of the man who plays. Being in harmony with his natural interests, the child enters into his play wholeheartedly and enthusiastically, and it gives him grace and symmetry. The Greeks were the best proportioned and the most perfect race physically the world has ever produced. This was because they placed so much emphasis on play in their educational system.

2. Mentally. Play also gives the mind the exercise it requires. It is the natural tonic for the mental organs just as it is for the physical. It develops the mind much more effectively than does the regular school work, because the child enters into it more enthusiastically. He enters into it with his whole soul and becomes selfactive. Play is the only kind of exercise into which the child will enter whole-heartedly, and it is, for this reason, the only kind that will cause his symmetrical development. When the child engages in any kind of exercise in which he is not interested, only one set of brain centers is active: but when he is interested in his work, all the centers are aroused, the brain is unified, and its symmetrical development is brought about.

Many people have a high mental efficiency for a few hours, but they cannot stand the test in which endurance is required. They have not developed the power of longsustained mental effort. In the child's study, his mind flits from thing to thing, but this is not true in his play. The boy in the baseball or football game has the best possible opportunity for developing the power of concentration.

Play also develops the judgment. In the school the pupil is taught to weigh arguments on both sides of a question and is cautioned to be conservative in rendering his judgment. This is all very well on some occasions; but in most cases decisions must be given "right off the

bat," as it were, when hesitation is fatal. When the boy in the center field gets a ball, he must decide in an instant whether to throw it to the first, second, or third base; he must decide in an instant which runner to put out. This requires quick judgment on his part, and, not as in his school work, much depends on his decision. The crowd cheers him if he makes a good play; it hisses if he makes a bad one. There is no place for "sissyism” in the baseball game. There is no teacher to say that Johnnie will do better next time. On the playground there is no next time; he must deliver the goods now. The boy soon learns this and he does his best to deliver them. Knowing that one must do what is expected of him is the greatest possible stimulus to the thinking faculties, and the boy who sleeps in his history recitation will be wide awake on the playground, when so much depends upon what he does. There he is mentally alert and every faculty is at its highest tension.

3. Morally. Play not only gives physical and mental development, it is the chief source of moral strength. We may teach the child to do right, but he does not learn through our teaching. He learns through his own doing. In his play he forms his moral concepts. There his apperceptive centers for after-life are formed. There he gets his ideals. The race is what it is morally because of its early activities, and the best way for it to reach its ideal morally is for it to continue those activities. Where the man was made is the best place in which to keep him in repair.

The lack of something to do is the cause of most of the immorality in the world. Play creates the habit of industry. Some one has said that the boy who does not play is father to the man without a job. The boy who plays most on the outside of school will, as a rule, do the best work in the school.

Play develops the spirit of sportsmanship, which urges the boy to do his best to win, but, if he cannot, to take his defeat magnanimously. It tells him to do his best even though the odds are against him, and if defeat comes, to do his best to win the next time.

Play develops a sense of justice, honesty, and obedience to law. It eliminates from the child's mind the idea that might makes right, and teaches him to play according to the rules of the game and treat even the smallest player with the same consideration that he gives the largest one. When the child gets the idea on the playground that he should play according to rules, he carries these same ideas into business and plays according to the rules there. The boy who learns to respect the laws of the playground learns at the same time to respect the laws of his state. It might be said that the boy will learn this lesson of obedience in his regular school work, but experience has proved to us that such is not the case. Lawlessness in this country is increasing at a very rapid rate, and many think that this is due to the increased lack of respect for the laws of the school. The school is an absolute monarchy where the teacher's word is law. The teacher is on one side; the pupils are on the other; and it is a question which side will win. The pupil, under such conditions, will naturally come to the conclusion that it is to his interest to violate the law whenever he can. The playground, however, is a democracy where the law is in harmony with the child's needs; he learns to obey it because he feels that it is his law; he wants to obey, he does obey, and thus he forms the habit of obedience.

There are many moral qualities which the playground develops. In fact, a properly conducted playground will develop every phase of the child's moral life. Play

satisfies the deepest longings of the child's moral life and is in harmony with his moral no less than it is with his physical and mental nature.

EDUCATIONAL CONSERVATISM

Then, if play is so important in the education of children, should it not have a more prominent place in our educational system than it has at present? When it means so much to the child physically, mentally, and morally, should it not have at least as much of the child's time as is devoted to one of his studies? Many of our leading educators are beginning to think so, and in the more progressive schools of the country provision is made for the child's play just as for his regular school studies. In fact, some schools have gone much farther than this, and play is given as large a place in the school program as all the other activities combined.

In the Gary schools, the child devotes half his time to play, and Superintendent Wirt says that the pupils gain rather than lose by it. The graduates of the Gary schools are, as a rule, given advanced standing when they go to higher institutions. In an investigation of twenty thousand school children in New York City it was found that those who had been on half time had made considerably better progress than those who had been on full time. Joseph Lee says that our present educational methods teach the child how to do one hour's work in five hours' time. Dr. Hutchinson says that "a child can read over in thirty hours all that the school requires him to master in three thousand hours. It keeps him one hundred hours on work that he could do in one hour." Dr. Eliot says that a normal eighth-grader could master in six weeks all the number work he has mastered in his previous years in school. Colonel Parker

said that if you would give him a normal child fourteen years old who had never been to school, he would put him through the high school in four years. We all know that the boy from the country who has been to school but very little can enter the high school and outstrip the city boy who has been in school all his life. He may not know as much as the city boy, but he is more alert mentally. Most of our great men attended school only three or four months in the year. All this seems to prove that our children are getting too much schooling of the kind we are giving them. Does it not prove that much that we are worrying over teaching the child he would learn at the proper time? The trouble is that we are trying to get him to learn these things when he is not ready for them. Like Dr. Blimber's hothouse, our schools are trying to force the boys and girls to bloom out of season. If we would let the child grow physically, mentally, and morally, in his natural way, he would acquire the necessary information at the proper season without effort. In our school work we have sinned greatly against the child by trying to force him. The teachers say, "Bring him on"; the parents say, "Bring him on," and, as a result, he has been brought on in great fashion. The hothouse method may cram into the child's head the customary quantum of information and make father and mother proud of his learning; but such a method will not develop the physical strength that is necessary to the fullest life; it will not develop mental alertness, and it is destructive of the child's finer sensibilities. The plant that is pushed and made to bloom out of season pays the price later on in retarded growth, and the child that is robbed of his childhood and the play life that goes with it will likewise pay the price in arrested development. If the Dr. Blimbers who manage the