The age of the child!  His development parallels that of women, in that an individualization has taken place.  In the past education and training took notice of the child-group, not of the individual child.  But child-culture has taken on new aspects, punishment has been largely superseded, individual study and treatment are the thing.  Personality is the aim of education, especial aptitudes are recognized in the various types of schools that have arisen:  commercial, industrial, classical; yes, and even schools for the feeble-minded.

All this is admirable, and in another century will bring remarkable results.  Even to-day some good has come, but this is largely vitiated by other influences.

Aside from the fact that the attention paid the child often increases his self-importance and makes his wishes more capricious, there are factors that tend to rob him of his naivete.

These factors are the movies, the newspapers, and the spread of luxurious habits amongst children.

The movies are marvelous agents for the spread of information and misinformation.  Because of the natural settings they give to the most absurd and unnatural stories, their essential falsity and unreality is often made the more pernicious.  Their possibilities for good are enormous, their actual performance is conspicuously to lower the public taste, to create a habit which discourages earnest reading or intelligent entertainment.  For children they act as a stimulant of an unwholesome kind, acquainting them with realistic crime, vice, and vulgarity, giving them a distaste for childlike enjoyment.  One sees nowadays altogether too often the satiated child who seeks excitement, the cynical, overwise child filled with the lore of the movies.

In similar fashion the “comic” cartoons of the newspapers have an extraordinary fascination for children.  Every child wants to read the funny page, though the funny page is not for childish reading.  The humor is coarse, slangy, and distinctly vulgar; very clever frequently and thoroughly enjoyable to those whom it cannot harm.

If the historians of, say, 4500 A.D. were by chance to get hold of a few copies of our newspapers of 1920 they might legitimately conclude that the denizen of this remote period expressed surprise by falling backward out of his shoes, expressed disagreement by striking the other person over the head with a brick or a club; that women were always taller than their mates and usually “beat them up”; that all husbands, especially if elderly, chased after every young and pretty girl.  They might conclude that the language of the mass of the people was of such remarkable types as this:  “You tell them Casket, I’m Coffin”, or “the Storm and Strife is coming; beat it!”

No one I think enjoys the comic page more than the present writer,—­yet it spreads a demoralizing virus amongst children.  Of what use is it to teach children good English when the newspaper deliberately teaches them the cheapest slang?  Of what use is it to teach them manners and kindliness when the newspaper constantly spreads boorishness and “rough house” conduct?  Of what use is it to raise taste when this is injured at the very outset of life by giving bad taste a fascinating attraction?