What does all this mean for the children concerned? Is not the meaning implicit in their story? Such an atmosphere of change and drift has an unsettling, and in the long run often produces a deteriorating effect upon many families. The cases of retardation (loss of grades) arising from frequent change of locality and the varying standards and demands of schools attended, are very numerous, and some which I have not had space to quote are pathetic in the extreme.

But the sag in family morale becomes gravest when, to the migration, congested living conditions and bad housing facilities are added. In many cities the congestion brought about by accumulating populations of incoming war workers is acute. Always a factor to con, tend with in lower income districts, the problem of adequate distribution of adequate housing has grown to enormous proportions. In a number of working class areas, three, four, five and even more families are sharing the same house . . . itself often old, badly constructed, or lacking satisfactory sanitary facilities. Hundreds of Canadian families are occupying one and two-room shanties on the outskirts of industrial areas under conditions that often seem intolerable.

There is a message here for our legislators and for every thoughtful man and woman in the capacity of citizen. But there is a special message for the teaching profession. Is it reasonable to expect from the many homes exposed to such conditions of flux and congestion the normal cooperation which the teacher looks for from the home? Spaciousness not only breeds graciousness, but also patience and perspective. In the noise, the heat or cold, the clutter, and the perpetual lack of privacy of many such congested "homes," one cannot hope for that impartial, unimpassioned, watchful guidance of youngsters which enables them to grow up with a certain grace, serenity, sense of values, steadiness, and feeling of security. Impatience with legislators and annoyance at the ill-judgment, improvidence, and unconcern of numerous parents are natural reactions for teachers; but this does not at best alter the established facts and it does not excuse the profession from its own duty. It is the job of the Canadian schools to see that boys and girls, raised in otherwise adverse circumstances, will at least enter a school which, in spite of the great strains and often heart-breaking difficulties which conditions are also imposing upon the work of teachers themselves, will nevertheless strive to surround these children with an atmosphere of quietness, confidence, courtesy, and composure in the class room, and provide them with a program of wholesome, healthful, and informative- activities outside of it. Such a contribution is of great importance to the welfare of our nation at war.

When John Whittier three generations ago wrote his classic description of boyhood in "The Barefoot Boy," he was painting an idyllic picture which concerned itself with one aspect of childhood in a specific locality. There is an overtone of sadness in the poem ... the sadness of a man who contemplates the pain and sordidness of the world which the barefoot boy must enter after his happy spell of boyhood. Other poets idealize on the same theme. Childhood is a time of "Painless play"; it is with maturity that the gates of paradise swing shut, and sin, pain, and darkness begin to gather. Wordsworth with sublime insight noted that "shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy", but even for him heaven lay about the child in his early years.

Many intelligent grown-ups who have read very little poetry since they left school are much closer to these poets than they know. As the years pass they tend to look back sentimentally on the days of childhood as Whittier looked back at his barefoot boy. They under, estimate the problems of childhood; they over-simplify the solutions; and fall readily into the misconception that the legal delinquent is "different" from other children.

The fact is that the life of a child is in general a microcosmic copy of the world about him. He is not immune from fear, conflict, hunger, humiliation, poverty, and the other ills that flesh and the spirit are heirs to. The further fact is that a child is a very complex organism, whether studied in regard to his physical, his mental, or his emotional life. In our day when the lurid glare of war throws into high relief the problem of juvenile delinquency, and when the war, not creating but aggravating nearly all social problems, piles up extra stresses and strains upon thousands of Canadian children, it is well for teachers, parents, and youth workers to keep both facts in mind as they contemplate the problem and deal with the youngsters within their immediate sphere of influence.

The teacher who sees her students as scarcely more than names in a mark book or faces in a classroom, the principal whose philosophy of discipline is more punitive than creative, the parent whose angry dissatisfaction with his children alternately blames them and the outside agencies that share his dealings with them, the citizen who complains of the rising costs of educational advance . . . all are suffering from the same form of social astigmatism. If we are to preserve our children so far as is possible from the deterioration which darkens the lives of great numbers and produces anti-social activity in many, we must understand that the rising tide of juvenile convictions means an increased pressure of adverse influences upon our whole child population; that even in so-called normal times children live far from the idyllic carefree existence portrayed by the poets; and that in dealing with them we are dealing in every case with a marvellous, intricate organism which requires a maximum of sympathetic insight and patience to teach, guide, and direct.

