of the problem of modern education, especially the trend toward vocational education and the expanding activities of the federal government in this field. Further, the importance of securing better health conditions and higher physcial standards should not be lost sight of in a democracy of whose drafted men 30 per cent were found to be physically unfit. Recent emphasis upon so-called community civics has been one of the most significant developments in methods of teaching; but unfortunately some teachers have regarded their community as limited to a particular neighborhood. However important the study of local conditions and local problems, no study of civics deserves the name that does not regard the community as nation-wide. In 1908 the Committee of Five of the American Political Science Association reported as follows: "It is the local and state governments which largely determine the conditions under which we live. The attention of the future citizens should be directed, therefore, primarily to a study of their organization and their problems, rather than to the national government, as the textbooks have done in the past." Whatever may have been true in 1908, it is certain that henceforth the attention of our future citizens must be largely focust upon the national government and its activities. Without neglecting the study of local problems, our students must be educated from the national rather than from the local point of view. The Great War has clearly demonstrated the need of instructing all of our citizens in the fundamental principles of American democracy; and it is upon the character of this instruction that our national unity will largely depend. Let us never hesitate to teach on every occasion true patriotism and true Americanism. Let us teach this in peace in the same effective way that our schools have done during the world-war. There will be no place for the advocates of internationalism and of class hatred in a republic ruled by free citizens who know their duties as well as their rights, and who while they may love all mankind nevertheless give first place to their own country and their own flag. WHAT THE WAR SHOULD DO FOR OUR METHODS IN E. H. ARNOLD, DIRECTOR, NEW HAVEN NORMAL SCHOOL OF GYMNASTICS, New for the army at least has been the use of physical-training methods for fitting for service men with defects amenable to treatment by exercise. Here must be mentioned the work for flat feet and posture done by the Orthopedic Department of the Army Medical Corps. What is most important to us as educators is the fact that the greater part of the success of this undertaking rested on the educational features of the methods employed. The successful use of exercise for remedying circulatory disturbances, that is, those of the heart and blood vessels, and thus turning the physically unfit into able men is likewise highly gratifying to physical educators; so much the more so as the conclusion is warranted that if these methods were successful with young adults they will be much more successful if employed with individuals still in the formative period, that is, children and youth. Greater attention to this part of physical education is one of the tasks imposed upon the physical educators of the country by this experience. Last but not least is the great rôle that physical-education methods have played in furnishing recreation to the army and to war-camp communities. The lessons learned will and must have a lasting influence upon physical education in the community in general and in the school community in particular. They must be awakened to the fact that two million men have become used to physical-training forms of recreation in their war life, and that the responsibility for providing this wholesome form of recreation will now fall upon the communities in which our soldiers will live. The educational forces of the country must take a hand in this provision. If the experiences of the war have furnisht us no new methods, new importance for physical education in all its aspects is gained from the consideration of the facts the draft has put so strikingly before us. Let us look at some of them. First of all 30 per cent of the drafted men were rejected for physical unfitness. What does this mean? It means that one-third of the men in the prime of life are physically unfit for war. How much greater will the percentage of unfitness be with advancing age? If one-third of the men are physically unfit for the special business of life which war is, what greater ratio is physically unfit for the several specific businesses of life? Undoubtedly it will be found to be greater still. No consolation is contained in the fact that other peoples may possibly be worse off than ourselves. The question with us is, Have we done our duty by the individual and by the nation if we allow such a condition to exist? Certainly not. Our duty is plain. This matter must be mended. How? Before we can answer this question we must know the causes of physical unfitness. The present report of the Provost Marshal General may not enable us to answer satisfactorily. A later report may fasten the physical unfitness on special defects and causes. Nevertheless the report points lessons which we as physical educators must heed. In the first place the percentage of physical unfitness in the several states is instructive. Pennsylvania heads the list with 46.67, Connecticut is a close second with 46.30, Vermont marches next with 43. .82. Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts are all high. And now who are the best in this column? South Dakota with 14.13 leads the list here, Nebraska being second with 20.15. Immigration, which is held responsible for so many of the ailments of our body politic, does not seem to have contributed to this deplorable state of affairs, for we find states with a high percentage of immigration making a very good showing, as for instance South Dakota with over 50 per cent immigration, while on the other hand states with practically no immigration show up badly, as North Carolina with less than 1 per cent has 29.78 unfit. The fact that the states of the Middle West make a good showing might justify the conclusion that racial differences in the immigration play some rôle. The report has practically exploded the theory of the nefarious influence of city life and of the unmitigated benefit of country life, for here is New York state, with a large urban population, having 30 per cent of unfit, while New York City shows a percentage of 27.85. Philadelphia shows a percentage of 31.07, as against 46.67 per cent for the state of Pennsylvania. It is quite evident then that if physical education is to remedy any of these defects in physical fitness its endeavors, must not be restricted to the large city but must extend to the country district as well. A beginning with physical education in rural districts had been made in New York. Shortsightedness has curtailed it before it could prove its efficiency, but enough remains to show its value in due season. Extension of physical education into all the rural schools of the land is one of the urgent and important demands of the hour. The percentages of cities that have had physical education for a sufficient number of years to have influenst the physique of men of draft age are very encouraging, yet not such as to warrant the conclusion that physical exercise will to a markt degree prevent and cure physical unfitness. Such