Schools should be made to fit the needs of children, and not children to fit schools.  The school that does not provide work and play for the child which he is glad to do, has learned little of the psychology and needs of youth.  Botany, Zooelogy, Geology and even Chemistry can be taught to children before they learn to read, and taught so that it will seem like play, and through this the pupil will acquire a natural taste for books.  It is only within the last few years that the modern school has really begun to educate the child.  It has been a hard fight that scientific teachers have waged with conventional education for the right of the child.  What has been done is too recent and scattering to show material results.

Nothing is so important to the child as education.  The early life is the time that character is formed, habits are made, rules of conduct taught, and it is almost impossible to up-root old habits and inhibitions and implant new ones in later years.

It is true that “the child is father to the man,” and he is the father of the criminal as well as the useful citizen.  Outside of the hopelessly defective, or those who have very imperfect nervous or physical systems, there is no reason why a child who has had proper mental and physical training and any fair opportunity in life should ever be a criminal.  Even most of the mentally defective and those suffering from imperfect nervous systems could be useful to society in a sheltered environment.  Poor as the country schools have always been, the outdoor life of the country child is still so great an influence that he generally escapes disaster.  He is not sent to a factory, but lives in a small community where he has fresh air and exercise.

Of course here as everywhere we must allow for the defective, the imperfect, the subnormals and the children of the very poor.  These unfortunates furnish a large percentage of the inmates of prison, and most of the victims for the scaffold which civilization so fondly preserves.

The growth of the big cities has produced the child criminal.  He is clearly marked and well defined.  He is often subnormal even down to idiocy.  In most cases he is the result of heredity.  Many times he may have fair intelligence, but this is usually attached to an unstable, defective nervous system that cannot do its proper work, and he has had no expert treatment and attention.  He is always poor.  Generally he has lost one or both parents in youth and has lived in the crowded districts where the home was congested.  He has no adequate playground and he runs the streets or vacant, waste places.  He associates and combines with others of his kind.  He cannot or does not go to school.  If he goes to school, he dreads to go and cannot learn the lessons in the books.  He likes to loaf, just as all children like to play.  He is often set to work.  He has no trade and little capacity for skilled work that brings good wages and steady employment.  He works no more than he needs to work.  Every night and all the days that he can get are spent in idleness on the street with his “gang.”  He seldom reads books.  He lacks the taste for books, and such teachers as he knew had not the wit to cultivate a taste for good reading.  Such books as he gets only add to his unhealthy thoughts.