694 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
A triangular division of child life under three classes of institutions 
and the dual organization of extra-home activities are inefficient, not 
only educationally, but administratively. Experience has shown that 
children in cities will not or can not go more than one-quarter or one- 
half of a mile to a play center. Therefore, the provision of adequate 
playgrounds within reach of every city child, and the organization 
of a staff of leaders, under some municipal administrative body apart 
from the board of education, puts a double burden upon the tax- 
payers. 
So far as the small town and country are concerned, few would sug- 
gest, after the recent campaign for a wider use of the school plant, 
that a play center should be located anywhere except at the school; 
still, where they have been so located, the functions of the play center 
and the functions of the school have not been identified. 
The public school is the institution concerned with the education 
of the child; it must provide all his extra-home educational activities 
if its functions are to be efficiently realized. As indicated before, this 
is a different problem from the recreation of the adult. 
(b) NEW EDUCATIONAL MOVEMENTS AND THE PLAY-SCHOOL IDEA. 
Social progress has changed not only the relationships between the 
home and the play center and the school, but it has brought a new 
social conscience concerning education. We are in a period of edu- 
cational discontent, restlessness, and experimentation—a part of 
the general social discontent. Every man who thinks and who is 
sensitive to the spirit of the time reacts upon the educational situa- 
tion and usually has some “new” idea or variation of the educational 
program. Several new types of school and a generous number of 
new educational efforts, both without and within the public-school 
system, have been organized and promoted sufficiently to attract 
public notice. 
Of the new types of school one or two are significant. First there 
is the vacation school, which is successful from the standpoint of 
child welfare and child interest. But it is simply a recognition of 
the fact that the child’s education is going on 365 days in the year and 
that the school must replace the home and community in supplying 
opportunity for experience. 
Then there are the open-air schools, which have proved that our 
‘‘model” ventilating schemes are delusions and that the most rational 
way to ventilate a school is to do away with most of the school walls. 
Now we are about to see the time-worn school idea run its vicious . 
circle again. ‘Adequate provision” is to be made for children need- 
ing the fresh-air school. So (according to the program) masses of 
children will be kept indoors to be devitalized and subjected to a 
string of diseases with their train of adult weaknesses, while the 
