106 THE SCHOOL 



demonstrates that committees of citizens, serving without remune- 

 ration, through salaried experts, manage vast undertakings and 

 enormous properties with economy and efficiency. The essential 

 condition is that the undertaking should be large enough to warrant 

 the employment of experts of first-class ability. 



The school should and must at all waking hours do all that its 

 resources permit to supply what the home, even under the most 

 favorable conditions, loses by moving from agricultural to urban life; 

 but if the home and its wholesome influences are not to be obliterated 

 among the city poor, the city must see to it that the so-called working 

 classes are enabled to live in homes where homely virtues have a 

 chance to nourish and where children have space to play. 



But there is still another aspect of physical education. Education, 

 whether physical or mental, is seriously retarded, if not practically 

 impossible, when the body is improperly or imperfectly nourished. 

 The child of poverty, with body emaciated, blood thin, and nerves 

 on edge, because he has not enough to eat, grows up stunted in body 

 and in mind. What a farce it is to talk of the schools providing 

 equal opportunities for all when there are hundreds of thousands of 

 children in our city schools who cannot learn because they are 

 always hungry! The schools of Paris provide a simple, wholesome 

 midday meal for their hungry children. In many places in the 

 British Islands the same thing is being done. Should we do less in 

 the cities of democratic America? In no other way can we be sure 

 that the schools will, as far as education. may, provide equal oppor- 

 tunities for all. 



Another of the very serious problems of school administration 

 confronting us at present is the division of time as between the 

 elementary school and the high school. The customary division 

 assigns two years, from the ages of four to six, to the kindergarten; 

 eight years, from six to fourteen, to the elementary school; and four 

 years, from fourteen to eighteen, to the high or secondary school. 

 If it is true, as is now generally believed, that the period of childhood 

 closes at twelve, that the period of youth begins at thirteen, and that 

 the child and the youth need different subject-matter and different 

 methods of teaching, it is obvious that a distribution of time which 

 requires two years of the period of youth to be spent under school 

 conditions fit only for the child, is open to most serious objections. 

 Specifically stated, these objections are as follows: 



First, the present arrangement causes the loss of valuable time by 

 prolonging for two years a method of teaching that is fitted only for 

 children; second, it unduly defers and therefore unjustly abbreviates 

 the time devoted to foreign languages, to the higher mathematics, 

 and to science; and third, in cities where school accommodations are 

 limited in proportion to the number of children, it is wasteful because, 



