teaching children to read. Both with and without the equating of the rooms as to pupil-ability, the results were the same. It is true that teacher-ability could not be accurately equated, but whatever differences exist would incline to favor the control rooms. In one school the teachers were believed to be of about equal ability; in the other the teacher of the experimental room was at any rate the youngest and least experienced of the three. It

would be desirable, of course, to put the Picture-Story lessons in the hands of the teachers who taught a control room, and allow the former teacher of the experimental room to take charge of a control room. In this way, whatever teacher differences there are could be "rotated out". It may be possible in the future to do this, though it would seem to be a little more than making assurance doubly sure.

HE child of pre-school age is being rediscovered. He has become a social problem of great magnitude because society now recognizes that the protection of physical and mental health, the reduction of crime, of mental defect and disorder, must begin with infancy. There are some 13,000,000 children less than six years old in the United States, a number not much less than the entire enrollment of the public schools.

The mental and physical welfare of the pre-school children of today is quite at the mercy of the multitude of individual homes in which these children are distributed. The developmental opportunities of the pre-school child hinge on the fathers and mothers who make or mar these homes. His fortunes depend on his parents.

that control should be achieved indirectly through his parents.

The present-day status of family life in America is not as discouraging as it is often painted. There are many distressing and disquieting signs of instability. The startling rise in marital divorce cannot, however, be construed as a decline of interest in young children. It means too many other things. Even the declinin. birth rate has a compensation in the higher premium it places on every surviving newborn infant. The birth rate in superic family strains is falling too low, but infant life is really not held as cheap as in the earlier days of excessive infant and maternal death rates.

The youth and the young marrie couples of today are perhaps even a little more cognizant of the meaning of parenthood than were any preceding generation There is no evidence whatever that child life is falling into lower esteem. In fac the evidence is just the other way. hear too little of the unnumbered, unheralded homes, where wholesome youn people are eagerly seeking every possib guide to help them rear their young chi

*Abstract of an address delivered before the M West Conference on Parent Education at Chicago

right. They are ready for more guidance nan society is prepared to give.

All told, the pre-school age is the most indamental, the most formative, the most recarious portion of the whole life cycle. f we wish to increase the physical stamina f the nation, we must begin at the botom, safeguard the physical growth of the hild from infancy, and make the health rotection of the pre-school child as uniersal as public elementary education. If e wish to increase the mental stamina of he nation and cut down the stupendous ad of insanity, crime, nervous and ental defect, we must strike near the pot and institute preventive measures of ental hygiene in the earliest years of life. One-third of all the deaths of the nation ccur below the age of six years. There are en times as many deaths during the half Lecade of pre-school life as during the folowing decades of school life. Most of the ommon physical defects of school chilren, like mal-nutrition and nose and hroat defects, are more prevalent among pre-school children than among school hildren. Rickets, a disorder of nutrition, s almost as common as dental caries and s essentially a pre-school disease.

Practically every case of mental deiciency dates back to birth or early child1ood. Three-fourths of all the deaf, a considerable portion of all the blind, onehird of all the crippled, and over threeourths of all speech defectives acquire heir handicap during their pre-school eriod. Many conduct disorders and deects of behavior take shape in this same eriod.

Public health leaders and educators like realize that if we are to safeguard arly mental growth, society must systemtically institute measures of parental uidance and of pre-parental education. How can this be done?

(1) By incorporating courses in child levelopment and child care into the home. conomics instruction of youths in high chool and college. In time these courses hould frankly become courses in pre

parental education. It is futile to sidestep the issues of home life and the difficulties of rearing children by maintaining a squeamish policy of silence in the public schools.

(2) By developing centers of parental training, in connection with kindergartens and nursery schools. Pre-school education should be cautiously extended through the kindergarten and otherwise; but not so much for its own sake as for the sake of the parents of the pre-school children. The great objective should be to assist the home and the parent, not to displace them.

(3) By instituting periodic developmental examinations from infancy to school entrance. These examinations can be made through an anticipatory downward extension of medical school inspection; through health centers, and preschool clinics, but best of all through the upward extension of the infant consultation center.

