Into such schools as described in the recent reports of the Public Education Association, no intelligent parent would dare send his child.  They are not merely fire-traps and culture-grounds of infection, but of moral and intellectual contamination as well.  More and more are public schools in America becoming institutions for subjecting children to a narrow and reactionary orthodoxy, aiming to crush out all signs of individuality, and to turn out boys and girls compressed into a standardized pattern, with ready-made ideas on politics, religion, morality, and economics.  True education cannot grow out of such compulsory herding of children in filthy fire-traps.

Character, ability, and reasoning power are not to be developed in this fashion.  Indeed, it is to be doubted whether even a completely successful educational system could offset the evils of indiscriminate breeding and compensate for the misfortune of being a superfluous child.  In recognizing the great need of education, we have failed to recognize the greater need of inborn health and character.  “If it were necessary to choose between the task of getting children educated and getting them well born and healthy,” writes Havelock Ellis, “it would be better to abandon education.  There have been many great peoples who never dreamed of national systems of education; there have been no great peoples without the art of producing healthy and vigorous children.  The matter becomes of peculiar importance in great industrial states, like England, the United States and Germany, because in such states, a tacit conspiracy tends to grow up to subordinate national ends to individual ends, and practically to work for the deterioration of the race."(8)

Much less can education solve the great problem of child labor.  Rather, under the conditions prevailing in modern society, child labor and the failure of the public schools to educate are both indices of a more deeply rooted evil.  Both bespeak the undervaluation of the child.  This undervaluation, this cheapening of child life, is to speak crudely but frankly the direct result of overproduction.  “Restriction of output” is an immediate necessity if we wish to regain control of the real values, so that unimpeded, unhindered, and without danger of inner corruption, humanity may protect its own health and powers.

     (1) I am indebted to the National Child Labor Committee for
     these statistics, as well as for many of the facts that
     follow.

     (2) “People Who Go to Beets” Pamphlet No. 299, National
     Child Labor Committee.

     (3) California the Golden, by Emma Duke.  Reprinted from
     The American Child, Vol.  II, No. 3.  November 1920.

(4) Cf.  Child Welfare in Oklahoma; Child Welfare in Alabama; Child Welfare in North Carolina; Child Welfare in Kentucky; Child Welfare in Tennessee.  Also, Children in Agriculture, by Ruth McIntire, and other studies.

     (5) W. R. Inge:  Outspoken Essays:  p. 92