Even though it is a little above the average amount of time, it is nevertheless too little.  A week consists of 168 hours.  After deducting 12 hours a day for sleep, meals, etc., there remain 84 hours per week to be used.  In a state of nature this was largely used for physical play.  Under the artificial conditions of modern city life, the nature of children is not changed.  They still need huge amounts of active physical play for wholesome development.  Most of this they will get away from the school, but as urban conditions take away proper play opportunities, the loss in large degree has to be made good by systematic community effort in establishing and maintaining playgrounds and playrooms for 12 months in the year.  The school and its immediate environment is the logical place for this development.

The course of study lays out a series of obsolescent Swedish gymnastics for each of the years.  The work observed was mechanical, perfunctory, and lacking in vitality.  Sandwiched in between exhausting intellectual drill, it has the value of giving a little relief and rest.  This is good, but it is not sufficiently positive to be called physical training.

Very desirable improvements in the course are being advocated by the directors and supervisors of the work.  They are recommending, and introducing where conditions will permit, the use of games, athletics, folk dances, etc.  The movements should be promoted by the city in every possible way.  At present the regular teachers as a rule have not the necessary point of view and do not sufficiently value the work.  Special teachers and play leaders need to be employed.  Material facilities should be extended and improved.  Some of the school grounds are too small; the surfacing is not always well adapted to play; often apparatus is not supplied; indoor playrooms are insufficient in number, etc.  These various things need to be supplied before the physical training curriculum can be modernized.

In the high schools two periods of physical training per week in academic and commercial schools, and three or four periods per week in the technical schools, are prescribed for the first two years of the course.  In the last two years it is omitted from the program in all but the High School of Commerce, where it is optional.  With one or two exceptions, the little given is mainly indoor gymnastics of a formal sort owing to the general lack of sufficiently large athletic fields, tennis courts, baseball diamonds, and other necessary facilities.

Special commendation must be accorded the home-room basis of organizing the athletics of the technical high schools.  Probably no plan anywhere employed comes nearer to reaching the entire student body in a vital way.

With the exceptions referred to, it seems that the city has not sufficiently considered the indispensable need of huge amounts of physical play on the part of adolescents as the basis of full and life-long physical vitality.  High school students represent the best youth of the community.  Their efficiency is certainly the greatest single asset of the new generation.  There are scores of other expensive things that the city can better afford to neglect.  The one thing it can least afford to sacrifice on the altar of economy is the vitality of its citizens of tomorrow.