The Yale Psycho-Clinic has for several years been interested in this problem of standards of mental growth in children of pre-school age. Accordingly, we have made a series of studies of some 500 normal children at ten ascending levels of their development-at one, four, six, nine, twelve, and eighteen months, and at two, three, four, and five years. Fifty children were studied at each of these levels to determine their significant characteristics with respect to motor ability, language, general intelligent behavior, personal and social behavior.

Through a series of motion pictures' we have recorded certain phases of our study of pre-school children, designed to show both the scientific and practical significance of the earliest stages of growth. The infant's mental growth is so swift, so

1A motion picture dealing with the mental growth of the pre-school child was shown at the Mid-West Conference meeting. This picture was made at Yale change. For a brief description of the subject-matter University with the co-operation of the Pathe Ex

see Vol. 121, No. 219, of the Annals of the American Academic of Political and Social Science. Philadelphia, 1925.

elusive, and withal so familiar, that its true wonder tends to escape us. This film is probably unique in the youthfulness of the principals who enact the drama. The youngest subject is just one month of age; others are four months, six, nine, twelve, eighteen months, and two, three, four, and

five years of age. These children appear on the screen in the order of their ages: and thus the spectator gets a sequence of cross-sectional views, which build up : cumulative impression of the speed and richness of development in infancy.

States.

A

MERICA has come to a parting of the ways in education. Up one way lie reaction and retrenchment, a curtailing of the individual's opportunities, a denial of his possibilities-all with the excuse that the individual is not able to profit by those opportunities that we would curtail for him. It would be senseless for us to close our minds to the campaign being carried on by the advocates of this restriction program; and it would be equally senseless for us to do otherwise than give restriction advocates credit for being honest in their arguments for restriction. Up the other way lie hope and expansion, an increasing of the individual's opportunities, and increasing belief in his potentialities-because we are convinced that the individual has not yet had much of a chance to show his capacity to profit by opportunities. It is our business, if we wish to go this way, to carry on a campaign more energetic than that carried on by restriction advocates, and we must believe in the justice of our cause in a very whole-hearted manner.

If we are to carry on our campaign of expansion and win out over the "enemy,"

we must study all possible means of culture distribution as well as culture itself, the real and the counterfeit. We must study, as we have not studied before, that individual in whom we believe, and we must show in some way that he is worth much more to society educated in the fullest cultural sense of the word than educated in the tool or vocational sensewhich the "enemy," the unbeliever, will not altogether admit.

In this article I am not concerned with the culture itself. Much is being writter about that now; in passing I refer my reader to the article in the March numbe: of the CHICAGO SCHOOLS JOURNAL by James Edward Rogers in which appreciation, another name for real culture, is treated. Nor am I in this article concerned with proving that the cultured individual is worth more to society that the uncultured one. I am going on the assumption that you and I, after the fire experiment that we have made with de mocracy over a century and a half, believe that this culture so extolled by M Rogers really should be a part of ou democratic education. Such an assumption leaves us face to face with the question of culture distribution.

After all, that is now the vital question for many reasons of which the following two are major ones: 1. The “enemy" is succeeding in closing the doors of colleges to all except leaders in our democracy, and colleges up to the present time, have beer but another name for culture. 2. Just as

The "enemy" has taken up the drawbridges round the colleges and universities, mulitudes have for the first time taken up heir stand just outside the walls and ave cried for entrance.

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What is to be our answer? Are we going o encourage these multitudes to wait outide and continue their clamoring in hope hat the doors will be opened? Certainly we are not going to advise them to take ntelligence tests to prove their lowly tation and then ask them to go away, atisfied that they do not belong. If we re to tell them to go away at all, and for he time we may ask them to do so ill we have built more colleges we nust offer to bring culture over the college valls to them. Wisconsin did this a quarter of a century ago and revolutionzed university teaching ideas. At the ime that Wisconsin did the job she had to do it in a very laborious manner; she had to send out a teacher bodily into the 'wilderness," or she had to send out etters from that teacher. Now Wisconsin as a more economical means of culture distribution, the radio. The teacher does not have to go in person to take his culture over the college walls, nor does he have to depend upon the written letter. He just talks into the air and thousands isten in; thus is solved the problem of culture distribution. Culture has become is free as air, a culture for the multitude, not just for the elect.