In dealing with legal delinquents and other boys and girls not measuring up to reasonable standards of conduct and attitude, the essential factor is to "get through" to the child. A young teacher told me some time ago that in his first year of teaching he had what he considered a very difficult boy to deal with in his Grade Seven class. Relations between the two went from bad to worse, and finally the teacher had to strap the boy. The boy took the strapping with his usual tough unconcern, and shortly afterwards the teacher found that the youngster had been punished in this particular case for some one else's fault. The teacher could have let the incident pass, but he was an honorable young chap, and drawing the boy aside, he apologized for his mistake. To his amazement the tough heady youngster who had resisted defiantly through all types of strict discipline since the start of term, said, "It's all right, sir," and broke into tears. The unexpected warm personal touch had broken through where stern impersonal discipline had failed, and although the teacher said that he and the boy had further trouble from time to time during the year, relations between the two never went back to where they were before that incident. The explanation is, of course, simple. The teacher, not experienced enough to look for it by intent, had accidentally stumbled on a point of penetration.

I believe absolutely in what I call the "Achilles heel" in dealing with young folk who are being a trouble to themselves and others. You will remember that the child Achilles, dipped in a brook to ensure him against penetration of any part of his body by an enemy weapon, was ultimately slain by a wound in his heel where the nurse had held him to dip him in the brook. It is a rare child who has no Achilles heel through which the spear of outside interest and help can penetrate the seemingly impenetrable outer shell of his delinquent attitude. I am not prepared to go the whole way and say that this is true of every boy and girl. There is the handful of incorrigibles who seem to withstand the most astute and able treatment of child experts. But in such cases the factor of mental competence enters in. Many incorrigible children who will respond to no other treatment must be left to the expert in mental defects and diseases to explain and deal with.

Granted mental competence and the absence of mental disorders which require psychiatric treatment, the child can be got through to; but the point of penetration will never be found by those who persist in taking the boy or girl on what might by called their face value. When Bill Williams' father died the other day, five men died: the father of a family, the employee of a business concern, the elder in a church, the member of a service dub, the citizen of a community and nation. If you want to know what kind of man Bill Williams' father was, you will never know until you have a fair idea of what kind of man each of these five men was. But is not the same true of Bill Williams himself? No boy is just the boy sitting at that school desk, or eating at the supper table, or playing out on the campus, or singing in the Church School, or walking home from the scout troop. He is all these boys; and time and time again folk who deal with young people fail to "get through" to them because they are forgetting the child as a whole personality. Community councils at their best are a very good thing, because they bring together the agencies which deal with the different interests in a child's life; Parent-Teacher groups serve a similar function. But aside from that, in the individual, day-by-day counselling and contact with children, miracles have been done by those who make almost a creed of this thought: "This child is more than an insolent or indifferent face. He is a whole personality of many aspects. Where are the points of penetration?"

Furthermore, the child is a human body. Like all simple statements this has an absurd ring until one examines it. Many folk who deal with children who are troublesome or in trouble would have more luck with their technique if the child were a disembodied spirit. The teacher, probably overloaded with work, scolds Mary's inattention and seemingly willful slowness until one day by accident she discovers that Mary's hearing is slightly defective. John's malnutrition saps his initiative and push while his school marks go down, and home and school worry about and probably harp on his laziness in studies. Classes and removal of her septic tonsils would make a new girl out of Lorna, which her mother's nagging is far from doing. Some trifling physical defect left over from incipient rickets when young worries Paul out of taking his share in school sports and supplies the inferiority sufficient to build a whole lifetime of defeatism and escape. The toll of physical ills in childhood is something I shall refer to fully in a later article, but what shall one say of the emotional disorders induced by some bodily defect: a stammer, a scar, some apparent ugliness or trifling abnormality of feature?

Again. A child is not only at least five persons in a very real body, but he is by no means a static personality. It is conventional to say that at puberty a boy is plunged into a period of adjustment when the sexual factor many induce unsettlement in an otherwise normal youngster. Less well recognized is the simple fact that at almost any point in the life of a school-age child, changed circumstances or influences may induce unexpected changes in conduct and attitude. Richard was a happy, normally-behaved boy in May, well up in his studies, class president, and well liked by his class master. In November he was staying in night after night for slovenly work, was indifferent, non-cooperative, and had developed several other undesirable traits. His previous master was non-plussed at the change, but there were answers. Richard's class had been broken up and divided between two others. He became part of a small group in a strange room, had a woman teacher for the first time in two years, had lost his own sense of leadership, found himself temporarily unable to obtain a niche, failed to adapt himself, and began a process of deterioration.

