The Vitalized School | Page 6

men and women whose time and energies are devoted to the
work of the schools for the child.
=All children should have school privileges.=--All these facts are freely
admitted, wherever attention is called to them, but we still have truant
officers, and child labor laws. We admit the facts, but, in our practices,
strive to circumvent their application. If the school is good for one
child, it is good for all children. Indeed, the school is maintained on the
assumption that all children will take advantage of and profit by its
presence. If there were no schools, our civilization would surely decline.
If school attendance should cease at the end of the fifth year, then we
would have a fifth-year civilization. It rests, therefore, with the parents
of the children, in large measure, whether we are to have an
eighth-grade civilization, a high-school civilization, or a college
civilization.
=Parental attitude.=--Schools are administered on the assumption that
every child is capable of and worthy of training, and that training the
child will make for a better quality of civilization. The state regards the
child as a liability during his childhood in the hope that he may be an
asset in his manhood. In this hope time and money are devoted to his
training. But, in the face of all this, there are parents, here and there,

who still look upon their own children as assets and would use them for
their own comfort or profit. They seem to think that their children are
indebted to them for bringing them into the world and that their
obligation to the children is canceled by meager provision of food,
shelter, and clothing. They seem not to realize that "life is more than
fruit or grain," and deny to their children the elements of life.
=The rights of the child.=--All this is a sort of preface to the statement
that the child comes into the world endowed with certain inherent
rights that may not be abrogated. He has a right to life in its best and
fullest sense, and no one has a right to abridge this measure of life, or
to deprive him of anything that will contribute to such a life. He goes to
the school as one of the sources of life, and any one who denies him
this boon is doing violence to his right to have life. He does not go to
school to study arithmetic, but studies arithmetic as one of the elements
of life; and experience has demonstrated that arithmetic may be learned
in the school more advantageously than elsewhere. He goes to school to
have agreeable and profitable life. Each day is an integer of life and
must be made to abound in life if it is to be accounted a success.
=Child life.=--Again, the child has a right to the quality of life that is
consistent with and congenial to his age. A seven-year-old should be a
seven-year-old, in his thinking, in his activities, in his amusements, and
in his feeling. We should never ask or want him to "put away childish
things" at this age, for these childish things are a proof of his normality
and good health. His buoyant life and good health may prove disastrous
to the furniture in his home, but far better marred furniture than marred
childhood. If, at this age, he should become as quiet and sedate as his
father, his parents and teacher would have cause for alarm. It is the high
privilege of the parent and the teacher to direct his activities, but not to
abridge or interdict them. If the teacher would reduce him to inaction
and silence, she may well reflect that if he were an imbecile he would
be quiet. He will not pass this way again; and if he is ever to have the
sort of life that is in harmony with his age, he must have it now.
=Childhood curtailed.=--He has a right, also, to the full measure of
childhood. This period is relatively short, and any curtailment does

violence to his physiological and psychological nature. All the years of
his childhood are necessary for a proper balancing of his physical and
mental powers, that they may do their appointed work in after years.
Entire volumes have been devoted to this subject, but, in spite of these
volumes, some mothers still try to hurry their daughters into the duties
and responsibilities of adult life. One such mother went to the high
school to get the books of her fifteen-year-old daughter and, upon being
asked why the daughter was leaving school, replied, "Oh, she's keeping
company now." That daughter will never be the hardy plant in
civilization that she ought to be, because she was reared in a hothouse
atmosphere. That mother had no right to