INITIAL MEASURES IN THE ORGANIZATION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF THE IOWA SOCIETY FOR CHILD STUDY. [The society was organized at Des Moines, December 27, 1894. The following officers were then elected: President, Supt. H. E. Kratz, Sioux City; secretary, Supt. O. C. Scott, Oskaloosa; treasurer, Supt. C. P. Rogers, Marshalltown.] THE INAUGURATION. During the year 1894 a few of the school men of the State were in correspondence on the subject of child study, and intimated that they were pursuing lines of study and investigation in their respective schools. A suggestion of one to have a meeting for conference during the session of the State Teachers' Association produced the following circular letter, which was sent to the school men and women of the State-necessarily, however, to a limited number: PRELIMINARY MEETING FOR CHILD STUDY. The undersigned, believing that well-organized, systematic child study will lead to a better understanding of child nature, more intelligent teaching, and place education on a more scientific basis, desire that a preliminary meeting be held at Des Moines, Wednesday, December 26, at 9 a. m., in some convenient room in the Hotel Savery, for the purpose of forming an organization and laying plans for the prosecution of such study. The following topics are suggested as a basis of discussion for the preliminary meeting: Value of child study in general. Brief reports of investigations made. Plans of work and organization of club. It is deemed wise to limit the number of participants in this preliminary meeting. You are cordially invited to be present. Please promptly acknowledge the receipt of this invitation, and state definitely whether or not you will be present. Send reply to H. E. KRATZ, Sioux City. Signed: O. C. Scott, city superintendent, Oskaloosa; G. T. W. Patrick, professor State University, Iowa City; C. E. Shelton, city superintendent, Burlington; G. I. Miller, city superintendent, Boone; F. B. Cooper, city superintendent, Des Moines; Henry Sabin, State superintendent of public instruction; H. E. Kratz, city superintendent, Sioux City. The meetings were held as called in the letter. The entire forenoon of December 26 was occupied in interesting lines of study, and in expressions of opinion on organization and plans of work. A committee then appointed to report at a meeting the evening of the following day did work which was approved and resulted in organization and the election of officers. ORGANIZATION AND CONSTITUTION. REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON ORGANIZATION FOR CHILD STUDY AS ADOPTED. GENTLEMEN: Your committee on organization and plans for the carrying forward the work of child study respectfully submit the following report: Believing that an organization for child study will greatly advance our educational work and help to place it on a scientific basis, your committee recommends: 1. That a society for such study be formed, to be called the Iowa society for child study. 2. That the officers shall be a president, secretary, and treasurer, who shall perform the usual duties of such officers, and who shall constitute an executive committee to appoint leaders to carry on the work of each line of investigation agreed upon, and to have general management of the work of the society. 3. That all persons who are interested in child study and contribute 50 cents annually shall be considered members. All other persons who will aid in carrying on the investigations of the society shall be constituted associate members. Both members and associate members shall be entitled to receive the reports of the society. In addition we respectfully recommend that a circular be issued promptly by the executive committee, setting forth the general course and purpose of child study, and suggesting the leading lines of investigation which may be made. 4. That for the present chief attention be given to the three following lines of investigation: (1) Visualization, or eye mindedness and ear mindedness. (2) Tests of sight and hearing. (3) Determination of age, weight, and height of respective grades. We also suggest the advisability of affiliation with the National Association for Child Study. The executive committee was instructed to take steps to have this society recognized in the programme of the State Teachers' Association as a round table or department. On the lines of investigation, the first topic, "Eye mindedness and car mindedness," was assigned to Mr. O. M. Harvey, of Burlington, as leader; the second topic, "Tests of sight and hearing," to Supt. O. P. Bostwick, of Clinton, leader; and the third topic, "Precosity," or "Determination of age, weight, and height of respective grades," to Prof. C. C. Stover, Oskaloosa. [Extracts from report (1894) of Dr. E. M. Hartwell, director of physical training, Boston public schools.