SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT 507 



Practical people and school authorities everywhere are forcibly 

 aroused when they learn, through the statistical studies, that our public 

 educational system is based upon a theory of the pupil's progress in 

 school which perhaps miscalculates by two years the success of the ordi- 

 nary child in passing through the grades. According to the estimate 

 of retardation made by Ayres, the average child in the country at large 

 would not complete the eight grades in less than ten years. This means 

 unmistakably that a decided change must be made either in the cur- 

 riculum or the teaching if our schools are to become adapted to the 

 abilities and needs of the average child. 



Group studies are being made of many other sides of child life. 

 A recreation survey of the city of Milwaukee, made by Mr. Eowland 

 Haynes, a field secretary of the American Playground and Recreation 

 Association, brings out, as do similar surveys elsewhere, many facts 

 which bear upon the most dangerous part of the child's day, the play 

 hours. With about 350,000 tickets sold weekly on the average to 

 shows in Milwaukee, 60 per cent, are to moving picture shows and 21 

 per cent, to vaudeville houses. The public has not begun to realize the 

 tremendous possibilities of the moving picture show for good and bad. 

 Again, this report shows that, after allowing 300 children to play on 

 every usable acre of public and private play space within three districts 

 tested, half of the thousand children enumerated would have to play in 

 streets or alleys or not play at all out of doors in those districts. 

 Perhaps even more significant of a condition of child development is 

 that for 1,400 children observed in these districts outside of school 

 hours, half of them were neither working nor playing, but doing noth- 

 ing. Idleness, mischief and bad development probably correlate closely 

 in the child's make-up. 



For those who can stand statistics or, perhaps I should say, under- 

 stand them, the frequent enumerations of child welfare conditions have 

 served to demonstrate the needs and dangers of childhood. We have 

 learned of the tremendous unnecessary waste of life through infant 

 mortality, which is the most important health problem of the day, 

 because proper care will here save the most lives. Statistics have also 

 shown the need for medical and dental treatment for school children. 

 Lying back of these problems are still more fundamental biological 

 problems of eugenics and euthenics. A whole school of statistical 

 experts traces its origin and inspiration to the personality and work of 

 the late Francis Galton, who established just before his death the 

 Galton Laboratory of Eugenics in London. The work of these eugenic 

 experts and the biometrists is making it clearer every day that the 

 problem of the mental defective is mainly a problem of heredity. 



There is a childish query which aptly puts the question of inherit- 

 ance and environment. A little lad was gazing raptly at the stove 



