training of self-control in play, and that individualizing between man and man, and woman and woman, the importance of which has been so ably stated by Dr. Jastrow. With our great cry for air and cry for freedom, the slogan of education in this country should be, "Back to the farm."

PHYSIOLOGICAL AGE AND CHILD-LABOR

ROBERT W. BRUÈRE, SECRETARY OF THE NEW YORK COMMITTEE ON THE

PHYSICAL WELFARE OF SCHOOL CHILDREN

May I preface what I have to say upon the relation of Dr. C. Ward Crampton's studies in physiological age to child-labor, with a word of congratulation to the people of Cleveland and of Ohio, upon the child labor law that went into force on the first day of July, 1908? The law as finally enacted has remained inaccessible to me, although I have made repeated efforts to secure a copy of it. From newspaper reports, however, as well as from the preliminary draft of the bill, I know that it contains many provisions destined to safeguard the physical welfare of children who are compelled by economic necessity to enter factories. Every such statute should be heartily welcomed not only because of the good it aims to accomplish for children, but especially because it indicates an awakening public conscience. It marks another step from brutal competitive barbarism toward an enlightened life-loving socialized civilization.

But it is just at the moment when the advocates of beneficent child-labor legislation are celebrating their triumph that an appeal for increasingly intelligent service needs to be made to educators.

No one who has closely followed the progress of legislation restricting the conditions under which children work has failed to see that one of its important by-products is the revelation of the unfitness of our elementary-school curriculum, as it is at present organized, to meet the needs of that very large majority of public-school children who are destined to serve the state not as clerks or as professional men, but as mechanics. There is a period between the grammar school and the time when boys and girls receive their workingpapers, in which children in all of our manufacturing cities are either turned adrift to shift as best they can upon the street, or, tempted by a not unpraiseworthy desire for healthful and gainful activity, to become lawbreakers by doing work before they are entitled to do so by the statute. This fact should not be brought, as I have often heard it brought, as an indictment against humane advocates of child-labor legislation. The responsibility for the grave sin of omission, of which the "lost year" is the striking symptom, rests not at all upon the advocates of liberal child-labor legislation, but upon the educator.

I shall not soon forget the conversation which I recently had with the foremost advocate of such legislation in our state. I was calling her attention to some of the facts which I am about to present to you, facts which show that some children need to be put to work, whether in workshops or in properly equipped schools, before the age of fourteen; and that many children at the age of fourteen are as little fit to bear the strain of physical labor as children of

twelve. I suggested that the fitness of a boy or girl for labor should be determined not by an arbitrary chronological age-standard, but by a thorough physiological examination which would determine what the state of the child's maturity was, what the fitness of the child to undertake labor of any kind. whatsoever, whether in a factory or the trade school, at the time of the examination, might be. With a flash of zeal, undoubtedly inspired by long familiarity with cruel conditions in schools as well as in factories, she declared that she would fight to the last trench any suggestion, however well grounded in scientific facts, that threatened the minimum age-limit, that tended to show that any child under fourteen was fit for any kind of physical work; and that as for trade and technical schools, which I was especially advocating, she preferred to see boys and girls ranging free upon the streets to seeing them subjected to daily imprisonment, if only during a period of five hours, in the schoolroom. What I particularly remember was her statement that the generation now growing up, when it arrived at the age of forty, would look back upon us of this generation as peculiarly callous to all the needs and rights of childhood, and would rank our educators as second only to the more drastic factory employers among the enemies of childhood.

In spite of the many beneficent changes that have taken place in our school curriculum during the past four or five years, her criticisms of educators was, I believe, for the most part just. Our schools are still encumbered by a false cultural tradition, inherited from the Middle Ages when knowledge of letters was synonymous with education and when work was a brand of inferiority, and which leaves children destined for the mechanic trade entirely unequipped at the end of their school course for the useful work which they must do in the world. Nevertheless, it seems to me a question as to whether we are wise to exchange the Procrustean bed of our present school curriculum for a Procrustean bed of calendar years, however nobly inspired the zeal that established the standard of calendar years may have been. It was because Dr. Crampton's investigation seemed to throw much needed scientific light upon the very difficult problem of adjusting education to the practical needs of our industrial life that the New York Committee on the Physical Welfare of School Children associated itself with him this last winter, with a view to completing his studies upon physiological age among the children in the New York public schools.

As early as 1902 Dr. Crampton, as assistant director of physical training, observed that boys not yet pubescent (as to the pubis) were smaller and weaker than those who were pubescent. He found that he could easily distinguish the pre-pubescent or immature by a complete absence of hair, and that he could distinguish the post-pubescent or mature by their very well-defined coverings. He accordingly classified the boys who came under his observation as prepubescent or immature, pubescent or maturing, and post-pubescent or mature. The results of his examination of forty-eight hundred boys are shown in the four following tables.

Table No. 1 below gives the population of the half-year groups 12.50-13.00 to 17.5018.00 with reference to physiologica! age, and demonstrates the important fact that the chronological age groups are not homogeneous.

From this table it will be seen that up to 17.00-17.50 each age group has its varied constituency of immature and mature.