Finally, a child is the reflection of his environment. The files of the Youth Problems Committee are eloquent testimony of this. Delinquency is no respecter of persons, but it breeds well in run-down and badly-housed districts; and it seeps in along the line of march of business arteries breaking into residential areas.

Edward is a boy of many fine qualities, but he has a violent temper and he has given evidences in the past of poor judgment in his choice of friends and of a disposition to "go with the crowd". However, he has some important things in his favor. Edward's family five in a comfortable district where his parents are well respected and liked. They are sound, rather fine people with a sense of humor, and with their roots well into the community life. They disagree sometimes, but they have made a point of talking things over out of the hearing of the children. When Edward goes to school in the morning he leaves a warm, happy home for a well-organized school which tries to find out what special interests and aptitudes a boy like Edward has, and keep him wholesomely busy at work and play until about supper-time. In winter he slings his stick, skates, and equipment bag over his shoulder at the school hockey rink where he has been playing on a house team, and walks home for supper. His people pretty well see to it that he stays in on week nights after supper except on special occasions, but they have encouraged him to develop his own hobbies. Edward learned to swim at the local Y, he is a scout, and when his parents found he was interested in the guitar they bought him one. The boy has in fact rather a flair for music. He has a room to himself which has been furnished with an eye to a boy's tastes. There is a rather striking model sailing ship on his bureau, and two or three fine aviation pictures on the wall. When ten o'clock comes he takes his bath or shower, slips into his pajamas and dressing, gown, and spends a few minutes putting the finishing touches to a new model airplane he is building on the table in his room. Then he turns off the light and goes to sleep. Edward's parents say that his temper has been trying at times, but they try not to "fly off the handle" themselves, and he is coming along all right. He is growing up rather well along with the boys in his community, and there is no really vicious crowd to make an inroad on his susceptibility to suggestion during these formative years.

Edward's traits are pretty much those of Michael who lives three miles away in another district. When he works, Michael's father is an unskilled workman who was a skilled craftsman before he drank himself out of employment. The drink question is a sore one between the father and his wife, and they quarrel a good deal without regard to time or place. The mother goes out working herself to bolster the family budget, and the family of six children had the run of the streets as soon as each could get about. The tenement they live in is overcrowded; sanitary facilities are poor; the place is clean of vermin but there is a perennial odour and untidiness over everything. Michael sleeps with two of his brothers in a bare little bedroom just off the kitchen where the mother has the radio blaring away while she irons and cleans up at night. The bedroom is stuffy in summer and cold in winter, and Michael is glad to get out on the streets each night with "the gang". The recreative facilities in the area are not good; the local school for some reason or other sponsors little in the way of extra-curricular activities; and the streets are full of smutty talk and suggestive magazines in the comer book stalls. Michael has septic tonsils and a number of defective teeth. He is a merry, brave, rather high-spirited boy, with a distinct aptitude for drawing, if any one can ever discover it; but when he fights his lonely little battles he does so with the atmosphere of neglect, cold, dirt, and discord thick about him. He has been on more than one lark with the gang. Sooner or later they are going to try getting into some parked cars and taking them for a free ride, and they will ask Michael to go with them. Or perhaps it will be the old safe at the comer grocery where the door is weak.

Delinquents are not "different" from other children. There, but for the grace of God, goes your child. No child lives or dies to himself. As war deepens the shadow of juvenile delinquency across our land, it should be the resolve of everyone who within his personal sphere of influence has to deal with young per, 5ons who are troublesome or in trouble, to cherish this creed: "I will remember 1;nal; every Gi8a personality of many aspects. I will remember that he is a human body. I will remember that he is the symbol of his environment. I will not rest until I have found the point of penetration, and then I will not weary in well-doing. I will endure in patience, knowing that ultimately he will come through."

YOU AND YOUR CHILD IN TIMES OF CHANGE

Few modern parents of school-age children read. Victorian novels, and probably not many more read Victorian memoirs; but if they did they would be amazed at the awesome authority wielded by the Victorian father in certain classes of society two generations ago. He was an august and awe-inspiring figure. Certain of himself and of his world, and secure in an atmosphere where women, still unemancipated in the light of our standards, were preferably to be seen rather than heard, he expected implicit obedience from his family and he usually obtained it. He was a benevolent despot. He reared his children on the patterns of his own type and time, and nothing would have amazed him more than to be handed a book on popular child psychology. A sincere concern for their whole welfare mellowed the strictness of his paternal dealings with his children, but his standards of judgment were based far more on effects than causes. If his children fell with filial obedience into the pattern which he had marked out for them, he saw no reason to fret unduly about what went on inside their heads. If they did not, he not unnaturally assumed their unfilial conduct to be either a sign of possession on their part, or a visitation upon him for leniency in the past. He simply saw revolt and misconduct in terms of external facts ... anything but the upshot of subtle and complex causes which a great many parents have learned to look for today. A dominating, opinionated, rather splendid, sometimes lonely figure, he was typical in his full stature only of a certain class and cast of thought in the Victorian day. But there were many thousands like him, and they set the tone in child-training for their generation.

