News and Comment
The Southern Educational Association. The nineteenth annual session of the Southern Educational Association will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, on December 29-31 inclusive. A Successful Boole.
We hear that the recent publication of the Russell Sage Foundation, entitled “Medical Inspection of Schools,” by Dr Luther H. Gulick and Mr. Leonard P. Ayres, is selling at the rate of between thirty and forty copies a day. This must be gratifying not only to the authors, but to anyone who has at heart the fuller development of medical inspection in our public schools, evidencing as it does a very widespread interest. Efficiency of Teachers in Examining Pupils’ Eyes.
In an article in the November number of School Hygiene, Dr Ralph Waldo Place gives to teachers a well merited word of praise for the ability they have shown in testing the eyes of their pupils. He says, “One cannot help being impressed by the valuable work teachers are doing in testing the acuity of vision. In the large majority of instances they are able to detect subnormal sight, but some must be tested by an oculist in order to discover latent errors. Young children with two, three, and even four diopters of far-sight can sometimes read the usual amount at a distance, and.these must be watched for inability to read their books for any length of time without having the vision blur or eyes ache. The patients especially have nervous symptoms greatly relieved by wearing glasses.” Indiana Statistics of Retardation.
The state association of Town and City Superintendents of Indiana publishes the report of a committee on delinquent and dependent children, including truancy, juvenile courts, and poor relief. This admirable report should be in the hands of every superintendent and friend of public education in the country. The Psychological Clinic hopes shortly to give an adequate review of this report. At present it is desired to call attention to the following citation: “The plan followed is based upon a plan followed by Supt. Bryan of the Camden, N. J., schools for his article in The Psychological Clinic and for his forthcoming book.” Not only Supt. Bryan’s work, reported in the first volume of this journal, but also District Supt. Cornman’s work, published in the same volume, is accepted by the Indiana superintendents as establishing standard methods for the treatment of statistics.
An Important Conference on Backward Children. The Public Education Association of Philadelphia held a public meeting on December 11, 1908, at which the following topic was discussed: “Do twenty-five per cent of all public school children fail to get an education ?”
This meeting has significance not only for Philadelphia but for the whole country. Most of the investigators who have within the last five years been bringing the facts and causes of retardation in school progress to the attention of the public, took part in this conference. Dr Lightner Witmer, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, gave a brief history of the study of retardation. He insisted that a backward child should not be defined as a mentally defective child. Backward children are frequently backward because of failure to attend school, imperfections in the school system, and other causes that lie outside the child’s physical and mental organization. Dr Roland P. Falkner, Ex-Commissioner of Education for Porto Rico, presented the conditions as these are found to exist in a large number of cities in the United States. Dr Falkner has the statistics of twenty-three cities in satisfactory shape for comparison. Mr. Leonard P. Ayres, General Superintendent of Schools for Porto Rico, 1906-08, and at present in charge of the backward children investigation of the Russell Sage Foundation, explained some of the causes of retardation. Dr Luther H. Gulick, formerly Director of Physical Training of the New York Public Schools, and now director of the backward children investigation of the Russell Sage Foundation, discussed the economic and practical necessity of investigations of school conditions. Every superintendent in the country would do his schools a service by placing before his board the following paragraph quoted from Dr Gulick’s address:
“Would a great business concern spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually and then never take statistics on its work? Would such a concern not have the slightest idea at the end of a current year as to what failures it had made, where energy and material were lost and who lost it? No. Yet that is what all the school boards of this country are doing. We don’t know anything. We imagine and form opinions and debate on the best methods, but what we need is facts. And we haven’t got them. You in Philadelphia don’t know them, and we in New York don’t know them.”
Church and Labor Unite for Social Progress.
The Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, comprising 350 delegates from thirty-three different denominations, and representing 18,000,000 communicants, held its quadrennial session in Philadelphia, December 2-7. On Sunday afternoon, December 6, the Council held a meeting for workingmen in the Lyric Theatre. This was the first mass meeting held by the Federal Council since the adoption of its aggressive attitude toward the great social and industrial evils which organized labor is fighting. President Hayes read the resolutions adopted by the Council on the previous Friday. They were received with the greatest enthusiasm by the large crowd present, and it was declared that they could not have better expressed the platform of labor had they been drawn up by the labor unions themselves. The resolutions are as follows:? “To us it seems that the churches must stand “For equal rights and complete justice for all men in all stations of life;
“For the right of all men to the opportunity for self-maintenance, a right ever to be wisely and strongly safeguarded against encroachments of every kind; “For the right of workers to some protection against the hardships often resulting from the swift crises of industrial changes; “For the principle of conciliation and arbitration in industrial dissensions; “For the protection of the worker from dangerous machinery, occupational disease, injuries, and mortality; “For the abolition of child labor; “For such regulation of the conditions of toil for women as shall safeguard the physical and moral health of the community; “For the suppression of the ‘sweating system’; “For the gradual and reasonable reduction of the hours of labor to the lowest practicable point, and for that degree of leisure for all which is a condition of the highest human life; “For a release from employment one day in seven; “For a living wage as a minimum in every industry, and for the highest wage that each industry can afford; “For the most equitable division of the products of industry that can ultimately be devised; “For suitable provision for the old age of the workers and for those incapacitated by injury; “For the abatement of poverty.”
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