places are Cincinnati, 27.96; Chicago, 21.24; and St. Louis, 25.77. The matter becomes still more confusing when we find that the differences in the several draft districts of a city are enormous. We have, for instance, the best district in Philadelphia 16.24 and the worst 57.4, in Pittsburgh the best 7.6 and the worst 36. It is quite evident then that neither nativity, nor industrial conditions, nor city or country life, nor presence or absence of physical education in the narrower sense has influenst the physical unfitness to any great degree. What are then the influences probably responsible for physical unfitness? Undoubtedly hygienic conditions are the deciding factor. Knowledge of the laws of health and obedience to them are the keynote. Obedience to the laws of health presupposes good-will to obey them and the means to carry them out. The latter is largely a matter of economic conditions. To supply the knowledge of the laws of health is the mission of education. More than ever before must the schools of our land devote themselves to the teaching of hygiene. It is the special function of physical education to be active in this field. According to the statement of the Surgeon General venereal disease constituted the greatest cause of physical disability in the army. Looking at the distribution of venereal disease among the draftees we find that the following states, namely Oklahoma, Texas, Georgia, South Carolina, Vir ginia, Alabama, and Florida, furnish the greatest percentage, Oklahoma having 4.50 per cent and Florida 8.90 per cent. This is clearly a reflection on the educational efficiency of these communities, for even wicked New York with 1.82 per cent shows up well. But once more the western and middle western states make practically the best showing. Are not a good many of the failures that are laid up against educational agencies due to the fact that the community does not furnish us material which can be developt and educated to a high degree of fitness? If that be so there comes to the school in general and physical education in special the duty to extend the influence of the school backward, so to speak, into the first years of life of the future school child. Physical education in its widest sense must look after the children under school age, in order to have children to make something out of with the now improved methods of physical education. A first step toward bringing the matter of physical development home to the person most interested in it, namely the child itself, has been taken by the Committee on Child Welfare of the American Physical Education Association, which has put out a scheme for growth and weight measurements to be taken at regular stated intervals all through the school life of the child. This purposes to bring home to the child, to the parent, and to the educational agencies the fact that the child is or is not developing physically. If it is not developing physically, why is it not? What about its nutrition, its work, its rest? It if is developing, if it devotes a great deal of energy to growth, what must be the conditions of nutrition, work, and rest to take care of this special expenditure of force? It is stated that it takes about six times as many calories of foodstuffs to build on a new pound of tissue than it takes to maintain it. The management then of children, as based upon the growth phenomenon, is an important matter, which is as yet little understood, and what knowledge we have is not applied. Here is a new method of making physical education visible, tangible. One school principal who has introduced the measure in his school writes me: "This is the longest step forward in practical hygiene that has been made. I told our boys and girls that most of our talk about hygiene went in at one ear and out of the other because there was nothing between to stop it, and that we were going to try to put something between, namely a motive to get them interested in their own health and growth." This is indeed what we wish, to visualize physical development and thereby motivate physical education. Now look once more over all the facts which the draft has brought to our mind, and realize for a moment that these facts relate only to one-half of our population, the males. What about the females? What do we know about their physical efficiency for the various tasks that life imposes upon them? Here is a great gap. Physical education must concern itself with establishing what physical fitness in the adult female signifies, what its ideal is, and then go to work and evolve methods to bring about such physical fitness. This at once doubles the field for our endeavors. The field is wide, the harvest to be obtained boundless. Let us hope that physical education will find every worker ready to enter the field, to sow the seed, and finally to reap the harvest for the good of the coming generation. EDUCATION OF THE IMMIGRANT RANDALL J. CONDON, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, CINCINNATI, OHIO I am requested to mention particularly the work of education of the immigrant in Cincinnati. A year ago what is now the American House was a disreputable former saloon and rooming-house on the canal bank by the Mohawk Bridge in the heart of a section densely populated by Roumanians, Serbians, Hungarians, and other nationalities. For years it had been a baleful influence, social, economic, and political, in the life of the district. Today it has been transformed into a community house of the best type. It is the headquarters of the Americanization work-a place into which all these people come for advice and assistance and for social and recreational opportunities. On the side of advice and assistance it is merely a clearing house teaching the people where to go and how to make use of the regularly organized city institutions and civic opportunities. We have conceived its main functions, however, to be to deal with people under normal conditions of social life. The organized Americanization work in Cincinnati has been unified and is being directed thru the American House by the Americanization Executive Committee, of which the superintendent of schools is chairman, not by virtue of his office, but by the election of the remaining members of the Committee, who represent the Chamber of Commerce, the Immigrant Welfare Committee, the Council of National Defense, the patriotic and allied women's organizations, the foreign groups, and the public schools. This Committee represents the cooperation of all the forces of the community in a disinterested attempt to unify and direct the work of Americanization in such a way that a higher type of Americanism shall result for both the older and the newer Americans, the native-born American understanding that it is his duty thru neighborly kindness, good-will, and fellowship to teach the foreign-born American what America is and what it stands for, trying to help him thru the normal relations of social and civic life to know America, to love America, and to serve America. And the American House stands for this spirit and affords a concrete opportunity for its expression. It is not an end in itself; it is simply a frontier station, a "house by the side of the road"-the community's expression of good-will, where ideas are exchanged and ideals built up, and thru which the foreign-born are brought into right relations with the educational, social, civic, and recreational activities of the community, |