SIGNIFICANCE OF PHYSIOLOGICAL AGE IN TERMS OF STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION

If the immature differed from the mature in no other way than this particular sign. it would hardly be worth while to segregate these groups. The classification shows, however, that there is a striking physical change in the progress from immaturity to maturity. At characteristic ages, the mature are more than 33 per cent. heavier, 10 per cent. taller, and 33 per cent. stronger than the immature, as indicated by the Tables No. II, III, and IV.

From Table II it is evident that any statistics which do not include a reference to physiological age are faulty and incomplete in so far as weight and allied features are concerned. Practically all of our statistical work must be viewed in the light of this evidence or disregarded completely.

Table III shows the different average heights of these three physiological age groups for each half year. The error of previous statistical work is clear, and the wisdom of recognizing the basis of physiological age in grouping statistical and other records is thoroly demonstrated.

Table IV is of the strength of grip of the right hand taken with a two-bar dynamo

meter.

Table IV demonstrates again that the immature are radically different from the mature. These three tables present a reiteration of proof of the importance of this classification, upon which it is unnecessary to enlarge.

In view of these great physical differences, it is not surprising that there are demonstrable differences in mental ability.

For a compendium of the great mental and social differences between the immature and mature, it is only necessary to refer to G. Stanley Hall's Adolescence and other publications of a similar nature; altho their data are based upon "puberty" and not upon any objective sign, their results are beyond question.

So far in our investigation we have obtained records only for high-school boys, and have taken success in scholarship as an indication in mental ability. The immature boys at all ages fail to pass the work of any grade much more than those who are mature.

Inasmuch as I have had the privilege of collaborating with Dr. Crampton in the formulation of the recommendations which he has based upon the foregoing tables, I venture, with his permission, to set them down here as they were set down in a recent issue of the Pedagogical Seminary.

EDUCATION

Our educational plan fails to take any cognizance of the difference between the immature and the mature, and of the vast development of existing and latent abilities, and the accession of new traits which occur during pubescence.

Nevertheless, the trend of our educational endeavor is rapidly changing. That every child entering the kindergarten must proceed regularly through the elementary school, high school, and college, is no longer the end and aim of our system. Our practice is being directed toward life as well as toward culture.

It is being recognized that the world provides little room for the scholar, and much room for the mechanic, clerk, and merchant, and it is idle to endeavor to transform any growing generation of children into an adult generation of scholars.

Hitherto education has succeeded in rejecting all of the children who fail to keep in line with the lockstep, and it has done its work fatally and well. Only those who could endure a system frankly fitted to subserve the ends of higher education remain in school. Only those are rejected who have failed in scholastic promise and accomplishment. These failures must perforce adopt other than scholastic or professional activities to gain a livelihood.

Dropping out of the lockstep into life-work is in one respect a most salutary thing for those unfitted for scholastic development, but our compulsory education law demands that the child be kept in school until he is a certain age, and has completed school work of a certain grade.

This retains the deficient scholar in school long after he has reached maturity, and we find in the lower grammar grades (from 5a to 7a in New York City) thousands of mature children, who are, have been, and always will be poor scholars, more out of sympathy with school work than ever before, resistant to all school authority, turbulent, unruly, wasteful, and useless burdens merely cumbering the scholastic ground till they become habitual truants, or finally succeed in getting their "working papers." A preliminary investigation shows that in the fifth, sixth, and seventh years in the elementary schools in New York City the poor scholars are on the average 37, 40, and 46 per cent. respectively more advanced in maturity than the good scholars. This is quite contrary to the conditions shown in the high schools.

The fundamental fact is wholly disregarded. A child commences to feel his newly acquired neuro-muscular ability when he matures, his increased mental grasp occasions a change of attitude toward life, and he begins to fit himself for a place in the scheme of adult affairs, and to exert himself for a livelihood and a competence. The instinct for lifework, the "earning instinct" is awakened. Those who have been successful scholars will find themselves well advanced in school, and can with assurance of success look forward to a scholastic or professional life; those who have had poor success as scholars will turn to the world of affairs and strife, of mechanics, industry, or business, for their maintenance. At this time it is essential to the mental and moral health of the boy to engage in something in which he may succeed. Our present system tends to confine him to a dull routine of school failure.

Recommendation I. In the light of the foregoing facts it is recommended that children who mature in the lower grammar grades be given the opportunity to obtain such form of instruction in the elementary school as will directly prepare them for immediately taking a part in active life.

Trade education, business practice, mechanics, etc., in short, industrial education, should be introduced for the purpose of releasing these children from the educational lockstep and affording them an opportunity to become useful citizens. Our great body politic is not essentially scholastic-to train for scholarship alone is undemocratic.

It is at this point the educational system on the inflexible basis of chronological age fails in its functions; it suffers from a lack of rational classification wherever mature and immature children are brought together in the same class. Measured by the Procrustean pedagogical system all children in the same grade are relatively equal in scholarship; but our educational control contemplates no cognizance of other and more valuable traits than those related to school success, traits the mature possess in such a marked degree, and which the immature lack. In the upper grammar grades and in the high schools the mature are probably not so much better in scholarship than the immature, but they have a whole range of latent abilities applicable to success in life, which, if trained at this point, would lead to personal benefit and industrial efficiency; neglected, they become relatively useless or perverted