SCHOOL PLAYGROUNDS. 177 



nasium " is a cavernous and ugly basement, a place full of shadows 

 cast by the gloomy arches on which the building rests, with walls 

 of brick and floors of asphalt. Little troops of silent, pale children 

 arrive and depart all day for their physical culture, a dreary repeti- 

 tion of silent dumb-bell exercises. There is no speech nor language 

 among them, no sound is heard but the jingle of the piano and the 

 sharp tones of the monitor's counting. I have never heard the chil- 

 dren count aloud or accompany the calisthenics by singing except in 

 a private school. What an alternative for a free recess! No peni- 

 tentiary drill could be more perfunctory, spiritless, dead. It must 

 be said of the public schools that the thing they most seem to dread is 

 the sound of a child's voice. The rude, untrained intonations, the 

 slovenly speech, the slouching attitude remain rude, slovenly, and 

 slouching, for all the school attempts to do for their improvement is 

 infinitely little. Even the blessed relief of shaking the arm and 

 hand to attract the teacher's attention has been reduced in some 

 schools to lifting two fingers. 



The pupils generally hate their calisthenics, or, in the new phrase, 

 physical culture exercises. And they would hate just as sincerely 

 regulated games superintended by some impossible master of sports. 

 What they want is spontaneity in play. Public money is wasted in 

 providing these abhorrent alternatives. Poor little Carthusians as 

 young as six and seven years are kept in their rooms, and princi- 

 pally in their seats, above two hours at each session, and often after 

 that to atone for some delinquency, most likely for speaking. In 

 many schools they do not leave the room for any kind of exercise. 

 If they were capable of demanding their rights they would call for 

 both the abolition of the school lawn and calisthenic basement, and 

 the restoration of their playground and recess. 



From the cruelty of this repression nature finds a little way 

 out; the children require of the neighbors what they have been 

 deprived of by the school committee. All around the precincts of 

 the temple of learning the trodden borders of the sidewalk, churned 

 to mire in winter and trampled to rock in summer, speak of the 

 victory of the boys. There are towns, perhaps, where they all go 

 straight home, but in our town- they gather four times a day in 

 knots of twenties and fifties for some kind of fun. The patient 

 neighbors go on removing coats and dinner pails from the pickets, 

 clearing away papers and missiles from their inclosures, yet I dis- 

 cover that even they would vote to keep the school lawn; it im- 

 proves the town. Very true. But ingenuity could well contrive 

 some way of uniting the playground and the school park. Spaces of 

 grass to rest the eye and decorate the square could be interspersed 

 with inclosures of asphalt, furnished with a few parallel bars 



VOL. L1V. 13 



