health of Brighton,
made a plea for the exclusion of children under five years of age from
schools. "During the time the child is in the infant department it has
chiefly to grow. Nutrition and sleep are its chief functions. Paints,
pencils, paper, pins, and needles should not be handled in school by
children below six." Luther Burbank, in an article on "The Training of
the Human Plant," says:

The curse of modern child life in America is overeducation,
overconfinement, overrestraint. The injury wrought to the race by
keeping too young children in school is beyond the power of any
one to estimate. The work of breaking down the nervous systems of
the children of the United States is now well under way. Every
child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, and tad-poles, wild
strawberries, acorns, and pine cones, trees to climb and brooks
to wade in, sand, snakes, huckleberries, and hornets, and any
child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best
part of his education.

Not every child can have these blessings of the country, but every
child can be protected from the stifling of the nature instinct of play
by formal indoor "bossed" exercises, whether called games, physical
training, gymnastics, or Delsarte.

[Illustration: NEW YORK CITY'S SCHOOL FARM DOES NOT STIFLE
NATURE INSTINCT]

The answer to the protest against too early and too constant
confinement in school has always been: "Where will the child be if out
of school? Will its environment at home not work a worse injury to its
health? Will not the street injure its morals?" Because we have not yet
worked out a method of supervising the health of those children who are
not in school, it does not follow that such supervision is impossible.
Perhaps the time will come when there will be state supervision over
the health of children from birth, parents being expected to present
them once a year at school for examination by the school physician. In
this way defects can be corrected and health measures devised to build
up a physique that should not break down under the strain of school
life. For children whose mothers work during the day, and for those
whose home environment is worse than school, it might be cheaper in the
long run to assign teachers to protect them from injury while they play
in a park, roof garden, or out-of-door gymnasium. If parks and
playgrounds come too slowly, why not adopt the plan advocated by Alida
S