The reaction from this kind of parenthood, vastly accelerated by twentieth century conditions, went a long way once it began. Self-expression became the new battle-cry of freedom. In wide areas of child life it seemed as though the home and the school had driven out the one devil of insensitive repression only to replace it with the seven devils of irresponsibility and license. The pendulum swung from the tyranny of the parent to the tyranny of the children, and those who set out to deliver youngsters from the fear of authority, found that only too often they had divested them of respect for it also. The situation was summed up in an hilarious book by an American author five years ago who defined "modem children" as those who would playfully push one down an open elevator shaft while their parents applauded their initiative. But the disastrous side of the picture finds its reflection in a torrent of books and articles dealing with the reckless misbehavior of many thousands of young folk over whom their homes, dispossessed of parental influence, exercise no control. Even if one dispenses with such dramatic words as "tragic" and "disastrous" for the greatest area of the modem scene, it is still true that the home in our day seems often a flabby and ineffective ally to the thousands of teachers who daily wrestle with the behavior problems that are exposed in school classrooms and activities.

No wonder that the normal response of many observers is to hark back wistfully to the good old days of authoritarian control - in Canada usually represented by the sturdy pioneer families where the patriarchal influence of the father was a natural social phenomenon. Persons who deal, day in, day out, with young people in the schools find it hard to escape these occasional waves of nostalgia; but no sensible person succumbs to them. Indifferent, non-cooperative, or frankly anti-social homes often impede and block the work of the school, and I have heard teachers say in a mood of righteous exasperation, "The trouble goes back to the parents." But the trouble goes back to a great many factors, and one may as well pile the responsibility on the pull of the moon as pile it solely on parents as persons. Aside from other eternal factors, improvident parenthood is a reflection of that economic and social wilderness which is modem life.

Times have changed. The rugged pioneer parent whose sturdy authority we now glorify faced a world as different from our own as the buggy trails of back concessions from the trans-Canadian air lines. Life demanded great sacrifices of him; but he had few problems he could not get his teeth into, and he lived, worked, reared his children, and died in a well-defined social and economic world. That Victorian father to whom I earlier referred lived in a social order which for all its undercurrents of revolution was one upon which he could depend, and the earth was solid under his feet. But the world is not solid under our feet. In the relentless excitement, speed, shift, and pressure of modem conditions, the problems of parenthood are such that teachers would do well to keep them sympathetically in mind. On the other hand, most thoughtful parents are revaluing the supervision of their families from time to time in terms of the special stresses and strains of our own day.

I think most parents will agree that the day of our Victorian symbol is gone. Turning the clock back to him is merely an academic exercise. On the other hand, self-expression has learned by bitter experience the accompanying need of responsibility and service. Nor can the average parent place his child under the sustained glare of a scientific case history, nor is it desirable that he do so. Yet our great debt to child psychologists must be that from their pioneer and frontier work, great general furrows or trends in child treatment have developed which have enlightened and glorified that field in our time.

To-day's children are growing up under conditions of great change, mobility, stress, and strain. In previous chapters 1 have described some of the conditions arising out of these, and have suggested that the adjustment to them demanded of the individual is very consider, able and requires the most careful training of tomorrow's citizens. This chapter puts forward, purely as a debatable check-list, some suggestions for child training designed to meet existing needs. Not only parents, but also teachers and youth workers and other interested persons may find it stimulating to revalue their experience against it.

1. SECURITY:
This to me means a state of spiritual equilibrium. The intelligent, conscientious parent will instinctively, so far as his circumstances permit him, try to surround his children with good housing, warmth, and good light, nourish them with wholesome food balanced to their needs, guard their health, and protect them from unnecessary fears or worries which are his own responsibility. To insulate them from family misfortunes is not always possible, however, and it certainly is not always desirable. Children should be made to feel that they have a junior partnership in the family, and that they are part of a cheerful, unexcitable, brave companionship in the face of good and bad times. Fear for what economic reverses or unsettlement in the family may do to the children, often leads to nagging and quarrelling on the part of otherwise fine parents who thus defeat the very ends which they set out to achieve. It is St. Paul's greatest line all over again: "For I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content." And so with the children. In the midst of fear, change, and decay, if they have grown up in an atmosphere of good humour, courage, kind discipline, and mutual tolerance, and if their emotional system has not been thrown out of gear by frequent explosions from within, they can survive a great many storms from without.

