FRANK HERBERT PALMER; A. M., EDITOR CONTENTS A Plea for the Wayward Child. William R. Lingo. As Shakespeare Did Not Say. C. R. Rounds. Master Will. (Poem.) Frederick Herbert Adler. American History for Citizenship. Gug Vaughn Price. Metre Met. (Poem.) Harold Willard Gleason. The School-Its Basic Purpose. W. F. Weisend. 483 500 The Tenth Star MISSISSIPPI has awarded an exclusive basal MCMURRY AND PARKINS GEOGRAPHIES EDUCATION Devoted to the Science, Art, Philosophy and Literature VOL. XLV. of Education APRIL, 1925 A Plea for the Wayward Child No. 8 WILLIAM R. LINGO, HIGH SCHOOL, JAMESTOWN, N. Y. I is an attribute of the exceptional child. Extreme cases assume more paricularly the nature of crime, while all other phases of delinquency come more within the province of pedagogy. When a child fails to submit to every disciplinary measure at home and at school he gradually comes to belong to the class of incorrigibles which frequents the Juvenile Court, populates our reformatories, and places himself outside the province of the school system. If, however, his delinquency assumes almost any ordinary form definite provision can be made for him in the school system. It is sometimes difficult to establish limits and determine the degree of incorrigibility of a child, and a little thought upon the subject will readily show how closely correlated may be the work of the Juvenile Court and the city school system. With respect to the incorrigible, therefore, the great mass of records and statistics deal with the subject in its relation to reformatory movements and the Juvenile Court. It will be the purpose of this paper to deal especially with this phase, and also to introduce the problem as it concerns our public schools. It will be the intention of this paper, then, to defend that class of young people who for reasons of environment or heredity or other causes follow the path of desire, delinquency and crime; the class which cannot or does not solve the problem of self-control and fails to organize life on social lines. Children are born without sin and vice and it is not their natural tendency under normal conditions to take a distinctly unsocial or immoral combination of social impulses. So it will be in defense of the wayward boy or girl if we determine some of the factors which prevent them from favorably adjusting themselves to society. Plenty of facts can be found to indicate that it is during the adolescent period when the individual goes through a definite process in forming ethical standards, a process marked by a breaking up of the old, a trial and reorganization, and finally by an attainment of the standard of his group. It is also during this period that the boy or girl is subject to three important sources of influence at once, namely the home, the community and the school. We have said that the child is born innocent, furthermore he does not inherit bad habits or incorrigibility in itself. He may, however, inherit certain tendencies toward good or evil, and upon his training depends which shall predominate, the good or the evil. The home, of course, cannot help but be the earliest training camp, and here begins the argument in favor of the incorrigible child. It is probably the results of juvenile court proceedings that prove most conclusively that the delinquent parent is a much more serious proposition than the delinquent child. It is an established fact that unless the child is defective mentally, it is chiefly a question of the right surroundings; but the delinquent parent is not of such plastic material, his habits are already formed and he is more impervious to the influences of society, especially corrective influences. A few examples will suffice to show that lack of attention and training at home in most cases brings the blame of incorrigibility back home to the parent. The mother of one lad who had burglarized six houses in as many weeks explained to the judge that she had been so busy with social engagements that she had no time to look after her son. The father of another boy who had run away from his home on Riverside Drive, New York, admitted to the judge that his son was gone three days before the servants and the tutor thought it worth while to tell him. The mother was spending the winter in a Florida hotel. Although both father and son slept under the same roof, the father was often so busy that he did not see the boy for a week at a time. While there are many parents in the alien colonies who are anxious to railroad their children off to institutions on trumped up charges, and thus shift to the State the burden of maintenance until the law permits them to work, there is a corresponding class of wealthy parents who are just as anxious to rid themselves of their progeny. The institution chosen by this latter class is, of course, the boarding school. It is astonishing at what an early age many of these young people are shipped away by socially busy mothers. There are many excellent boarding schools that deservedly take high rank among educational institutions; the heads of some of these schools do inestimable good; but the usefulness of some of them has been estimated solely by the rate of tuition. Ignorance and want and their attendant ills are the causes of much of the parental helplessness found in alien colonies and the congested districts of large cities. None of these excuses, however, can be urged for the parents in materially fortunate homes. But it was neither ignorance nor poverty that led Jakie's mother recently to make a charge of an "ungovernable child" against him. As Jakie stood before the judge his nose just touched the rail of the bench. His mother, fat, hatless, in a filthy calico dress, a shawl over her shoulders, and with large diamond earrings in her ears, had told on the stand all of Jakie's grievous faults. He would not go to school, he often stayed out until two or three o'clock in the morning, he was disobedient, and the mother declared that he was "no good." An investigation of his school record showed that he |