=All children should have school privileges.=—­All these facts are freely admitted, wherever attention is called to them, but we still have truant officers, and child labor laws.  We admit the facts, but, in our practices, strive to circumvent their application.  If the school is good for one child, it is good for all children.  Indeed, the school is maintained on the assumption that all children will take advantage of and profit by its presence.  If there were no schools, our civilization would surely decline.  If school attendance should cease at the end of the fifth year, then we would have a fifth-year civilization.  It rests, therefore, with the parents of the children, in large measure, whether we are to have an eighth-grade civilization, a high-school civilization, or a college civilization.

=Parental attitude.=—­Schools are administered on the assumption that every child is capable of and worthy of training, and that training the child will make for a better quality of civilization.  The state regards the child as a liability during his childhood in the hope that he may be an asset in his manhood.  In this hope time and money are devoted to his training.  But, in the face of all this, there are parents, here and there, who still look upon their own children as assets and would use them for their own comfort or profit.  They seem to think that their children are indebted to them for bringing them into the world and that their obligation to the children is canceled by meager provision of food, shelter, and clothing.  They seem not to realize that “life is more than fruit or grain,” and deny to their children the elements of life.

=The rights of the child.=—­All this is a sort of preface to the statement that the child comes into the world endowed with certain inherent rights that may not be abrogated.  He has a right to life in its best and fullest sense, and no one has a right to abridge this measure of life, or to deprive him of anything that will contribute to such a life.  He goes to the school as one of the sources of life, and any one who denies him this boon is doing violence to his right to have life.  He does not go to school to study arithmetic, but studies arithmetic as one of the elements of life; and experience has demonstrated that arithmetic may be learned in the school more advantageously than elsewhere.  He goes to school to have agreeable and profitable life.  Each day is an integer of life and must be made to abound in life if it is to be accounted a success.

=Child life.=—­Again, the child has a right to the quality of life that is consistent with and congenial to his age.  A seven-year-old should be a seven-year-old, in his thinking, in his activities, in his amusements, and in his feeling.  We should never ask or want him to “put away childish things” at this age, for these childish things are a proof of his normality and good health.  His buoyant life and good health may prove disastrous