ht be seriously inadequate and dangerous in
case of haste or panic due to a real fire. In such a building sustained
good work by teachers and pupils is very difficult....

"The High School is miserably housed. It is dingy, badly lighted and
badly ventilated. These defects constitute a serious menace to the
physical welfare of pupils and teachers and, of course, seriously
interfere with good work. It is crowded. Intercommunication is devious
and inconvenient. The building is quite unfit for high school uses. Some
of the school furniture is very poor; the physical and chemical
classrooms and laboratories are very unsatisfactory, and its biological
laboratory and equipment scarcely less so. The assembly room is too
small, badly arranged, and badly furnished. There are no toilet-rooms
for the teachers, and there is no common room. There is no satisfactory
or adequate lunch-room. The library is in crowded quarters; the
principal's office space is altogether too small, and his private office
almost derisively so."[6]

Overwork in the school is said to be alarmingly prevalent. "It is
generally recognized by physicians and educators to-day that many
children in the schools are being seriously injured through nervous
overstrain. Throughout the world there is a developing conviction that
one of the most important duties of society is to determine how
education may be carried on without depriving children of their health.
It is probable that we are not requiring too much work of our pupils,
but they are not accomplishing their tasks economically in respect to
the expenditure of nervous energy. Some experiments made at home and
abroad seem to indicate that children could accomplish as much
intellectually, with far less dissipation of nervous energy, if they
were in the schoolroom about one-half the time which they now spend
there. German educators and physicians are convinced that a fundamental
reform in this respect is needed. In fact, among school children we are
learning the same lesson as among factory employees, viz., that high
pressure and long hours are not economy but waste of time."[7]

The school has been rendered monotonous. "We have worked for system till
the public schools have become machines. It has been insistently
proclaimed that all children must do things the same way for so long a
time, that many of us have actually come to believe it. Children unborn
are predestined to work after the same fashion that their g