been brought out by these studies with reference to the opportunities for work and training which the mining town lays before its children. The first of these studies, made in the summer of 1919, centered at Shenandoah, a town of about 25,000 population in the anthracite coal fields of eastern Pennsylvania. The second, completed a year later, covered eleven mining towns or "camps" in Raleigh County in the mountains of West Virginia.

Mining, being rough work, is done in large part by immigrants or the sons of immigrants. In Shenandoah almost two-thirds of the children interviewed in the bureau's inquiry were of foreign parentage, Lithuanians and Poles predominating, and 5 per cent were themselves born in foreign countries. The population of the bituminous coal camps in West Virginia, Kentucky, and southwestern Virginia, on the other hand, is still predominantly of native birth, though foreign races are beginning to come in. Child labor in the anthracite area.-Children in the anthracite towns begin work at a very early age. Over half (1,652) of the 3,136 children between thirteen and sixteen years of age had already begun to do some kind of work, while two-fifths had already entered "regular employment," having made a final break with school. Many of those, moreover, who had commenced regular work were among the younger children; over one-tenth of the thirteen-year-old children in the area had already entered permanent employment. Over 600 of the children in the Shenandoah district who had gone into some kind of work had done so before they were fourteen, and over 400 had left school for a regular job before that age. This proportion of children at work increased with each year of age, so that by the time the sixteenth year was reached seven-tenths had started regular work. Boys were more likely to go to work than girls, for of all the boys in the area who had reached sixteen years of age, 86 per cent were employed at regular work, as compared with a little over one-half the girls of that age.

Nine-tenths of the boys from thirteen to sixteen who had definitely left school for work had entered the mining industry as their first regular job, a number of them, by the way, according to their own statements, having gone to work in underground occupations even before the age of sixteen, in violation of the state law. An even larger proportion were at work in or about mines at the time of the study, and only 67 boys were found at the time of the inquiry to be employed in other industries. In almost every instance the boys in these industries were engaged in errand-boy or helpers' jo which paid them much lower wages than the work in the mines and likewise offere training at all for more lucrative and responsible work.

As for the mining industry itself, the majority of boys when questioned repo that they felt that it offered no opportunity for advancement. Only 4 boys out of might expect by the time they reached middle age to earn as much as $1,850 in a y of abnormally high production. The conditions and hazards of the work, moreove further affect the boys' opportunities in that they run a special risk of being kille crippled, or otherwise physically handicapped.

The girls in the area enjoyed a somewhat greater than boys. Most of them (422 out of 453) found work personal and domestic service, the former employing i the girls doing regular work.

Child labor in the bituminous field.-In the mountain fields opportunities for employment are still more meage principal but practically the only industry. Outside the s

cally nothing for a man to do except to work on a rough mountain farm or to join a lumber gang if there happens to be one nearby.

There are no breakers at the bituminous collieries and the only occupation in which a considerable number of boys are used is underground. This work a boy cannot do legally until he is sixteen years old. But even including those who could legally be employed in the mines, the number of boys thirteen to sixteen years of age who had started regular work in the West Virginia camp was small-one-fifth as compared with almost three-fifths in the anthracite area. For women and girls the only possible employment in the West Virginia camp is in domestic service or in clerical work in the company stores and offices, but opportunities for such work are few. Most women in the mining camp do their housework unassisted, and there is but one company store to a camp. Only 4 per cent of the West Virginia girls between thirteen and sixteen years of age had been regularly employed, as compared with 29 per cent of the girls in the Shenandoah district.

Early school-leaving and its causes.-Fewer chances for work ought to mean that the boy's or girl's school life is prolonged and that the child is better equipped for vocational life before becoming a wage-earner. It is true that the proportion of children remaining in school after the age of fourteen is reached was found to be greater in the West Virginia than in the Shenandoah area. Nevertheless, a great many children in both districts left school between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, even when they did not go to work. In West Virginia the number of children of these ages who had left school was almost twice as large as the number who had gone to work, so that about one-tenth of all the children thirteen to sixteen years old in the West Virginia camps were neither at work nor in school. In the Shenandoah area 391, or 8 per cent of the total number of these ages, and 18 per cent of the sixteen-year-old children were neither regularly at work nor were they attending school.

