is absolute.

Further, since men should not devote their entire lives to the same
task, because they require a change of occupation, the school should aim
to provide an avocation, or secondary occupation, which may occupy
leisure hours. Manual training, agriculture, art work, and civics will
supply different people with occupations for spare time.

Finally, since one of the chief duties of society is to insure a healthy
and increasingly valuable supply of human beings, no one should leave
the schools without a thorough domestic training, including training for
parenthood. While this training should be given in a measure to boys, it
should be intended primarily for girls, and should include biology,
hygiene, chemistry, dietetics, psychology, and nursing. Although the
elementary grades can provide only the simplest training along these
lines that training should be given to every future housekeeper and
mother.

V What Schools Must Provide to Meet Child Needs

If, up to this point, we have rightly described child needs, the school
must be so organized as to provide for growth and play, for instructing
the child in a knowledge of people, institutions, things and ideas, and
for preparing every child to do his work in life.

These subjects must be so apportioned over the grades that each child
has the benefit of them. The high school is a continuation of the
elementary school. It is in the high school that children should begin
to specialize, because specialization before the beginning of
adolescence is undesirable; but since, in many localities, almost all of
the children leave before reaching the high school, these subjects must
be taught in the elementary grades. Certain things every child must
know. If he is going to drop school at fourteen, as three-quarters of
the American school children do, he must be reached in the first eight
school grades. If he goes to high school he may there be given an
opportunity to complete and intensify the education which the elementary
school has started.

We believe that these fundamental principles of education are
sufficiently flexible to fit any community in the United States; they
will apply to places of the most divergent school needs.

VI The Educational Work of the Small Town

Let us begin by applying the scheme to a mining village of three
thousand inhabitants, a typical industrial community.

In this village more than nine-tenths of the children leave school at or