as it should be. Mistakes will be made, both of omission and of actual teaching, but they are now being made.

Shall the teaching be done by special teachers or shall all teachers be trained for it? Boys and girls now learn from each other or from older, vilely ignorant people. All teachers know more or less of the subject. All teachers ought to be ready to deal with the physiological and biological facts and with their ethical significance. For older children more specially trained teachers are needed. Parents and teachers can present ideas in connection with nature study, gardening, or out-of-doors tramps as follows:

Cradles, or preparation for parenthood: The protection of the young of plants and animals; seed pods, nests of fishes and birds, holes of rabbits and others; the human mother; the cowbird as an example of neglect.

Motherhood: The ovaries of plants; seeds; the ovaries and "spot of life" in animals; eggs, both deposited in nests and developed within the body; the reproduction of the same kind. The care of pet animals leads up to the facts of human motherhood. The teacher here as everywhere must earnestly and honestly respect the creative power of her own body, if she is to eliminate in her pupils the old filthy notions.

Fatherhood: Both in plants and animal reproduction, the dignity and beauty of fatherhood must be presented. The father's part may be studied in the families of various pet animals. The breeding of poultry and stock teaches about heredity. The value of a well-bred male animal can be shown. The application to human heredity can easily be made.

By such teachings children learn the story of inheritance and the importance of parenthood, and a new message of pride in re-creative power and its proper use may be given to our people.

Away with secrecy, shame, and darkness, and the doctrine of " conceived in sin." Let in honor, respect, and joy in re-creative power, to express joy, beauty, and blessing to the individual and to others.

IX. MENTAL HYGIENE OF THE SCHOOL CHILD.

A. CHILD CLASSIFICATION AND CHILD HYGIENE.

ARNOLD GESELL, Yale University.

When knowledge is duly classified it becomes scientific. Increasing efficiency in educational economy calls for a more thoroughgoing classification of the raw material and product of our schools-the children.

The primary room is the threshold of the school system; the kindergarten, the vestibule. Through this educational Ellis Island our future citizens pass, and it is a motley stream of incomers. We do not ask them to matriculate; we can not deport; we must accept them as they are normal, subnormal, atypical. No one can thoughtfully stand in the presence of such a motley assembly without feeling what a misfortune it is to subject all of these children to substantially the same daily and the same annual treatment. Nor can one feel that a periodical medical inspection for medical defects alone meets the situation. From the standpoint of sincere, individualized child hygiene, what is demanded is a thoroughgoing diagnosis of the health and developmental needs of at least every exceptional primary child. The primary school is the port of entry; and it is of strategic importance for child hygiene. Here most of the special types of children may be recognized and registered. This is child classification at source; and it is the first step toward that consecutive, biographical supervision of special children which must become the policy of child hygiene.

Take an ordinary kindergarten and first grade, with a combined enrollment of 100 pupils. Among this number we may expect to find at least one child feeble-minded (unable, say, to draw a man or a house); one child who stutters; two or three who seriously lisp; another extremely anemic; a badly spoilt child; another infantile (babyish, a year or two retarded in mental or moral growth), still another morally weak. There will be one negative child (passive, colorless, physically flabby, mentally inert, uncommunicative, possessed of a feeble kind of imitation); one oversensitive, nervous. child (with exaggerated sense of failure, overconscientious, lacking in humor); one superficially precocious child; another distinctly superior (eager, ardent, imaginative, sociable). Without even including a score or more of eye, ear, nose, mouth, and throat defectives, we have at least a dozen children in every 100 at the threshold of our public schools who demand special recognition (classification) and special attention from the standpoint of educational child hygiene. Here at the threshold is the place for timely treatment. For some of these children there is no better disposition than prompt assignment to a special class, the special class method having been put into successful operation for 13 different types of children.

The necessity of improved classification extends to the special classes themselves. Take the classes for the feeble-minded. The desirability of segregating the lower grade cases from the highest is becoming more and more apparent; this segregation will become quite practicable with the development of subnormal centers. A center is a domestic group of classified special classes. The discovery of

the vocational aptitudes of morons is a further part of the task of pedagogical classification.

But of all the special classes the ungraded class (for so-called backward children) stands most in need of inventory. Here are stranded all the driftwood and flotsam which can not float upon the ordinary channels of the elementary school. The consequent diversity of the ungraded class membership is often pathetically picturesque. Here is the roll call for one such class in a large eastern city: Twenty-four boys, 16 girls; nationalities, Norwegian, French, Irish, Armenian, Italian, Austrian, American, Chinese; names range from James Moriarity and Ong Yung to Arcangelo Christiano and Nishan Kalehadoarian; ages range from 6 to 18; mentality, from giggling imbecility to ambitious intelligence; morality, from truancy, cigarette smoking, and thieving to good behavior; parentage, noted in special cases, includes a drunken mother, an overindulgent mother, an illegitimate father, an insane father, and, in three instances, gypsies; physical condition, from partial blindness and deafness, and spinal trouble and anemia, to vigorous physical health. Think of the problem before this teacher, who may not even have a working definition of feeble-mindedness in her consciousness to aid her in classification and instruction.

