life of the child. No place would be better adapted than these
schools to establish and popularize reform in the clothing of
children, which should meet the requirements of cleanliness and of a
simplicity facilitating freedom of movement, while it should be so
made as to enable children to dress themselves. No better place could
be found to carry out and popularize infant hygiene in its relation to
nutrition. It would be a work of social regeneration to convince the
public of the economy they might effect by such practises, to show
them that elegance and propriety in themselves cost nothing--nay,
more, that they demand simplicity and moderation, and therefore
exclude all that superfluity which is so expensive.

The above applies more especially to schools which, like the original
"Children's Houses," might be instituted in the very buildings
inhabited by the parents of the pupils.

Certain special requirements must be recognized in the rooms of a free
school: psychical hygiene must play its part here as physical hygiene
has already done. The great increase in the dimensions of modern
class-rooms was dictated by physical hygiene; the ambient air space is
measured by "cubature" in relation to the physical needs of
respiration; and for the same reason, lavatories were multiplied, and
bathrooms were installed; physical hygiene further decreed the
introduction of concrete floors and washable dadoes, of central
heating, and in many cases of meals, while gardens or broad terraces
are already looked upon as essentials for the physical well-being of
the child. Wide windows already admit the light freely, and gymnasia
with spacious halls and a variety of complex and costly apparatus were
established. Finally, the most complicated desks, sometimes veritable
machines of wood and iron, with foot-rests, seats, and desks revolving
automatically, in order to preclude alike the movements of the child
and the distortions arising from immobility, are the economically
disastrous contribution of a false principle of "school-hygiene." In
the modern school, the uniform whiteness and the washable quality of
every object denote the triumph of an epoch in which the campaign
against microbes would seem to be the sole key to human life.

Psychical hygiene now presents itself on the threshold of the school
with its new precepts, precepts which economically are certainly no
more onerous than those entailed by the first triumphant entry of
physic