Over three-fourths of the West Virginia children who reported the grade completed before leaving school had not considered it worth while or had not found it possible, to go beyond the sixth grade. Almost a third of these children who reported their age at leaving had left before they were fourteen years old, and before the age of sixteen was reached all except one-sixth had deserted the schoolroom. In the Shenandoah area, almost one-fourth had left school before they were fourteen. No doubt some of these children became fourteen during the summer vacation after leaving school so that not all of them ing the state law which required attendance up to

they are of course more likely to leave school at the earliest possible moment if they are older than the other children in their grade, or if they have been obliged to repeat the same school work year after year. By the time a child is fourteen years old he finds the school work and discipline of the fourth or fifth grade entirely unadapted to his needs, and he is anxious to escape and will if he can, even if he has to combat parental opposition in order to do so. In spite of the much smaller proportion of children leaving school for work than in the anthracite field, retardation was much more marked in West Virginia, especially among school-leaving children. Of the 89 children who had left school for whom age and grade were available, only 19 per cent had been in normal or advanced grades as compared with 28 per cent who remained in school. In Shenandoah 65 per cent of the children thirteen to sixteen years of age still in school were in normal or advanced grades. Thirteen of the West Virginia children who had left school, or about 1 in every 8 who left, were unable to read and write. In Shenandoah I in 10 was unable to read and write.

In the larger mining towns, that is, towns in which the population is 2,000 or more, high schools as well as schools covering the grammar grades are maintained. In the "camps" or "patches," however, the schools are rural in type, often having but one room and one teacher to the five or six grades which are given. The fact that a child must go to town in many cases to complete even the elementary course probably accounts in part for the large number who drop out at the fifth or sixth grade. The completion of the last grade in the school appeals to the child as an excellent time to stop. Some of the smaller communities have no schools at all. This does not mean in all cases that a child has absolutely no school which he may attend, but a 2-mile walk to a school in another camp is not uncommon on the roads which in winter or muddy weather become impassable. Because of distance and weather, the children, as one West Virginia father expressed it, can attend school only on "picked days." This is doubly unfortunate in view of the short school terms which prevail. The term varies from five to nine months in the Appalachian area. In the West Virginia camps it is usually only six months, the term required by law, though some of the mining companies supplement the county funds in order to lengthen the school term a month

or two.

In order that children may learn anything in so short a time, the most skilful teaching is necessary. But as a matter of fact, except in rare instances, the teachers in the schools of the mining camps are uniformly poorly trained. Here, too, the mining company in some cases steps in and pays a higher salary to secure a better teacher, often of their own selection. In Raleigh County, 34, or exactly half, of the teachers in the mining camps in one school district reported their education had never even been to high school. Nor have many of them had much experience to offset their lack of train ing, at least one-eighth of these teachers never having taught before the year of t

survey.

Needless to say, these teachers have had no instruction in methods of teachin English to foreigners, and have in most cases little or no sympathetic understanding mining-town life. The lack of suitable rooming and boarding places in the average mining town makes it not only more difficult than it would otherwise be to obtain teachers of the right kind, but results in the teacher's living entirely apart from the community, so that the school is not the center of the so ivities of the camp

which it could and ought to be.

The situation is rendered worse by the large classes which the teachers are obliged to handle and by the very general overcrowding of classrooms. One teacher in West Virginia had 73 children enrolled, another 100, another 81, and from 45 to 60, including several different grades, was common. A fourth of the schoolrooms in the school districts of West Virginia covered by the Children's Bureau survey had too few seats for the average number of pupils attending and at least five had no seats at all, or from three to seven single seats for classes of from 18 to 55 pupils. Pupils had to sit two or three in a seat, and one parent said that her child had to sit on the floor, so that she was glad when the teacher sent him home saying that she could take no pupils under eight years of age. A number of the children covered in our survey were obliged to stay away from school because there was no room for them. Few mining-town schools have any playgrounds and many have no play space, except the streets and railroad tracks, where crap-shooting, smoking, and card-playing are frequently the favorite forms of play.

