TEE NORMAL CHILD 559 



THE NORMAL CHILD: ITS PHYSICAL GEOWTH AND 

 MENTAL DEVELOPMENT 



By Professor BIRD T. BALDWIN 



SWARTHMORE COLLEGE 



FOE purposes of psycho-educational analysis it should be recognized 

 that a child has five parallel or interrelated ages : a chronological 

 age in years, months and days, denotive of the temporal span of life; a 

 physiological age denotive of stages of physical growth and maturity; a 

 ■mental age denotive of the ripening of certain instincts, capacities and 

 mental traits; a 'pedagogical age denotive of the rate and position in 

 school progress; and a moral age denotive of fairly well-defined nodes 

 of development in moral judgment and religious awakenings. In a 

 normal child these ages balance each other. 



This paper presents the results of a study of the physical growth 

 (physiological age) and the pedagogical age (school standing) of a 

 group of boys and girls from six to eighteen years of age when observed 

 consecutively. The chief value of the study lies in the fact that it is the 

 first attempt to follow for any considerable length of time the same 

 group of individuals through the elementary and high schools, either in 

 physical growth, school standing or the relation of the two. 



The scope of the investigation includes, first, a series of norms based 

 on the height, weight and age distributions : the average and average 

 deviations of individual yearly and half-yearly increments of growth in 

 height, weight and lung capacity; and individual curves in height, 

 weight and lung capacity with health notes, and weight, height 

 and vital indices. The second part of the paper deals with the school 

 standing of the same individuals in marks, grades and ages; the third 

 with the relation or correlation of physical growth to mental develop- 

 ment as shown in school progress. The data comprise 43,840 measure- 

 ments on approximately 1,000 boys and 1,000 girls, and 21,683 final 

 quarterly term marks for 135 of these same boys and girls from the 

 Horace Mann School at Teachers' College, New York, the University of 

 Chicago Elementary and High Schools and the Francis W. Parker 

 School in Chicago. 



That these boys and girls form a select group and that school-med- 

 ical inspection, directed play and physical training are important edu- 

 cational agencies are shown by the fact that on the average these chil- 

 dren are taller, heavier and have better lung capacity than any other 

 group in a series of 112 groups extending from Quetelet's first study in 

 1836 to 1914, and comprising over one million individuals. 