} INTERRELATION OF MENTAL, MORAL, AND PHYSICAL TRAINING. Moral, mental, and physical training, each and all, aim at develop ing the faculty or power of action-of acting in accordance with a rule of right and wrong, of acting intelligently, so that action and the ends of action shall be adapted to each other; of acting easily or with the greatest economy of force-i. e., so that energy shall not be wasted in purposeless, irrelevant, roundabout, or self-defeating movements. This suggests closer relations and interrelations between physical, mental, and moral training than are usually recognized by teachers, or the trainers and governors of teachers. Since physical training aims at perfecting the body as an instrument and at rendering it the willing, prompt, and efficient servant of an intelligent mind and a sensitive and enlightened soul, it can not be gainsaid that physical training lies at the foundation of mental and moral training, or that it enters and must enter as a more or less prominent and necessary factor into the greater number of our educational procedures. The full success or failure of physical training, therefore, does not relate simply to the size or strength of the red meat we call muscles, but is measured in part by our achievements in the domain of mind and the domain of conduct. In other words, we judge of the mental and moral worth of a man by the purpose, number, consecutiveness, and skillfulness of his ordinary and extraordinary acts, which acts, when viewed objectively and concretely, are reducible to the contractions of muscular fibers. THE HYGIENIC AND EDUCATIONAL ENDS OF EXERCISE. The ends of exercise may be characterized, in a general way, as, first, the promotion of health, and, second, the formation of proper habits of action. The one is a hygienic end, while the other is a distinctively educational end. It matters not whether we consider a single muscle, which admits of only a single limited motion, or a group of muscles, or a complicated system of muscular organs, like the organs of speech, or the communal structure we call the body, or a class of school children, or a football team, or a regiment of soldiers, the ends of exercise are practically identical in each case, and can only be attained through a combination of hygienic and educational measures. The main field of education is the nervous system, and the principles of all forms of education into which physical training enters as a factor are based upon the power of the nervous system to receive impressions. and to register them or their effects; in other words, upon its ability to memorize the part it has played in acquired movements and on occasion to revive and repeat such movements. The student of nervous disorders notes carefully the peculiarities of his patient's movements in order to determine the seat of his injury or weakness and the nature and extent of his disease. It is equally necessary that the practical teacher should apprehend the significance of the spontaneous and acquired muscular movements of his pupils, be those movements coarse or fine, since those movements constitute an index of the action of the brain which it is the teacher's business to develop and train and also serve to measure the success and test the character of the teacher's efforts at instruction. This is true not only of instruction in football, military drill, gymnastics, sloyd, shoemaking, and sewing, but of instruction in drawing, singing, and the three R's as well. Genuine success in any of the departments of instruction mentioned above is conditioned on the intelligence and skill of the instructor in selecting and teaching such forms of neuro-muscular action as are adapted to the sex, age, and capacity of his pupils. The motor element in education is so large and of such vital importance that we hazard little in predicting that the systematic study of movements is destined to play a much more prominent part than has been accorded it hitherto in the professional training of all classes of teachers. "It can scarcely be too often reiterated," says Mercier, an English alienist, in his Nervous System and the Mind, "that the study of movements is the only means by which we can gain any insight whatever into the working of the nervous system." * THE EVOLUTION OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. In the evolution of the race and of the individual the more general functions and orgaus are formed and developed earlier than the special functions and their organs; e. g., the circulatory and alimentary organs develop earlier than the vocal organs and the hands and feet. The same law obtains likewise in the growth and development of the nervous system, both as to its massive and its minute parts. The nervous mechanisms concerned in central movements are at once older and more lowly placed than the mechanisms concerned in peripheral movements. To those parts of the nervous system in man which are formed earliest and are practically completed and fully organized at birth the late Dr. Ross, a leading English neurologist, gave the name "fundamental," while he designated as "accessory" those parts which are rudimentary at birth and comparatively late in their growth and development. Broadly speaking, central movements are represented by low-level, fundamental centers, and peripheral movements by highlevel, accessory centers. If, as has been stated, the nervous system is the field of education, education to be natural, safe, and effectual should defer the training of the accessory parts of the nervous system until the development of its fundamental portions has been secured by appropriate forms of general training. HOW PHYSICAL TRAINING STRENGTHENS THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. As is well known, city