The school curriculum, too, is meager and unsatisfactory, and is confined to instruction in the three R's. Vocational courses are rare. Only about one-tenth of the Shenandoah children had had even any manual training or homemaking courses. In only a few of the schools in the West Virginia area had even so much as a sewing class been introduced. Continuation classes offer an excellent opportunity to give vocational work, but even in Shenandoah it was found that no continuation classes in any subjects were being conducted in the area, though attendance at continuation school is required of working children under sixteen years of age in Pennsylvania in districts where 20 children are eligible to attend.

While short-unit trade-extension courses for men already employed in the mines are beginning to be given in a number of places, usually under state auspices, day vocational schools for children from fourteen up are practically unknown except in the few large cities in which mining is only one of a number of important industries. Of the six most productive coal states, four (West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, and Illinois), in answer to an inquiry from the bureau, report no, or practically no, vocational work in coal-mining towns for children under sixteen. Indiana, in 6 mining communities (all except one town of over 2,000 population), however, has established all-day courses in one or more vocational subjects, generally agriculture or home economics, for children between fourteen and eighteen. In Pennsylvania, trade preparatory work is given in the full-time day schools of 3 school districts in which mining is the predominant industry, and vocational home economics in 23.

Deprived of a proper schooling, without opportunity for wholesome play, driven early into the routine of unskilled labor in mine or household, or more rarely into the factory, what future lies before the hundreds of thousands of children who are growing up in our mining oday? In the isolation of their lives the majority of the boys follow in their fathers' footsteps and become the miners of reater proportion of the irls will as wives of miners

should offer these opportunities to the girl and boy in the mining camp, as they are now doing in other industrial communities.

But the most immediate and pressing need is obviously for a type of education so available, and so adapted to the child's life and interests, as to combat the influence of family tradition and the lure of wage-earning long enough to insure to him at least the rudiments of a sound elementary education.

Legislation effectively administered should keep out of work and in school children who have not received this minimum, and scholarships or pensions should be provided for those whose families cannot unaided afford to keep them in school. Proper supervision should be given to boys and girls during their first years of work. Five of the six most important coal-producing states now have continuation-school laws, which ⚫provide an excellent opportunity to put into effect an adequate program of supervision for working children in mining communities, including supervision of their health, recreation, and further vocational training.

B. ENFORCEMENT OF PHYSICAL STANDARDS FOR
WORKING CHILDREN

George P. Barth, M.D., Director, School Hygiene Bureau, Milwaukee

Fancied economic necessity or desire determines about twenty million children of the United States between the ages of ten and fifteen years to engage in some industrial pursuit. Whether or not the labor of children is necessary for business growth and development is still a matter of contention at least in some parts of the country. The fact remains, however, that this vast army of children is drafted into the maelstrom of industry at a period of life when most of them should be enjoying a fruition into healthy manhood and womanhood unhampered by the hazards and untoward influences of daily toil.

Inasmuch as the greatness and welfare of a state depend on the quality of manhood and womanhood which it rears, it would seem to be but ordinary business foresight for the state to protect the child from influences which might mar the perfection of its citizenship.

It seems but reasonable that assurance be had that the child is physically fit to undergo the strain of industrial life before it enters it; and yet the laws of twenty states still make no provision at all for a physical examination even when the child accepts his first job.

The reason for requiring a physical examination before issuing a working permit to the child is to prevent children from going to work before they are physically fit or from allowing them to engage in unwholesome, dangerous, or unsuitable occupations. Reliable data on the influence of employment in industry on the health and welfare of children are still sadly lacking. The sickness surveys conducted by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in 1915 to 1917 in Pennsylvania, - Virginia, North Carolina, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Boston,Rochester, Tre New York City, show that 11 out of every 1,000 persons under fift tated from work and 125 out of 1,000 between the ages of fifteen but these statistics are of small help to us in the present problem incapacity for work increases rapidly with advancing

This, of