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Show SCHOOL DAYS Another school year has begun. More children than ever went to school at one time before, will spend the next few months laying lay-ing the foundations for their independent and individual lives. Some of them will leam a good deal. Some of them will not leam very much. The one thing that mosL children learn in school, and the most important thing that any of them learn is, after all, not what is in the books but how to live. It has always seemed to us that the real life of the child is his or her school life. During these formative years the child's principal interest centers about school. It is the one place where he can mingle on equal terms with all of those around him. For several hours a day he works and plays in the company of those of his own age. He learns, through the necessary discipline of the . schoolroom, to restrain such natural impulses as tend to disorder, dis-order, but he learns from the contacts with other boys not only the wisdom of non-interference with the rights of others but the importance of standing up for his own rights. In other words, the most valuable function of the school is to socialize its pupils, to help them to leam how to live in the crowd. In the old days of big families the children learned those things from their own brothers and sisters. Families of eight or ten or more youngsters are not so common in these days, and the discipline of the crowd is best enforced and learned in the school atmosphere. And it is becoming more and more essential that our young folks should go out into the world with a better understanding under-standing of their place in it. We think the best schools are the ones in which the pupils are required to do most for themselves and have the least done for them by their teachers and others. All that any system of education can do for any child is to stimulate him to use his own native intelligence. But outside of the curriculum, beyond and above the formal routine of the acquisition of knowledge, far more important is the socializing and civilizing influences of constant con-stant association with other young ones of his own age. |