 2. ADAPTABILITY:
Not many people stay put in our day, The odds are overwhelming that your boy or girl will be called upon to move among many circles of people and go great distances. These conditions will call for qualities of social adaptability for which every child should be pre, pared. If my list of some of the skills which he should be taught sounds a trifle bizarre, remember that it is no more bizarre than the variety of situations life may ask Him to face. For example: he should speak not just fair, but good English, and the home should cooperate fully with the school in checking him in this regard in a good-humored way. Nothing will impede or embarrass him more later on after he has gone some distance along the road of progress you hope will be his. He should learn really to speak French now while he has the chance, not only for its usefulness here, but because outside Quebec a bilingual person is so rare that your child will have a unique skill which will add to his sense of personal accomplishment. His manners at the table should be completely, not just usually at ease, and he should be taken out enough to public dining-rooms to get the feel of these places. By the time he is fifteen he should have learned to swim well, to skate or ski really well, and he should have had enough training in public speaking not to have to go through the worry and embarrassment which many splendid people have to face later on, of really speaking on their feet for the first time. Unless he is tone deaf, he should have had some training on some musical instrument. A song in the heart will brighten the dullest day, and no mechanical substitute, like the radio or phonograph, can fill the place of personal accomplishment which a child feels who can bring music with his own fingers out of a piano, guitar, accordion, violin, or other instrument. Somewhere before he is through high school he should have learned to dance ... not only because it is a useful social skill and he will encounter it everywhere, in war and peace, but because at its best dancing offers glimpses of gaiety and beauty which have a place in the dark tides of our day.

3. ENDURANCE:
I have given this a separate heading, but it is really a big section of that process of adaptability referred to above. There never was a world in which qualities of endurance were more needed than our own. Five years ago a Cornell professor who had made a thorough study of the matter made the categorical statement at a national convention of psychologists, "Above all else, we must teach our children to endure." Children must not be exposed to needless hazards to health and limb, but those parents do their boy or girl a poor service who would insulate them from normal risks of pain and normal contacts with disappointment. Supervised group games of all sorts not only build respect for other people's rights, but self-respect for the child's own ability to stand knocks and bruises without whimpering. It will not harm your boy to miss a meal on a camping trip. Among themselves, boys have a curiously intuitive worship for the Spartan virtues of courage and self-sacrifice, and will often accept hardships and bruises not only without complaint but even with ardour if left to themselves. . . a quality which should be encouraged rather than subdued. So also with the disappointments which loom very large in young lives. Miriam R., an ambitious and capable girl, expected to be chosen for the leading role in a school play, but the casting director was forced to replace her by another student. Instead of sulking or resigning from the cast, she cheerfully accepted a comparatively minor part and threw her whole energies into the play. How is it possible not to salute the parents of such a girl? The pleasant sequel to that incident is that after two weeks of rehearsals Miriam was replaced in the leading role. But suppose she had not been? Is life always just? Can we teach our children that the race is always to the swift? History is full of the unmerited disasters that have befallen splendid people. It seems to me rather that in a day when unrest, pain, hunger, and fear are familiar horsemen riding across our skies, schools and homes could not do better than to accentuate those qualities of endurance and fortitude which ultimately can turn every life into victory. When children have suffered through their own errors or misdemeanors, they should be trained to assume their own responsibility. When they have suffered through causes beyond their own control, they will need the love that heals but not the foolish love that breeds petulance and inability to weather such storms. I have never forgotten the words of a girl about ten years old spoken to her little sister who had fallen down on a Montreal sidewalk and hurt her knee. She might, as so many of us do, have attempted to distract the child's attention from its own momentary pain by pointing to a supposed hole in the sidewalk. But instead, she said merely, "Be brave, Sheila, be brave." I would like to have met the parents of that youngster. How long in life can we keep up the pretense that it is the sidewalk that is hurt and not our, selves?