This is not a dream; it is very real. As [ write my article America is beginning to receive her culture via the air in mass deliveries instead of in homeopathic doses. Her culture is coming to her on the wholeale plan, the only way it can come if a hundred million people are to acquire culture. I realize that this philosophy will ind little favor with those cultured men and women who look upon culture as somehing so limited in quantity that if one person has it the other person has to do without it. . . . the people who want an aristocracy of culture. I am not especially concerned with them. Rather I am con

cerned with the "ninety and nine" whom the Creator in his great wisdom must have considered when he made a world as rich as this with material comforts enough to go around; and I am concerned with radio as the possible means for distribution of that culture.

What is this culture-this real culture that is, in my opinion, the birthright of the masses? It is a love for music, for art, for literature; and it is a realization of values that comes through an understanding of fundamental laws governing the material and social world-inorganic and life-sciences on the one hand and social science on the other. It is simple; only when we come to the hair-splitting indulged in by victims of too much leisure and false culture or the sincere exactness of the research worker in art or science do we find complexity. The finished product ready for mass use and application is simple-lending itself to world-wide distribution and application.

How will this radio distribution of world culture to a waiting democracy of a hundred million come about? Will it be a commercial venture in which culture is sold, a dollar down and a dollar a week, or will it be another adventure in American democracy in which culture is distributed via the radio as a common obligation in which the expense is borne by the entire group-a venture like the public schools, parks, and playgrounds? Or will it be a commercial by-product for the distribution of which the ultimate consumer pays but does so in an indirect manner?

It is too soon to give more than a tentative answer to these questions. Difficulty in measuring the distributed goods takes this distribution out of the class of purely commercial ventures. The dollar down idea is applied to the selling of receiving sets; but so far as I know there is no adequate method of applying such a practice to the culture to be received via the air through the radio set. It seems to me from the data at hand that expense for

distribution will be met in one or the other of the latter ways. Either the public will pay for it directly, as for any other common luxury like a park, or as a by-product which seems to be free but which is in reality paid by increased prices of radio sets and other commercial products sold as a result of broadcasting. One thing is sure: The public will have to pay.

There is some indication that the whole proposition may be taken over as a part of the extension program of America's great state universities. Already there is a sort of superchain of university broadcasting stations bound together in The Association of University and College Broadcasting Stations. In this association there are thirty-two colleges and universities. A dozen of them are big state universities, aggressive Wisconsin, with her record for taking education to a democracy, heading the list. These schools are scattered over the country in strategic positions from Maine to Montana, from Wisconsin to Mississippi; east, west, north, and south we find them, and in the Mississippi Valley, making a real National Radio University able to reach an entire nation during any given quarter of an hour.

This air university of the United States is a part of her public school system and offers educational possibilities in democratic education not before dreamed of even by democracy's most ardent supporters.

But will this national air university be worked out under leadership of great state universities as a part of this nation's public school system? In an essay written long before the day of radio, William James deplored the danger of a new educational leadership in democracy,

a leadership that since then has grown to a dominant position, the press. To be sure, at that time James had reference primarily to the "ten cent" magazines. while I have in mind here not on these literary ventures but more especially the great newspapers; but they are a part of the same leadership which is really a part of democracy itself. I come then to this question: Is it not possible that this big national air university, arising to supply the cultural desires of the many who are now knocking at the doors of American colleges-and are not welcome within the walls will be under the leadership of America's newspapers and magazines? Certainly there are indications leading one to believe this will come about, in which event this radio distribution of world culture will be a commercial by-product for which the ultimate consumer pays but pays in an unnoticeable. indirect manner.

In conclusion we may sum up what I have tried to show in this article: 1. There are two movements, one of restriction, the other of expansion; the one would close the doors of culture to all save leaders of a democracy, while the other would dis tribute this culture "even unto the least c them." 2. Real culture, consisting in a love and appreciation of the beautiful in music, art, and literature, and in an understanding of the application of science to living, is simple. 3. This simple culture may be distributed to a waiting people a hundred million via the air. 4. Such dis tribution may come through the leadership of America's great state universities of may come through the leadership o America's great newspapers and mag

zines.