THE AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOL 303 



to poison the atmosphere for those who are kept decent. All these 

 children, breathing an insufficient quantity of more or less polluted air, 

 are in many instances cramped into penitential desks, ten minutes' stay 

 in which provokes intolerable restlessness, and are told by a much over- 

 worked teacher, also ill-supplied with a like bad quality of air, to keep 

 still and to do a uniform task, a task which is too easy for some, too 

 hard for others, and mainly distasteful to all. The teacher does her 

 best ; the pupils do better than one would suppose ; both are victims of 

 ill-planned conditions. Nothing superior to rigid discipline and un- 

 varied tasks can be thought of when sixty little individualities, burst- 

 ing with life and spirits, must be dampened into order and dragged 

 forward somehow into that formidable next grade by an overwrought 

 teacher whose work is judged solely by its outward results. 



The inevitable outcome of such conditions, especially with growing 

 girls and the teacher herself, is headache, nervousness, ill-temper — all 

 the present and future ills which lurk in this Pandora's box of bad 

 hygiene and overcrowding. Moreover, to serve as an antidote, we find 

 in most cases nothing but some listless calisthenics, monotonous march- 

 ing, and aimless romping in a bricked back-yard. So much do most 

 schools contribute towards that foundation of a useful life, good health. 

 Alertness, vigor, dexterity, self-command, individuality, can hardly 

 develop out of such anti-natural conditions as these. The boy may be 

 vigorous, alert and dexterous; but it will be in spite of the school, it 

 will be because his life outside the schoolroom, that life which he loves, 

 is full, as the school life is devoid, of the means to encourage those ad- 

 mirable and necessary qualities. 



And those other virtues which the employer of young men is always 

 seeking and so seldom finds, for which municipal life is crying out, 

 without which the nation will perish — does one get them, as a rule, 

 because of or in spite of the public school training? Does the setting 

 of uniform tasks, with penalties for their neglect, either uniform or 

 gauged by the passing temper of the teacher, develop an eagerness to 

 work and a delight in labor ? Do wholesale lessons explained by whole- 

 sale to sixty children, each one of whom has a different mind-content, 

 a different means of apprehension, each of whom needs, therefore, spe- 

 cial leading over every new difficulty — do these tend to promote readi- 

 ness, quickness and alertness? Nothing, on the contrary, could be 

 better calculated to dry up that intense eagerness to know, that grasping 

 after new ideas, which most children come to school with and which, 

 alas ! so many go away without. Do desiccated text-books, rote work, 

 graded lessons, the whole abominable system of yearly promotion, re- 

 sult in that quickness of adaptation, that fertility of resource, which are 

 the very soul of civilization? Is honesty encouraged by the usual 

 school discipline and methods? Does truth-telling always plainly get 



