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tions? On my way to this conference I saw an exquisite example of the effect of engendering fear through the modern method of health campaigning in the schools. A most intelligent and very healthy little girl has her weight chart, and the person in the school who reviews these charts calls her attention to the fact that she is in the "D" class, she is in some danger because she has lost weight in the last month, the last hot month of the school year. The child goes home in a perfect panic, the unnamed danger preying upon her imagination. To this I say, most emphatically, that no child health work can be decently carried on, in this day and generation unless one remembers that human beings are minds as well as bodies, and that children's minds are tremendously plastic and to be thought of in terms of hygiene as much and perhaps more than their bodies.

Perhaps a good illustration of the recent more scientific attempt to understand processes, in sociology as well as in mental life, might be to consider the studies that some of us have attempted to make of why gangs of boys hold together, definite gangs. We used to say a good deal about boys being naturally gregarious and about this being an age of gang life and so on, but one finds such general considerations to be of very little help in understanding what gang life frequently brings forth in the way of conduct. If one does, then, make a real inquiry, one frequently finds quite subtle factors, bonds of union which are quite unsuspected. And the alleged fact of universal gregariousness hardly looms so large under these circumstances. One finds the bond to be very specific matters, secret practices, as well as possibly some hidden habitat or mutual possessions.

And this brings us to the whole matter of sex ideation in childhood. The newer point of view in this matter is that we are dealing with affairs, most frequently, of mental life, of ideation, of imagery, and not merely with physical feelings and habits. This is not the place to enter into this most vital subject, but I do want to insist to you that what we have learned in recent years that the very greatest of value for the correction of sex misconduct has to do with the finding out of what the mental content is and the ascertaining of, not only the sources of mental contamination, but also the actual form of the contamination. It is a truism to state that if parents do not instruct children in sex matters someone else will, but we ought not to rest content until parents generally appreciate the fact, and then the next step is to gain better understanding of what makes for a healthy mental content in these matters, or, if there is trouble already, how to uproot and supplant acquired unfortunate ideation.

Nowadays I wonder if we insist enough upon mental rest-in these days of quick transportation and many public amusements and the vast experiences that our children have through the movies and the modern bustle of life. "A child's mind is burdened with so many problems of adaptation and conduct while society is shaping instinctive nature," as Tridon says in his little book which contains so many suggestions for a healthy child life, that we should take special pains to see the values of quietude and thoughtfulness.

And all through one does very clearly see the great necessities for insisting on the constructive aspects of developing children's character, emphasizing the do rather than the don't. Again, I like what Tridon says, "People with the puritanical ideas harp on the protection needed by immature minds, but they never make any positive suggestion for developing minds to some greater maturity so that the world can be withstood." Of course this paragraph could be expanded to a whole paper dealing simply with this idea.

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V VALUES IN PSYCHOLOGY OF CHILD LABOR-FULLER 85

adamental point that I would insist on over and over, as a general point, giving the illustrations that one might give by the scores, is that the basis of onality and character tendencies is in conditions in youth. One foundation, se, is in the native equipment of mind and personality, and nowadays we er it our business to diagnose the individual in these terms. But the other ation is found in conditionings, which are modifiable, in the character-forming riences of environment which leave a specific content in the mental life.

We are not nowadays, at least very few of us, asking for any great extension of npathy, in the fashion of a Charles Dickens, for childhood, but we are asking for a eper and more extensive understanding of child life. We are asking for the general evelopment of this in the general attitude of social workers as well as in the dealing with separate cases. We are asking for an understanding of what goes to make up individual tendencies-native equipment, mental and physical; for an understanding of instinctive life as far as it may be known; for a knowing and an understanding of the influence of experiences; for a knowing and an understanding of many elements in the inner mental life. A just treatment of children may come out of this.

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OF CHILD LABOR
C. IN TERMS OF A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF THE PSYCHOLOGY

Raymond G. Fuller, Director, Department of Publicity, National Child Labor
Committee, New York.

With progress in child labor reform the conception of child labor has broadened,
and with the broadening of this conception the program of reform has expanded. The
field of vision in child labor reform includes much that was not there, and much more
that was not there conspicuously, at the beginning of the century. This is partly
due to accomplishment of first tasks, partly to enlightening experience, and partly
to increasing knowledge about the child himself.

A rough outline of child labor and its problem would run somewhat as follows: 1. Direct effects (or hazards). These group themselves into physical, mental, moral.

2. Indirect effects or deprivations. These are chiefly loss of schooling and loss of play, constituting together an educational loss, if we take "educational" in its broadest sense.

