t is high
time some measure was taken to keep the children off the streets."
Physical examinations would prove that streets are safer and better
than indoor gymnasiums for growing children. Intelligent physical
training will train children to go out of doors during recess; will
train pupils and teachers not to use recess for study, discipline, or
eating lunch.

[Illustration: SPONTANEOUS PLAY ON ONE OF NEW YORK CITY'S SCHOOL
ROOF PLAYGROUNDS]

"After-school" conditions are quite as important as physical training
and gymnastics at school. Not long ago a nurse was visiting a sick
tenement mother with a young baby. She found a little girl of twelve
standing on a stool over a washtub. This child did all the housework,
took care of the mother and two younger children, got all the meals
except supper, which her father got on his return from work. As the
nurse removed the infant's clothes to give it a bath, the little girl
seized them and dashed them into the tub. "Yes, I am pretty tired when
night comes," she confessed. This child has prototypes in the country
as well as the city, and she did not need physical training. She did
not lack initiative or originality. She did need playmates, open air, a
run in the park, and "fun."

The educational value of games and outdoor play should be weighed
against the advantages of lowering the compulsory school age, and of
bridging over the period from four to seven with indoor kindergarten
training. Neither physical training nor education is synonymous with
confinement in school. The whole tendency of Nature's processes in
children is nutritional; it is not until adolescence that she makes
much effort to develop the brain. Overuse of the young mind results,
therefore, in diverting natural energy from nutritive processes to
hurried growth of the overstimulated brain. The result is a type of
child with a puny body and an excitable brain,--the neurotic. The young
eye, for example, is too flat (hypermetropic)--made to focus only on
objects at a distance. Close application to print, or even to weaving
mats or folding bits of paper accurately, causes an overstrain on the
eye, which not only results in the chronic condition known as
myopia,--short-sightedness,--so common to school children, but which
acts unfavorably on the constitution and on the whole development of
the child. At the recent International Congress of School Hygiene in
London, Dr. Arthur Newsholme, medical officer of