Proenvironment in the Evolution of Man 643 



a career is planned and expected for it that shall be the most 

 satisfying and the best for its relations in life; the parents 

 send it, not for the present advantage or pleasure, but because 

 they realize that for years ahead its hand and eye and ear 

 and mouth and nose and brain should all act and react on 

 each other under guidance of elders, so that a cumulated stock 

 of brain stimuli and stimulus resultants should be originated, 

 built up, and in part stored, that will enable it to do that use- 

 ful work which shall be a reward to it, and an honor to the 

 family. 



The city compels it to go, since for each child it proenvirons 

 the future man with education and without it. Like the 

 graphic drawings that advertised and ushered in "The Pop- 

 ular Educator" in Britain nigh 50 years ago, the city council 

 holds up before it the picture of an innocent child with two 

 alternate proenvironal possibilities, and asks: which will it 

 become.^ Either the boy at school, the office helper, the busy 

 merchant, the happy father, and at length honored age. Or 

 the street boy, the inmate of the police cell, the degraded 

 wretch, the homeless wanderer, the aged criminal. Society 

 if worthy of the name proenvirons the former career, and 

 even firmly guides the child toward it as a response action. 

 For thus society, by long continued mental stimuli, is slowly 

 discovering that its jails, its asylums, its workliouses, and its 

 pauper graves can best be kept empty. 



The State proenvirons and responds in action toward such 

 a career, for so the world will honor its sons; and in return, 

 when days of bad trade, of peril, of national danger come to 

 the State, it learns that it can rely on them for support. 



The State then that requires every one of its youth to attend 

 school from 6 to 16 years is slowly proenvironing a course 

 of honor for each of its sons; while it surrounds each of them 

 with an educational environment that stimulates, inclines, 

 molds, and builds up, at every turn of the mental way. En- 

 vironal action and modification, that combine as resultant 

 stimuli to work out a definite proenvironal plan, sum up bio- 

 logically our entire system of education. And as with the 



