form. Her place is indicated when we remember that for such youngsters no machine program, however well it may work for the majority, will take the place of a hand-made plan.

THE WORK OF THE BUREAU OF ATTENDANCE, NEW YORK CITY SCHOOLS

JOHN W. DAVIS, DIRECTOR, ATTENDANCE BUREAU, NEW YORK, N.Y. The full title of this bureau is the Bureau of Compulsory Education, School Census, and Child Welfare. In doing our work, these three divisions sometimes impinge, sometimes overlap, as the nature of the problem to be solved demands. Primarily, as I understand it, the prevention side of our work is the one to be emphasized today. And right here I should like to put forth our fundamental proposition: that a school census properly kept will be a great help in our work.

We feel that the problem is a sociological one, and, further, that to reduce truancy we must study the causes leading to it. The causes may be groupt as follows: the nagging teacher; lack of clothing; not in proper physical nor mental condition; dislike for school brought about in other ways; overindulgent parents; incomplete family; stern father and relenting mother; squalid and filthy homes; drunkenness on the part of one or both parents; the gang.

If we remove the cause, the truancy disappears. The attendance officers are instructed to look primarily for the cause in order to ascertain whether the individual officer can effect a cure, always remembering that he must put himself in the place of the erring pupil, when he begins to judge the boy, and to be a big brother to him.

While the bureau car was coming thru the park one day, a boy of fourteen was stopt, invited to a seat in the car, and brought over to the office. On being questioned by me, he stated that his reason for playing truant was that his teacher was constantly nagging him! He was returned to school, transferred to another class, and that cured his truancy.

Now the dislike for school may be brought about in other ways than by the nagging teacher. If a pupil is maladjusted as regards the course of study, trouble will follow; also lack of clothing and shoes are frequent causes of truancy. The bureau has a stock of clothing on hand that has been given it by well-wishing friends, and it relieves the necessities of the individual cases in this respect.

The law gives this bureau power to commit to a parental or truant school all children who are persistent truants, provided the parents consent; if the parents do not consent, the aid of the courts must be invokt to carry out the law. Our hearings are conducted by two division supervisors. Last year we had 9000 hearings.

When the bureau was organized we felt that it was necessary at these hearings to have a physical and mental examination made of all the pupils brought before us. After the physical and mental status has been determined and the pupil found to be satisfactory, he is transferred to another class in his own school, or to another school, and placed on probation to see whether the change in environment will prove beneficial.

Let me here call your attention to what we consider one of the most important phases of our prevention work-the number of children placed on probation. We have had on probation this year about 5000 children. This does not include those on parole from the truant schools-583. The attendance officers keep in close touch with the boys on probation and on parole. Here the attendance officer is the big brother, and that is the attitude we wish to maintain.

One of the cases reported to us and referred to Dr. Heckman was that of a boy who not only was a truant, but, when he did attend school, was very troublesome. Dr. Heckman's examination showed that his eyesight was very defective. The boy wore glasses, but they were of a character that he should not have been using under any circumstances. As a matter of fact, when he was sitting in the front of the classroom, near the blackboard, the glasses he was wearing made the figures on the blackboard indistinguishable.

In studying the case of another lad, we found peculiar conditions at home good surroundings, but with a stepmother and the boy's own father, resulting in a case of "my" children, "your" children, and "our" children. As the father was at home very little, his child was not receiving the attention from the stepmother that he might have received had the father been at home more. The case was referred to us thru the court, inasmuch as one of the attendance officers had found a good home for the child.

Now, as to the gang: I mean the gang of older boys-seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen years of age-that induces and seduces the younger boys to play truant, that they may be brought up in the ways of the older gangsters. These gangsters are a very grave danger and menace to the city, and generally speaking, this is where criminality begins.

Under a working arrangement between Police Commissioner Woods and our bureau, the police now apprehend any boy of school age found on the streets during school hours, and take him to the nearest public school where he is turned over to one of our attendance officers.

This leaves but one other topic to be spoken of: the boy who takes out working papers with no intention of working. As you doubtless know, the Board of Health notifies us of the number, date, and the name of every person to whom working papers are issued. Each case is investigated automatically after ample opportunity has been given to each child to obtain a position. If the child has not secured a position, he must return to school.

To facilitate an experiment with pupils found on the street with working certificates but not employed, Edward Mandel, principal of Public School 188B, mapt out a course of study along commercial lines, consisting of the following subjects: Commercial arithmetic, commercial English, stenography, typewriting, office practice, civil service, telephone, and transit problems of New York City railway lines.

Six periods of forty minutes each were devoted during the afternoons to teaching the boys the practical use of tools, while a thirty-minute gymnasium period and a thirty-minute reading period were provided for each day as well. As you can see, prevention rather than punishment is the doctrine of this bureau.

THE NEED OF FRESH-AIR CLASSES IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS HARRIET A. TUPPER, PRINCIPAL, PUBLIC SCHOOL NO. 58, NEW YORK, N.Y.

The second annual report on fresh-air classes for anemic children in the public schools of the city of New York contains a letter written by Dr. Gustave Straubenmüller, now acting city superintendent. In it is this paragraph:

While there always will be children who are physically weak and undernourisht, still the time is coming when it will be considered unpardonable in a school administration not to know of the cases and not to make special classroom provisions for them, even if active measures for the removal of the remediable defects be not intrusted to it.

