ents" to find out what they are able to do and what they are
actually doing in the moral training and physical care of their
children. "The Parents' Score Card," prepared by Dr. Caroline Hedger,
of the Elizabeth McCormick Memorial Fund, and published in the
_Woman's Home Companion_ of March, 1922, aims to enable fathers and
mothers "to size themselves up as parents." The points to be noted and
on which parents have a rating as good, bad, or indifferent, comprise
those concerning "physical defects attended to," "adequate supervision
of athletics and recreation," "regulations concerning the below-weight
or nervous child," on "team-work in parents" (whether they pull
together or apart in the discipline of the child), and some very
drastic examination points on "fault-finding," "lying to child,"
"punishing when angry." The chart deals, in general, with the
character influence of the parent. It is said that only one child in
three hundred had a perfect "score card" in an investigation of a
large number of children, and hence only a small proportion of parents
could be supposed to measure up to all the requirements of the
parent's outline of duties.

This new device of putting parents to the test is being adopted in
many differing ways by health boards, by school boards, by children's
courts, by church committees of investigation, and by the
superintendents of charitable agencies. This all means that a standard
of child-life is being attained, a measure of the normal, divergence
from which is an indication of the abnormal, either in capacity or
condition. This is a wholesome movement, although sometimes carried
out in unwise and unsympathetic ways. This should enable parents to
find out if they have average children and what to do with defects
that are remediable. This is also one of the ways by which we measure
the social need to help parents who are themselves handicapped in any
way to do their duty by their children.

What we need, however, is more than this--we need some definite
knowledge of what sort of children we have in one generation with
which to build the next generation. We need to be able to take account
of our social stock as we go along. To do this the home must be
supplemented specifically and adequately by the school. In the school
we have opportunity of wide study of varying types, of comparison of
differing rates of progress, of getting at actual knowledge of actual
quality and capacity in a child as rel