3. Substitutes for child labor. The principal substitutes are play, schooling, and suitable work. These are all educational. Child labor might be defined as the absence of its substitutes.

4. Methods of reform may be classified as prohibitory, preventive, and substitutional. Methods of each kind are necessary. Establishment of the substitutes for child labor in the lives of all children is both a goal and a method of child labor reform -the method of overcoming evil with good.

Vital to the solution of the child labor problem is an increased popular appreciation of childhood itself, and this presupposes, of course, a better understanding of childhood. In spite of parental love for children, in spite of the claim on the part of society to have a special place in its heart for children, children even today are visited with vast cruelty and abuse-not a conscious cruelty and abuse, not a brutal cruelty and abuse, but a cruelty and abuse of adult ignorance and thoughtlessness and neglect. So many fathers and mothers know so little about children that one sometimes wonders whether they are entitled to be the fathers and mothers of children; and society, upon which also devolves the task of fostering and bringing up each succeeding generation, is not better informed or more intelligent, and a doubt similar to that concerning parents arises concerning society.

Two sources of encouragement may be noted: the first is the comparative recentness of real humanitarian regard for children, together with the results of this regard; and the second is the rapid spread of the facts discovered through scientific study of child nature in both its physical and its psychical aspects.

There are those who believe that child labor is solely an economic phenomenon and its solution therefore an economic solution; that is, if we could do away with economic greed and economic pressure, we should thereby do away with child labor. They are only partly right. I mean to say that child labor may flourish and indeed does flourish in the midst of plenty. It is not a matter alone of power to provide children with the things they need, but is also a matter of knowing what they need and of providing it at all costs. It is not so much a matter of economic income as it is of spiritual outgo.

We cannot measure children's needs in terms of their future adulthood. We often, in dealing with child labor, condemn conditions which we regard as injurious to the child's future efficiency when the real question should be, not what kind of adulthood he is being prepared for, but what kind of childhood is he having now. The principal new value in the field of child welfare is, in my opinion, the new value attaching to childhood as a good in itself.

Now though it is true undoubtedly that we need in child labor reform a social vision, a social conception of the child-labor evil and of the objective in child-labor reform-in a word, humanitarianism broader than the old humanitarianism of pity and tears for the individual exploited child-it is equally true that our central and dominant interest should be in the child, the child as child. He is our proper point of departure in child labor reform. The elder economists used to talk about the economic man, as if he were a separate and distinct being from other men, but that viewpoint has been discarded. There is no economic man merely as such. There is likewise no child laborer merely as such. There is, instead, a child. We may consider the child in connection with child labor; we may consider child labor in connection with the child; but in either case we need to know what the child is, by nature.

Modern child psychology has taught us that in neither body nor mind is the child a miniature adult; he is a child, not a little man or a little woman. Out of the nature of children arise their needs; and out of children's needs, children's rights. As the primary and principal right of children is the right to childhood, so it is also the right to a full childhood and a normal childhood, which really amount to the same thing. What constitutes a normal childhood, and what are the environmental conditions of a normal childhood? This is the most important question in the entire field of child welfare. The answer will not be attempted here, beyond the pointing out that a normal childhood is one of natural development in accordance with developmental needs, that development of body or of mind depends on previous development, and that between physical development there is close correlation and more or less interdependence. Any occupation that interferes with a full childhood, a childhood of normal and complete development, a characteristic childhood in each of its stages, is far from being a gainful occupation.

The general popular conception of child labor is one that is still limited very largely to the physical and physiological aspects of the evil. Not only does it fail to place due emphasis on the indirect effects of child labor-the deprivation of play and of schooling-but it fails, as regards direct effects, to emphasize sufficiently the psychical side of the child labor experience. The physical effects have been uppermost in the public mind, possibly because they are more obvious and more easily understandable; moreover, the physician and the physiologist have had more to say about child labor than the psychologist and the psychiatrist. Nevertheless, the psychical effects are quite as numerous, and quite as much a menace to future happiness and efficiency, as the physical. Deformation of the person is not more terrible than deformation of the personality, and health of body not more to be esteemed than health of mind. The child has a mind, a nervous system, as well as a body, and it has to be remembered too, that he is mentally as well as physically immature, and susceptible and plastic. The abolition of child labor and the establishment of its substitutes, particularly suitable schooling, suitable play, and suitable work, is a task of mental hygiene.