The current National Education Association session seems to prove this, as is evidenst by the time and space allotted to special education. We have become not merely administrators of the three R's but keen analysts of the material with which we work. The result is widely differentiated methods of educating differing types. These methods rest in part upon devices to permit of greater comfort for the physically or mentally handicapt, and thru this relief to the body, the mind is able to work normally. That is the meaning, I take it, of Dr. Straubenmüller's characterization that it is unpardonable in a school administration not to provide special classrooms for children so handicapt.

The supplying of fresh air for all children in school would seem like a first principle of education, but cold fresh air doesn't seem to be very popular with parents, teachers, nor pupils. Yet the over-heated air of most of our homes and the ventilating systems of our most expensive school plants leave much to be desired in the way of betterment.

The anemic child needs these changed conditions as is proved by Dr. Woodruff's clear-cut, conclusive reasoning. Then, having provided the fresh, cold air, the proper wraps must follow, while suitable desks and chairs help also. Any form which will insure comfort while sitting, and which may be moved to one side to make room for cots during the resting

periods will suffice. A southern exposure is desirable so that one may have sunshine all day, etc.

But how shall we know the cases needing attention of this kind? Must we as principals and teachers also become pathological experts? Not at all. I am sure that physicians, who are always in every community the greatest givers, will give the necessary examinations and aid you in selecting your class. If errors are made, don't worry, because fresh air was never known to hurt even the most vigorous person. The greatest results will be gained from these physical examinations if tonsil and adenoid operations are performed at once where needed, and the teeth put into a good condition. No child is likely to be permanently benefited by a fresh-air class if he needs an operation, but if the examination results in the removal of remediable defects the school is largely benefited thereby.

Perhaps we do not know the result of the ordinary heated classroom on the normal child. Let me tell you of a test made by Dr. Woodruff at Public School No. 107, Manhattan, during the school year of 1911-12. A class of normal children was selected and called a control class; they were as near the average age of the fresh-air class as possible; they were weighed, measured, their blood was tested, and they were fed quite as regularly as the anemic children, whose windows were wide open to the not too gentle breezes from the North River during the entire school year. This was, in fact, the only difference, so far as we were able to control it, that one used an ordinary steam-heated room with ventilation thru windows opened as the teacher felt the need, while the other never closed them and had practically no heat. The results showed that the so-called control class did not gain so much in either weight or height, and that they actually lost 3.48 per cent of haemoglobin, while the anemic children gained 10.2 per cent, thus making a difference of more than 13.5 per cent; in other words, the control class became more anemic while the anemic children became nearly normal. But this was not the only gain made by the anemic children; their ability to study increast, the fatigue point was reacht after longer periods of work, and at the end of the year nearly every child had shown improvement over his previous year's record of promotions. In several cases extra promotions were made.

However, the influence of the fresh-air system doesn't stop with the good of the children and the education of the parents. In my opinion a distinct advantage comes to that school where a fresh-air class has been organized thru the broadening influence of the teacher. The real fresh-air teacher is just another kind of missionary. She preaches the doctrine of a perfect body as a temple for a better mind, to her pupils, their parents, and her associates. Inadvertently, perhaps, she drops a word about the wonderful resistance of her class to colds and contagious diseases. Not an absence due to cold nor measles nor other like disease in the entire year, is quite frequently the record.

SPEECH-IMPROVEMENT

DENNIS J. MCDONALD, M.D., FELLOW OF ACADEMY OF
MEDICINE, NEW YORK, N.Y.

Having for many years been closely associated with our public-school system, I find that the most serious problem that confronts us is the spoken English of our children. Realizing the paramount necessity for normal speech and having the opportunity for observation and study at close range during my service to the board of education as commissioner for many years, I determined to try to standardize work for all abnormalspeech conditions found in our schools.

Speech per se, as a faculty, is not innate in man; every human being is born speechless. The child gradually learns to speak, and unconsciously speech is developt with other bodily and mental faculties. While means of speech is possest at birth, in its development it is subject to disturbances by disease or other causes. Speech is produced by the prompt cooperation of three great mechanical factors, namely, respiration, vocalization, and articulation, with which is associated mentation, or the action of the mind.

Modern medicine and psychology have put to their credit a notable achievement by the demonstration that defective speech is at bottom a mental rather than a physical disease, where a definite defect of the speech organs does not exist. Children suffering from such a speech defect as stuttering are highly strung or sensitively organized. They are emotional, temperamental, and easily influenst. If nothing is done to correct their condition, thereby establishing mental stability, what is the result? Such children help to fill up our vast army of truants, delinquents, vagrants, and gangsters. From a weak, good-natured child is evolved a child on the road to criminality. To quote the words of an authority who has had charge of a large home for vagrant boys for the last twelve years: "Ninety per cent of the boys who have past thru my house have suffered from some form of speech defect." This definitely corroborates my former statement, that if these boys had received the proper training and had been cured of their defective speech during their school life, their mental status and environment would have been normal, and it would have been impossible for them to find themselves in their present condition. Instead of undesirable citizens we would have, with the proper care and training, citizens that we all could be proud of.

For years teachers of English connected with the various schools and universities have deplored the fact that pure, unalloyed English speech, viewed from a tonal and enunciatory standard, is fast becoming a lost art. This impulse, no doubt, has been the outcome of the rapidly developing interest in oral composition; so much so that the English teachers are observing in themselves their own deficiencies in tone and utterance. The