many families have to live on such poor wages—­five and six hundred dollars a year—­that the children have neither the health to profit by the schooling nor the books nor the chance to read books at home when the home is one or perhaps two rooms.  The curse of homework in cities ties the children down to willowing feathers or picking nuts or sewing on buttons, or carrying parcels to and from the shop that gives out the work, deprives them of both sleep and play, makes their attendance at school irregular, and dulls their brains during the hours they are with the teacher.  In the country the frequently short period of school attendance during the year and the daily out-of-school work forced from young children by poverty-harassed parents has similar disastrous results.

Even in those states which have compulsory attendance up to fourteen, many children who are quite normal are yet very backward at that age.  The child of a foreign-speaking parent, for instance, who never hears English spoken at home, needs a longer time to reach the eighth grade than the child of English-speaking parents.

Chicago is fairly typical of a large industrial city, and there the City Club found after investigation that forty-three per cent. of the pupils who enter the first grade do not reach the eighth grade; forty-nine per cent. do not go through the eighth grade; eleven per cent. do not reach the sixth grade, and sixteen per cent. more do not go through the sixth grade.

A child who goes through the eighth grade has some sort of an equipment (on the literary side at least) with which to set out in life.  He has learned how to read a book or a newspaper intelligently, and how to express himself in writing.  If he is an average child he has acquired a good deal of useful information.  He will remember much of what he has learned, and can turn what knowledge he has to some account.  But the child who leaves school in the fifth or sixth grade, or, perhaps, even earlier, is apt to have no hold on what he has been taught, and it all too soon passes from his memory, especially if he has in his home surroundings no stimulus to mental activity.  Poor little thing!  What a mockery to call this education, so little as it has fitted him to understand life and its problems!  What he has learned out of school, meanwhile, as often as not, is harmful rather than beneficial.

The school door closes and the factory gate stands open wide.  The children get their working papers, and slip out of the one, and through the other.  At once, as we arrange matters, begins the fatal effect of handing over children, body and soul, into the control of industry.  After a few days or weeks of wrapping candy, or carrying bundles or drawing out bastings, the work, whatever it is, becomes but a mere mechanical repetition.  A few of the muscles only, and none of the higher faculties of observation, inquiry and judgment come into play at all, until, at the end of two years the brightest school-children have perceptibly lost ground in all these directions.