4. INDEPENDENCE:
A child must learn in our day to get along with other people, but he will be often alone and he should have learned to get along with himself . It is a good thing to keep a boy in the house on week nights. He does not need to be eternally out with the group or 11 the gang," and he certainly should not be allowed to roam around after dark. If he has had a full, useful day of studies and sports up to supper time he has had plenty of normal social intercourse with other youngsters for the day. Wise parents will, of course, provide rather carefully and not too obtrusively for him after supper hours when the boy is not at his home lessons. The radio is not good enough; pets, hobbies, and books fill a more useful role. A dog is a good thing to have about the house, or a kitten, but if the boy's taste runs to turtles and tropical fish, he is as well off. In the old days ... and still, out on the farms . . . boys had chores to do that kept their hands busy. Modern city boys live in an atmosphere of taps, switches, and gadgets, and they should have some tasks to perform. Hobbies like carpentry, model airplanes, and stamps, fill a boy's life with contented hours in which he learns to keep company with himself, make his own decisions, criticize his own achievements. Preparatory work for cadet points and scout badges will fill other hours usefully.

Place an asterisk in your mental notebook opposite the reading habit. The child who has learned to love books has insurance through the years against theft of his health, periods of nothing-to-do, and the too-frequent tragedy of empty retirement. The only way to learn to read is to be exposed to reading. Wilma's school will have many good books, but Wilma should have plenty of good books in colourful jackets in a bookcase in her own room. It would be a wise precaution to check your child's reading list at home against well, rounded lists of selected books for his or her age-group.

5. RELIGION:
The obligation to raise children in the Christian faith is a serious one undertaken by most parents in the ceremony of christening. How effective a substitute for the Sunday service is the undisciplined Sunday morning laid out around the Sunday newspaper? Writers and critics who pound away at the gloomy sanctimony of the Victorian Sunday are beating a straw man. Neither the Church nor the Church School are repositories of gloom in our day, and there cannot be a better place for a growing boy or girl on Sunday after, noon than in discussion groups under keen, intelligent teachers in a well organized Church School. One of the writer's pleasantest experiences was the leadership of a group of early 'teen-age' boys in a young church where the sessions had to be held for a year-and-a-half in, of all places, the Church kitchen! Every Sunday brought its own consecration. Nor does taking his children to service and sending them to Church School exhaust the opportunities of the parent in this field. Family worship has fallen into disuse, and in our more reticent day it is not likely to come strongly back. But parents can do a great deal to arouse in their children the sense of wonder and mystery in life ... which is the deep-flowing well of all religion. The stars at night, the miracle of creation, the mystery of space . . . these offer a thousand opportunities for spontaneous, unforced, almost incidental reference on the part of the parents in walks and talks and family discussions. We accept the miracle of radio, telephone, film, telescope, microscope, and aeroplane too casually nowadays. The sense of wonder should be kept strong in children, and here science is another road to the Eternal

6. UNDERSTANDING:
A merry, brave, well-balanced, courteous child is still in need of companionship and aid at rough passages on the road. Parents and teachers have to navigate between the rock of neglect and the shoal of fussy over interest. The worries and problems of childhood are considerable, but the solution is not to thrust oneself in unasked upon the inner life of the youngster. The traditional fishing trip in which novelists bring together fathers and boys who have drifted apart is only a dramatic presentation of the need at all times for companionship that is tacit and unforced. One splendid father of whom I knew had rare opportunities for fishing trips, but his habit was to ask his youngster to go off with him in the car on business trips, often to walk over to the store with him for a paper, to drive down, town on election nights to hear the returns, or to drop in on some amateur boxing matches. If the boy was busy, that was all right. They were offers courteously made, courteously declined; and the father never tired asking. The boy grew to know that there was always a place in the car for him, and his father's unvarying courtesy and reserve did not cloak the fact that there was always a place in his heart for him also. The father did not spend his time trying to "find out" what was going on inside his boy. He believed, rightly or wrongly, that if there was much on the youngster's mind it would ultimately come out in the natural flow of their conversation. He was not distressed when his boy seemed to drift away from him at times in the later teens when his own ideas seemed a trifle out-of-date to omnipotent youth. He knew that the boy would come back, and he did come back. He always came back, because he could not deny the unselfish, undemanding companionship of the years, and because he knew that the temper of his father's mind was generous, fair, strong but tender, and reasonable.

"He sacrificed a great deal for me," his son said, "and I never knew how much until after his death. Even on the rare occasions when he was angry I never heard him say, 'Look how much I've done for you, and how you've repaid me.' The only thing he used to keep specially drumming away at was that there was a lot of pain and trouble in the world, and not too many people to sweep it up. When he died it was like losing a king. I never realized until then that there are kings living and dying among us on every side."