The refinement of child classification and the progress of child hygiene go hand in hand. The time is, of course, coming when all our large municipal school systems, and perhaps county educational systems as well, will have the equivalent of a department of child classification and special classes. In a few cities we already have a working suggestion of the possibilities. Our present classification of children is admittedly imperfect. To improve it we need among other things psycho-medical experts officially part of the school system, resident or semiresident school hygienists, supplementary teacher-nurses, trained teacher-diagnosticians, supplementary and classification classes.

All the world is a clinic. Some day as adults these individuals will be classified by the rigorous tests of actual life. It is the business of the public school to anticipate and perfect the present-day classification of adults, especially that part of the classification administered by courts and charity organizations. Child classification is the basis of child hygiene. But it is more. The primary school may develop into a sociological clearing agency for the discovery and registration of all children who, when adults, may prove socially dependent, defective, or dangerous. Child classification thus becomes a part of the task of social hygiene as well.

B. THE DISTINCTIVE CONTRIBUTION OF THE PSYCHOEDUCATIONAL CLINIC TO THE SCHOOL HYGIENE MOVEMENT.

J. E. W. WALLIN.

University of Pittsburgh.

America has recently developed a new type of school inspection parallel and coordinate with, but entirely different from, dentomedical inspection, namely, the psychoeducational inspection of mentally unusual children. The first so-called psychological clinic was established in the University of Pennsylvania about 17 years ago, but we now have in the United States from 35 to 40 psychological clinics, more or less expertly manned, in the universities, schools, and institutions, besides a large number of dilettantes who test children, but who are neither psychologists nor scientists.

The psychoeducational clinic performs a service for the school child which no other type of clinic is able to perform. Its field is the psychoeducational diagnosis and corrective pedagogical treatment of mentally deviating children. It strives to determine the nature of the pupil's inherent mental strength and the character and causes of his mental and pedagogical variations in order that it may give intelligent advice in regard to the mental hygiene of the child and his proper educational classification and training.

The work of the psychoeducational inspector is not competitive with or duplicative of the work of the medical or dental inspector, but it is entirely correlative and supplementary. No one is fitted for the work of psychoeducational diagnosis and treatment who is not thoroughly grounded in experimental, educational, and clinical psychology, child study, elementary methods, corrective pedagogics, the methods of case-taking, and the rudiments of neurology and psychopathology.

At the free psychoeducational clinic conducted by the University of Pittsburgh, 11 per cent of a certain number of consecutive cases examined were classified as supernormal, 9.9 per cent as retarded, 39.2 per cent as backward, 11.6 per cent as border cases, 17 per cent as feeble-minded, 8.8 per cent as morons, 6.6 per cent as imbeciles, and 0.5 per cent as idiots. The different types included mongols, cretins, paralyties, choreics, epileptics, child prodigies, speech defectives, psychasthenics, Freudian cases, and cases of infectious infantilism, and ataxia without mental impairment. Many of these cases came fallaciously diagnosed. In many cases the parents had been utterly misled as to treatment and prognosis and very many had been educationally neglected in the schools; that is, they had for years been forced to do work which was not suited to their peculiar needs.

The moral is clear: Society must provide the machinery whereby the numerous mentally deviating children in the schools may be

accurately, mentally, and educationally diagnosed and classified. Only thus can we economically and scientifically train "all the children of all the people."

C. MENTAL HYGIENE IN THE SCHOOL.

WILLIAM H. BURNHAM,

Professor of Pedagogy, Clark University.

From the point of view of hygiene it is better to prevent mental disorder by observing the principles of hygiene in the school than to cure mental disease by reeducation in the sanitarium. If education is necessary for the mental health, it is better to give it before rather than after nervous breakdown. As for pedagogy, there is no conflict between a sound doctrine of pedagogical efficiency and the scientific teachings of mental hygiene.

The outcome of the vast number of investigations of the optimum conditions of work and the causes of fatigue during the last 25 years has been to make emphatic the following points: That work, as well as rest, is necessary for the health of the human organism; that both function and relaxation are necessary; that the explosion of energy, as well as the storing of energy, is a condition of health; that by working hard with close concentration some degree of immunity to fatigue may be attained; and, on the other hand, that rest is equally important with the time spent in study. Recent psychological experiments have shown the great improvement in efficiency effected by regard for these principles. Let me recount these somewhat in detail:

Some years ago I had the opportunity to make a brief study of retroactive amnesia, of that class of cases where a shock or the like obliterates the memory for a brief period preceding the accident. Such cases are familiar to everyone, perhaps. From such cases I found evidence that led to the tentative conclusion that the amnesia was due to the fact that the memory was never completely organized. That new impressions may become a part of the permanent store of memory it is necessary that a certain period of time should elapse in order that a process of organization or consolidation may take place. In normal memory these processes of organization are continually going on, and in order that ideas may be permanently remembered, sufficient time must elapse for the organization to be completed. A shock or the like that arrests these processes of organization obliterates the memory.

Bergstrom and others have since found experimental evidence of this process of consolidation. Muller and Pilzecker found that in learning nonsense syllables less was retained if immediately after learning a series the observer was required to concentrate attention