In true play no movement is made or action performed ahead of its natural and normal time; there is no unreadiness of body or of mind for that movement or that action. Thus it fosters no prematurities or precocities of physical, psychical, or psycho-physical development. Its activities, being timely not only, but interesting, since interest and play are one and inseparable as body and soul, are without that defective psychic motivation so common to child labor and so favorable to cumulative fatigue, which in turn is favorable to the inception of those dread diseases of personality the neuroses and psychoses.

The psychical side of the child-labor evil might be stated partly in terms of suggestibility. Children are more suggestible than adults. Fatigue enhances suggestibility. In child labor we have a combination of the two factors. Suggestibility and fatigue may become psychopathic, with consequences many and serious. Conditions which involve fatigue and particularly the cumulation of fatigue, which lower the general physical tone, which separate the child from his own natural society, which destroy self-confidence and initiative, which starve the instinct of workmanship instead of feeding it, which present an experience of repeated failure, which are marked by such concomitants as worry and fear, which fail to develop a rich fund of wholesome, objective interests, are conditions found in child labor and in the etiology of nervous diseases and personality disturbances of various sorts.

It does not seem to me that we are taking a utilitarian view of play when we recognize the service which it renders to the individual and to society. In preaching the gospel of play we must not forget, while enumerating the values of play, that play is a right by virtue of inheritance-a right written in biological laws that none can repeal.

We have mentioned the prophylactic and therapeutic value of play in mental hygiene. Next come in for consideration such psychological processes as catharsis sublimation, and socialization, which are of great significance in connection, for instance, with the instinct of pugnacity and the impulses of the psycho-sexual life. We may speak also of the fact that through play the play habit is formed. This means a great deal to the adult in keeping physically and mentally fit. It

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is valuable as a prophylactic against mobmindedness. But over and above the play habit is the play spirit which is developed through children's play. Henry S. Curtis has said, "Perhaps the greatest service that play has to render life is to give it the play spirit in which to do its work. The tragedy of child labor is that too often it kills the spirit of play itself."

Nothing could be further from the truth than the rather widespread notion that child labor reform is predicated on the assumption that children should have no work whatever to do. As part of the solution of the child labor problem, as a means to the abolition of child labor and the breaking down of opposition to reform, we must give attention to the work that children should have and see that they have it. To establish children's work is quite as important as to establish children's play or to abolish child labor. These are all aspects of a single problem.

Psychologically, the fundamental characteristic of child labor is unmotivated activity-or activity motivated from without rather than from within. Some forms of activity involved even in school work may be described as child labor. They are beyond the child's needs, that is to say, beyond his powers, except as they are externally motivated or artificially forced. They may run directly counter to his needs. For instance, his need of free bodily movement or his need of interesting occupation.

In distinguishing between child labor and children's work, very definite psychological facts and principles are available for guidance and aid. This from John Dewey is suggestive: "To confine the growing child to the same kind of muscular activity is harmful both physically and mentally; to keep on growing he must have work that exercises his whole body, which presents new problems, which teaches him new things, and thus develops his powers of reasoning and judgment. Any manual labor ceases to be educative the moment it becomes thoroughly familiar and automatic." Child labor is child labor partly because it is not educative in this psychological sense. It does not give the child experience in solving problems and coming off well from situations; it does not, in other words, develop intelligence.

The distribution of degrees of intelligence among the general population, as indicated by the army tests, has been the subject of considerable discussion. It appears that 10 per cent of the population is of "very inferior" intelligence; 15 per cent of "inferior" intelligence; 20 per cent "low average"; 25 per cent "average"; 161⁄2 per cent "high average"; 9 per cent "superior"; and 4 per cent "very superior." Or, otherwise stated, 10 per cent is limited to a mental age of not over ten; 25 per cent of not over eleven; 45 per cent of not over twelve; and 70 per cent of not over thirteen or fourteen. On the assumption that the age-grade progress of school children corresponds with their intelligence, it has been concluded that 70 per cent of our boys and girls are incapable of acquiring a high-school education; 25 per cent of going beyond the fifth grade, and 10 per cent of finishing the fourth. It has been pointed out that, according to the figures of the federal Bureau of Education, 13 per cent of our school children actually do drop out in the fourth grade or earlier and that 69 per cent do not complete the eighth grade.

Taking the conclusions drawn from the army mental tests at anywhere near their face value, surely we must regard them as having a very direct bearing on the question of a sixteen-year age standard for leaving school and going to work. It is a psychological question as well as a physiological one. Why keep children in school if they are incapable of profiting by staying there? But maybe they could profit if we had