Within arm's reach as I write this chapter ar, 0 professional journals published by teacher's organizations across Canada during the past two years. them are many excellent articles on a wide variety subjects. Status of teachers, methods of teaching, democracy in the schools . . . all are given due prominence and discussed at considerable length. But a curious blind spot exists on a theme which one might have expected to arouse a lively professional awareness: the importance of a powerfully directed and integrated program aiming at sound health in Canadian children both in war and peace. Of the 60 magazines examined, only two present general articles dealing with some of the tragic facts sketched in later in this article; none deal with the problem editorially; and less than a handful of isolated articles on nutrition, speech defects, and mental health complete the picture. No less amazing is the fact that one can read whole articles recently published on the treatment of problem children which neglect the physical aspect of the child altogether!

It would be pleasant to report that legislators, educational authorities, and parents acting as citizens have proved themselves more alert to the vast implications of this great problem than most of our professional journals would seem to be. But with a few notable exceptions, this is not the case. The war has popularized the idea that Canadians as a race are well below the par in health to which the matchless country in which they live would seem to entitle them. But despite the wide publicity given this fact in the press, few have driven their thinking through to one great source of the problem: the neglect of the health of many thousands of Canadian children.

 Perhaps it is symbolic that on the same table with those magazines which seem unaware of the magnitude of this problem, are at the moment of writing the Health Files of the Youth Problems Committee. They make fascinating, if uncomfortable, reading. Space permits the quotation of only a few highlights from this material.

1. Despite notable gains in maternal care, Canada still ranks only nineteenth out of twenty-six leading countries in statistics on maternal deaths.
2. In a recent year in Canada, 16,675 infants under one year died, or 76 per 1,000 live births. In the same year in New Zealand only 30 infants per 1,000 live births died under one year.
3. Taking a sample American city with 100,000 school children which has a higher record for attendance and punctuality than many Canadian communities, total absences amounted to over 1,000,000 school days . . . which equals 100 empty classrooms every school day of the year. "Most of this," says the report in question, 'is due to illness."
4. In some parts of Canada there are as many young people in mental hospitals as are in the universities. Over 50 per cent. of all hospital beds in Canada and the United States are occupied by neuropsychiatric disabilities, each of them costing the state or province about $7,000 per year.
5. More than 20 per cent. of the children, 16 years old and under, in the households interviewed in a Canadian Federal Government Survey in Oshawa and Quebec City drank no milk. In Calgary 16 per cent., and in Vancouver 14 per cent. of the children did not use milk as a beverage. The proportion of children not drinking milk varied with age and family income. In all cities the larger the family income the smaller the proportion of children not using milk as a beverage. Many teenage children in cities do not drink milk. Approximately one-third of the children in the age-group of 13 to 16 years on the average drank no milk! In low income families (less than $1,000 a year) from 40 to 60 per cent. in this age group drink no milk. Even amongst the high family income groups many of the children between 13 and 16 years of age drink no milk. In the city of Quebec, 22 per cent. of the boys and 3 2 per cent. of the girls under six years of age in relief-level families who were interviewed drank no milk, and the proportion not drinking milk in relief-level families was higher where the children were older.
6. Of 70,000 children in Montreal schools on which recent statistics have been released, 9,000 were suffering from malnutrition, 12,000 from infected tonsils, over 10,000 from pediculosis (lice), 6,000 from skin disease, 5,400 from marked uncleanliness, 13,000 from disorders of glands, and 7,000 from defective vision, chiefly correctable. (I quote for convenience in round figures from the official report.)
7. 200,000 adults in Canada are daily unable to carry on their regular vocation because of illness, and 50,000 workers are absent from worktable and bench through sickness, more than 50 per cent. of which is preventable.
8. A statistical estimate puts the cost of sickness and untimely death in Canada as at least one billion dollars per annum, largely preventable. Against this, Canada's Dominion, Provincial, and local governments spend about $7,000,000 a year in preventive measures! Have not the schools a heavy responsibility in regard to these statistical facts and to the vast waste, beyond calculation, in ill health, untimely death, and thwarted happiness which must be added to them?

 

THE SCHOOL'S ROLE IN CHILD HEALTH

The fundamental responsibility of the school in helping to face the grave problems in child health is the school medical examination. No one would argue, and it would be absurd to argue, that this is its only responsibility. Of overwhelming importance are the school's potential obligations in three other respects: the condition of the school plant; a sustained program of health education; and physical training and recreation. But the base upon which these rest is the regular medical examination of students. It is the inventory of health conditions against which the other factors may be measured and modified. Aside from the value of the physical examination to the student, this regular stock taking of student health is the core of the school's own health and recreational program. Without it all other phases of a school health scheme are unorganized, and the school neither knows where it is nor where it should be going.

