764 THE URBAN COMMUNITY 



or passively, in contact with the community and which characterize 

 the urban community, are the school and charities. Both are an 

 integral part of familiar activity. 



The school originated when a part of education, instruction, was 

 separated from the family and instituted for several families in 

 common. The municipal school is an institution established for the 

 purpose of making this part of education common to all families of 

 the city (or to make the common education possible). As long as 

 the families paid school fees according to the number of the children 

 using the school, the public school was a common institution of all 

 participating families. Where the fees are abolished this connection 

 is dissolved and a part of the familiar duties have been transferred to 

 the community. But now the different parts of education are so 

 closely connected that no part could be separated from the whole 

 without drawing other parts along. Even the school libraries which 

 furnish the pupils reading material in their leisure hours recognize 

 that the child is, in a certain measure, under their supervision and 

 care during the time in which it does not go to school. Since not 

 only mental but also physical culture is the object of instruction, and 

 since special stress must be laid upon this in accordance with the 

 old saying "mens sana in corpore sano," also the care of the body 

 becomes a part of the activity of this institution. The cities begin, 

 therefore, to connect baths with the institutions (Schul-brause- 

 bcider), and the sanitary supervision, in the hands of school physi- 

 cians, is performed from the higher point of view that in a country 

 with universal education this supervision gives the best opportunity 

 to review the sanitary condition of the future generation and to 

 prevent, at least with good advice and little remedies, the diseases 

 of eyes, teeth, etc., on which the necessary care is not bestowed in 

 the families, as experience has shown. Free instruction contains the 

 recognition that the community has taken up this part of education 

 instead of the family. From this the deduction is made that the 

 community must furnish not only the common means of instruction, 

 but also the individual means for every child, not only the means 

 of teaching, but also of learning. To a certain degree an agreement 

 in this much-disputed demand has been reached, inasmuch as it is 

 considered to be, under all circumstances, the duty of the school ad- 

 ministration to provide children with school-books. There is still 

 a controversy whether this provision shall become general or shall be 

 confined to the cases of poor families (more expressly: whether the 

 provision of school-books shall be general or subsidiary). If, accord- 

 ing to the Latin proverb, " plenus venter non studct libenter," a full 

 stomach is not inclined to study, certainly an empty one is less 

 capable of it. The impossibility to instruct hungry children urges 

 the necessity of feeding the pupils; it is done as a formal school 



