defect like flat foot, flat chest, weak abdominal muscles, habitual constipation, uneven shoulders, spinal trouble, etc. That no physical training should be provided for normal children is the belief of many leading trainers. This special training is useful to develop athletes or to correct defects. Like massage, osteopathy, or medicine, it should follow careful diagnosis. The time is coming when formal indoor gymnasium exercises for normal pupils or normal students will be considered an anomaly. There is all the difference in the world between physical development and what is called physical training. The test of physical development is not the hours spent upon a prescribed course of training, but the physical condition determined by examination. To be refused permission to substitute an hour's walk for an hour's indoor apparatus work is often an outrage upon health laws. Given a normal healthy body, plenty of space, and plenty of playtime, the spontaneous exercise which a child naturally chooses is what is really health sustaining and health giving. Mere muscular development artificially obtained through the devices of a gymnasium is inferior to the mental and moral development produced by games and play in the open air. Eustace Miles, M.D., amateur tennis player of England, says: I do not consider a mere athlete to be a really healthy man. He has no more right to be called a really healthy man than the foundations or scaffolding of a house have a right to be called a house. They become a good house, and, indeed, they are indispensable to a good house, but at present the good house exists only in potentiality. The "healthy-mindedness" and "physical morality" which play and games foster rarely result from physical training as a business, at stated times, indoors, under class direction. It is too much like taking medicine. A certain breakfast food is said to have lost much of its popularity since advertised as a health food. When the National Playground Association was organized President Roosevelt cautioned its officers against too frequent use of the word "supervision" on the ground that supervision and direction were apt to defeat the very purpose of games and to stultify the play spirit. Is the little girl on the street who springs into a hornpipe or a jig to the tune of a hurdy-gurdy, or even the boy who runs before automobiles or trolley cars or under horses' noses, getting less physical education than those who play a round game in silence under the supervision of a teacher in the school basement, or who stretch their arms up and down to the tune of one, two, three, four, five, six? Who can doubt that the much-pitied child of the tenement playing with the contents of the ash can in the clothes yard or with baby brother on the fire escape is developing more originality, more lung power, and better arteries than the child of fortune who is led by the hand of a governess up and down Fifth Avenue. Children have not forgotten how to play, but adults have forgotten to leave space in cities, and time out of school, home work, and factory work in which children may play. Again, the child — whether a city child or a country child — rarely needs to be taught how to play. Teaching him games will not produce vitality. Games are the spontaneous product of a healthy body, active mind, and a joy in living. Give the children parks and piers, roof gardens and playgrounds in which they may play, and leave the rest to them. Give them time away from school and housework, and leave the rest to them. Instead of lamenting the necessity for playing in the streets, let us reserve more streets for children's play. There are too many students of child welfare whose reasoning about play and games is like that of a lady of Cincinnati, who, upon reading the notice of a child-labor meeting, said: "Well, I am glad to see there is going to be a meeting here for child labor. It is high time some measure was taken to keep the children off the streets." Physical examinations would prove that streets are safer and better than indoor gymnasiums for growing children. Intelligent physical training will train children to go out of doors during recess; will train pupils and teachers not to use recess for study, discipline, or eating lunch. "After-school" conditions are quite as important as physical training and gymnastics at school. Not long ago a nurse was visiting a sick tenement mother with a young SPONTANEOUS PLAY ON ONE OF NEW YORK CITY'S SCHOOL baby. She found a little girl of twelve standing on a stool over a washtub. This child did all the housework, took care of the mother and two younger children, got all the meals except supper, which her father got on his return from work. As the nurse removed the infant's clothes to give it a bath, the little girl seized them and dashed them into the tub. "Yes, I am pretty tired when night comes," she confessed. This child has prototypes in the country as well as the city, and she did not need physical training. She did not lack initiative or originality. She did need playmates, open air, a run in the park, and "fun." The educational value of games and outdoor play should be weighed against the advantages of lowering the compulsory school age, and of bridging over the period from four to seven with indoor kindergarten training. Neither physical training nor education is synonymous with confinement in school. The whole tendency of Nature's processes in children is nutritional; it is not until adolescence that she makes much effort to develop the brain. Overuse of the young mind results, therefore, in diverting natural energy from nutritive processes to hurried growth of the overstimulated brain. The result is a type of child with a puny body and an excitable brain, — the neurotic. The young eye, for example, is too flat (hypermetropic) — made to focus only on objects at a distance. Close application to print, or even to weaving mats or folding bits of paper accurately, causes an overstrain on the eye, which not only results in the chronic condition known as myopia, - short-sightedness, so common to school children, but which acts unfavorably on the constitution and on the whole development of the child. At the recent International Congress of School Hygiene in London, Dr. Arthur Newsholme, medical officer of health of Brighton, made a plea for the exclusion of children under five years of age from schools. "During the time the child is in the infant department it has chiefly to grow. Nutrition and sleep are its chief functions. Paints, pencils, paper, pins, and needles should not be handled in school by children below six." Luther Burbank, in an article on "The Training of the Human Plant," says: The curse of modern child life in America is overeducation, overconfinement, overrestraint. The injury wrought to the race by keeping too young children in school is beyond the power of any one to estimate. The work of breaking down the nervous systems of the children of the United States is now well under way. Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, and tadpoles, wild strawberries, acorns, and pine cones, trees to climb and brooks to wade in, sand, snakes, huckleberries, and hornets, and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of his education. Not every child can have these blessings of the country, but every child can be protected from the stifling of the nature instinct of play by formal indoor "bossed" exercises, whether called games, physical training, gymnastics, or Delsarte. The answer to the protest against too early and too constant confinement in school has always been: "Where NEW YORK CITY'S SCHOOL FARM DOES NOT STIFLE will the child be if out of school? Will its environment at home not work a worse injury to its health? Will not the street injure its morals?" Because we have not yet worked out a method of supervising the health of those children who are not in school, it does not follow that such supervision is impossible. Perhaps the time will come when there will be state supervision over the health of children from birth, parents being expected to present them once a year at school for examination by the school physician. In this way defects can be corrected and health measures |