Perhaps there is danger of exaggerating the im portance of the school as compared with less or ganized, less formal influences. There is always danger of taking any human institution too se riously. Charities and schools especially are all the better for occasional blasts of satire, chaffing illuminating criticism, which, without either adula tion or prejudice, helps, as it were, to restore a due sense of proportion.
Play belongs with class-room and home life as a serious feature of child life. And not merely regu lated, organized, artificially stimulated play, but spontaneous, natural, unwatched play. It is a famous playground director who tells of a startling proposition made by a boy at the end of a very big and successful play program—I am not sure that it was not a "pageant": "Now let's have some fun!" What children need in this direction is a place to play, time to play, and health. I have all possible sympathy with the so-called playground movement. It recognizes that city children do not have a place to play, and that modern civilization must, by conscious effort, restore the glorious privileges of which its own cruder stages have robbed the children and the adults. The condi tions are changed from the old days. Leisure comes now, like employment, to masses of men and of children, and some element of organization is necessary to its profitable use. But we are experi
menting only. Play festivals and pageants, folk dances and gymnastics, athletic leagues and com petitive school games, are but interesting experi ments, full of promise and amply justified so long as we do not fail to leave open the free competition of the street and the open field.
Health and nurture, through home and school and playmates, through religious and moral and social training, through responsible individual direction and through less direct but genuine com munity action, are the aims of a policy of social construction in normal childhood, as a good hered ity and physical well-being are the aims at birth and in infancy. I have an idea that in these re spects those whom we call the poor—the tenement house and alley population in our cities—to-day are rather better off than were the children of the comfortably well-to-do, say fifty years ago.
All parents and relatives who have a family standing, all family physicians and public health physicians and nurses, all teachers and pastors, all neighbors and associates, all who govern in the community, and all who shape its public opinions, are among the builders of the child life of the na tion, individually more or less responsible and jointly fully responsible for the death-rate, the incorrigibility rate, the efficiency rate of the chil dren of the nation.