selected and summarized to serve as a foundation and background for the pedagogical section. The chapters deal with large themes, not so much for the sake of exposition as with the hope that the schoolroom program and practice will be somewhat illuminated and dignified. The fundamental subjects of perception and instinct are fully treated, and the aim throughout is to develop the genetic point of view toward the child and education. Part Four considers the child as a whole, with special reference to the larger aspects of physical and mental health or normality. Special attention is given to the normal mental hygiene of the child's personal power and growth. What is a normal child? The prevailing standards consciously or unconsciously adopted in answer to this question are sadly slipshod, - even in the pedagogical world where high child standards ought to be religiously maintained. It is carelessly assumed that the normal child is the average child. Teachers of defective children often confess that by a gradual process of instinctive toleration or adaptation they come to believe that even their inferior pupils are all right," or at least "pretty good." Such teachers resort to companionship with "normal" children in order to revive their fading standards of what is normal. The great mass of elementary school-teachers lapse into a similar undervaluation of what is truly normal; but they have no convenient place of reference where they can rectify their slumping standards. We must go to science, to literature, to art, to revitalize our ideals of childhood. We ought to see more children in half-naked garb, as the Greeks did, bare arms, legs, chests, -to give us a feeling for the beauty and nobility of the human form. We are becoming too satisfied with the collars and ribbons of our primary pupils, and not keeping alive our natural disapproval of the frail, unshapely bodies which clothes conceal. Likewise we are losing a sense of what is mentally normal. The sciences of education have not, however, worked out a detailed psychophysical portrait of the normal child, and at present we have more adequate pictures of types of subnormality than we have of normality. A particular interest in the pronounced and pathological deviations from the medium has been to the detriment of the great medium mass of children, who, after all, are the most important, for the democratic reason that God made so many of them. There are over seventeen millions of pupils, the majority under ten years of age, enrolled in the public schools of our country. A small fraction are in special classes for the backward and defective. The rest are all "normal." By reason of the vast amount and by reason of the peculiar potentiality of all this child life in the early grades, the primary teachers, who far out-number any other class of teachers, have a big part to play in the expanding movement for the conservation of national vitality. By bringing new health, gladness, and creativeness into the pri mary school, a large and precious measure of perishable elements in human material can be saved to the race. Part Four treats some possibilities in a new-old field of conservation. The work in this fine field can be furthered, we believe, if those who have to do with children will develop and heroically maintain high standards of normal childhood in its various ages. This book may in some places do something to make more definite and elevated such standards of what is normal. We have not written for the technical clinician, but for the elementary school-teacher, and, of course, for other traditional guardians of children, as mothers, aunts, some fathers, supervisors, and child-study and reading circles. دد It is preferable that the normal should approximate the ideal rather than the average. The higher and stronger the norm of normality the better for the race. The Greeks used the word "idea" to mean the model which existing objects imperfectly embody. Millions of the primary children in our regular" grades imperfectly embody what is ideal, what is normal. We have not ventured far into the dangerous and uncertain problem of primary prodigies and precocity. According to certain new ideas of child culture, ordinary children by proper nursery pedagogy may be brought at primary age to high-school levels of intellectual advancement. Although there is nothing finally established as to the ultimate healthy limits of achievement in the primary child, we do believe that he is at present far below his possibilities, and think it regrettable that the primary schools continue to turn out such hordes of pupils subnormal in personal power. The primary child has many untouched reservoirs of interest and capacity. He is ripe for unguessed avenues of activity and attainment. Though we need not suddenly strive to make of him a prodigy, we can hold him more completely to what is soundly normal. BEATRICE C. GESELL ARNOLD L. GESELL CASA VERDUGO, CALIFORNIA |