children as a class present more cases of nervous instability than do country children as a class. I therefore venture to quote at length Dr. Ross's views as to the part which physical training should play in the education of children with tendencies to nervous instability: The children of parents who manifest a predisposition to severe nervous disease, as hysteria and epilepsy, are frequently not merely quick in their perceptive faculties, but are also often possessed of great intellectual powers, and much of their future happiness depends upon judicious mental training in youth. The children of such families ought not to be subjected to any severe mental strain during the period of bodily development, or be allowed to enter into competition with other children in the mental gymnastics which are so fashionable in our public schools. On the other hand, regular, graduated, and systematic exercise in the form of walking, riding, gymnastics, and calisthenics does a great deal of good by strengthening both the muscular and nervous systems. Everything which tends to develop the muscles of the lower extremities and trunk, and indeed all muscles engaged in executing the movements common to both man and the lower animals, tends also to develop the fundamental part of the nervous system, and a good, sound development of the fundamental is the first prerequisito to a well-balanced development of the accessory portion. The order of the development of the nervous system in the race has been from the fundamental to the accessory portions; and no one can reverse this process with impunity in that further development of the individual which constitutes education in its widest sense. Yet until a few years ago the natural order of development was reversed in the education of youth, and especially in female education, so far as this could be accomplished by human contrivance and ingenuity. The natural order of development was indeed observed so far as to allow the child to acquire the power of walking prior to that of other accomplishments; but the care of the infant had not yet been transferred to the professional trainer. No sooner, however, had what is technically called education begun than the professional trainer began to exercise the small muscles of vocalization and articulation so as to acquire the art of reading, the small muscles of the hand so as to acquire the art of writing, and in the case of young ladies the still more complicated movements necessary in running over the keyboard of a piano; while little attention was paid to the development of the larger muscles of the trunk and lower extremities, upon the full development of which the future comfort of the individual depends. In the education of youth in the present day the laws of development and physiology are not so openly violated and defied as they were a few years ago; but much remains to be done in this respect, and especially in the education of children of families who manifest a neuropathic tendency. In the children of such families the greatest possible care should be taken to develop carefully the fundamental actions, inasmuch as a sound development of these involves a stable construction of the fundamental part of the nervous system, a process which makes the latter to offer a greater specific resistance to the paroxysmal discharges from the later-evolved centers of the accessory portions which underlie hysteria, epilepsy, and even many of the psychoses. The process of educating the accessory system, and especially the higher centers of that system, should be regular and systematic; habits of mental scrutiny and self-examination, which, unfortunately, too many religious teachers deem necessary for the welfare of the soul, ought to be discouraged. In one word, education should be made as concrete and objective as possible. THE LAWS OF DEVELOPMENT AND THEIR BEARING ON EDUCATION. If this be true-and who shall gainsay it-is it not evident that edu cational measures of every kind should be selected and coordinated so as to conform to the order and rate of growth and development of the fundamental and accessory neuromuscular mechanisms of the child and the adolescent? Is it too much to ask that educationists should recognize, ponder upon, and be guided by, the laws of development which determine the health and power of the brain centers, and the health and efficiency of the servants and ministers of those centers, namely, the skeletal muscles? It is true, doubtless, that the laws of development are recognized in a way in the conventional division of schools into elementary, secondary, and superior; but it is no less true that the bodily and mental characteristics which differentiate children. from youth, and both from adults, are deserving of more careful study and much fuller recognition than they have received hitherto from teachers as a class or from those charged with the appointment and control of teachers. THE SCOPE OF PSYCHO-PHYSIOLOGY. [For the information of teachers who are constantly making inquiries into the limits of the several branches of experimental psychology, the following extracts are given from an article by Prof. C. Lloyd Morgan, of University College, Bristol, England. In this article Professor Lloyd gives a very clear outline of the province of psycho-physics and inci |