692 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
life will develop. Adults must be specialists in order to be efficient, 
and they must struggle for leisure in order to have any degree of 
completeness in life. Both these conditions and the habits of adult 
life flowing out of them are foreign to child nature and life. So, if 
the influence of industrialism continues, the gap between the child 
and adult is bound to widen. Like all differentiations in the organic 
world, the greater the unlikeness the greater will be the interde- 
pendence. The child is dependent upon adult resources and organ- 
izing skill in order that he may have life; and the adult, who is to 
be the product of this child life, is dependent upon the child’s living 
his complete life. The failure to supply that complete life gives us 
adults who are mere cogs in the wheel of a complex machine. This 
is the social educational situation even now. 
Instead of the home and its immediate environment supplying 
practically all the opportunities for the child’s activities, experiences, 
and expression, these functions are now divided among three insti- 
tutions—the home, the school, and the play-center. 
The home is still the center of domestic life, though even in the 
best homes it is greatly narrowed in its educational possibilities. 
Many homes are merely places in which to sleep and eat. Though 
they still have great educational influence, their educational resources 
are practically nil. 
The school has absorbed an increasing amount of the child’s time, 
but it has not, except in a few cases and in a limited way, even 
attempted to supply what has been eliminated from child life by 
modern social changes. As a prominent educator puts it: a genera- 
tion ago, a boy had three months’ schooling and nine months in 
which to get an education; now he has nine months schooling and 
three months in which to gain an education. Actually, the situation 
is even worse; since during the three months he has few opportunities 
for activities that educate. 
The public playground is coming to fill the need for educational 
activity and experience otherwise limited by a physical environment 
that is unnatural, and a social one that is complex and specialized. 
At present most playgrounds are inefficient, because of public ignor- 
ance as to their functions and the prevalence of poorly trained 
directors. 
The public playground is a child’s community social center, and 
it should supply and does now supply, under expert play directors, not 
only the space, equipment, and companionship which are beyond the 
economic and social resources of the home, but the adult leadership 
that is essential. 
Experience has shown that leadership is the first essential of a 
successful playground, for three groups of reasons: 
