DEMONSTRATION PLAY SCHOOL—HETHERINGTON. 697 
the old subjects, together with new phases of the arts, sciences, and 
literature pushed by a variety of individuals from the viewpoint of 
their own adult specialized interests. 
Consequently, school hygiene will come out of the same door 
wherein it entered, so far as its larger functions are concerned, 
unless child life is put squarely on its two hygienic legs in school 
organization—the one an open-air life, and the other a program of 
activities instead of subjects of study. 
Our educational fetish, the three R’s, blocks the way. Certainly 
children must acquire the tools of a cultural adjustment; but is the 
learning to read and write and count at an early age more sacred 
than the health of our children and an enthusiasm in life that gives 
capacity to live and work efficiently? At present the danger is that 
the fetish will be imposed at 5 or even 4 years of age and some few 
children are able to learn to read and write during these tender years 
for the edification of ambitious teachers and vain parents. The 
point is not what some children can do, nor that they should not learn 
these essentials of a cultural adjustment during childhood. It is 
that to make reading and writing a requirement to which all other 
activities are subordinated, say up to the child’s ninth year, is insup- 
portable from a broad educational standpoint. 
The time has come when men are beginning to realize that the 
stifling of the child’s developing enthusiasms in life through a back- 
warping, chest-cramping, nerve-breaking, mind-deadening desk and 
schoolroom program of ‘‘studies’’ is as cruel as the Spanish Inquisi- 
tion. : 
The tendencies noted point to the solution. All the vital special 
desires in education can be met, the overcrowding eliminated, the 
program increased to 8, 10, or 12 hours a day and through 365 days 
in the year, the present injury to health replaced by a positive con- 
struction of vital and nervous powers of which health is an index, 
moral education placed squarely on a laboratory basis, with each 
child treated as an individual as well as a creature to be socialized, 
and the ‘‘learning”’ increased both in quantity and quality by rein- 
terpreting the school as an open-air, educationally fused play and 
school center, and by shifting the emphasis in the school program 
from subjects of study to the organization of activities which evolve 
with the aid of leadership into specialized, adult interests. 
This solution, as indicated by the effect of recent social changes 
on educational practice, is also demanded by the social changes to 
come. Society has reached the age of human engineering, with 
child education as its foundation. The knowledge and skill are at 
hand. In the past, man’s human engineering efforts were confined 
to correction and cure; medicine was the dominant human engineer- 