How many schools have made a regular and thorough medical examination of the student body part of their life? In many states and provinces, including our own, it would be a fair estimate of the situation to divide the schools into four broad classes:

1. Schools which have a very thorough medical examination of students, with a well-organized report and follow-up system to the home.

2. Schools which have a much less thorough examination, with a routine but unenergetic report and follow-up system.

3. Schools with the merest excuse of a medical check, and with no follow-up report at all.

4. Schools without any examination whatever of the physical condition of their students. It seems incredible that in face of the three major aims of any regular physical examination of students there are still educational authorities, school commissioners, and parents who are careless or neglectful of this great essential in modem education.

Consider for a moment the three aims:

1. To detect and obtain correction of physical defects which may be draining the child's health and preventing his giving his best to his studies or his school life. Bad vision, infected tonsils, defective hearing, defects of posture, decayed teeth (to mention only a few) handicap a child both in work and play, and bring upon him not only misdirected anger for failure to do his best, but possibly a lifelong sense of inferiority through failure to adjust himself successfully in his own child world.
2. To detect and obtain correction of physical defects which may develop into serious adult complaints. The most advanced schools have developed their tests to a point of completeness where they are in a favored position to pursue this aim, but in even the less thorough examination, this aim is in part achieved.
3. To serve as the gauge of success of the school's whole health program. This has been most elaborately demonstrated in some residential schools where careful records of gains in weight, height, and certain muscular skills have been added to the regular physical data.

Possibly those schools which completely neglect their obligations in this matter fall back on the timeworn excuse that the regular physical examination of the child is the parent's responsibility. The best answer to that would be- to examine for an hour the physical record cards of any good-sized school where the regular medical examination has been introduced for the first time. Vast numbers of parents fall to discharge their obligations in regard to regular examination of their children (not willfully, of course), calling in medical treatment only when the most obvious symptoms appear. If this was so before the war, one may imagine how the war has intensified this condition, when, as I have emphasized over and over again, either one parent or in thousands of cases, both parents, are out of the home, and the burden of child care must fall more heavily on the school.

Is the solution a law ordering compulsory annual examination of students in every school in the state or province? I read recently what appeared to be a very naive thesis by an American scholar on school medical examinations in which he appeared to accept the deed of a compulsory state law for the fact of a satisfactory examination. The Regents' Inquiry into the condition of the school health program in New York State (McGraw-Hill Inc., 1938) is a very illuminating answer to that kind of reasoning. Since the state law demanded an annual examination and was legally content with the fulfilling of that requirement, the procedure was "as a rule so hasty and incomplete as to be almost valueless." The American Public Health Association standards are based on a maximum of twelve pupils per hour, which, the Report remarks, "is high enough, in all conscience!" But at one typical school over fifty children were examined per hour. At another, from 80 to 90 per hour. Naturally a considerable number of more conscientious schools were represented by that at Wrendale, where the rate was from 8 to 10 per hour. But typical of the system was another school where of three local physicians aiding in the examination, one examined at the rate of fifteen pupils per hour, an, other at the rate of sixty per hour! "In general," says the Regents' Inquiry, "the best results are obtained in communities where the state requirement calling for an annual examination is ignored and only certain grades are examined annually." But in such schools the most thorough program was then followed through: An excellent record system was kept; the cooperation with the parents was sought by a well-organized and zealous follow-up report system; the classroom teachers were kept informed of physical defects in their children, and trained to understand that they must take these elements into account in their dealings with the students; and the school physical training and health program was built to correlate with existing needs, rather than to run along beside them blissfully ignorant of the conditions in its own student body.

The trouble with the compulsory law of New York State was that it could be satisfied with an annual medical examination. No doubt many schools would not have had any at all had it not been for the law. Those were the schools which were content to fulfill the letter of the law with a farcical procedure which was worst than none because it gave the illusion of well-being where none existed. No greater enemy of child health in our own country exists than the formalized type of mind on the matter of the regular physical examination. When the regular physical examination of students becomes only a formal procedure to be gone through without enthusiasm, inspiration, or carefully-planned objective, it is a dead form and a barrier on the road to real progress in child health.

It is true that facilities for this work vary with communities and that there are many difficulties to be faced. In my next chapter I shall deal with some of the difficulties and suggest some of the ways by which they can be overcome.

If many public-spirited persons in Canada have given the matter of child health less than the direct attention it deserves, one great reason is that to many responsible and thoughtful citizens, it seems to be the effect of undesirable features of our national fife, which, once remedied, will bring a reform in child health as a concomitant of such action. This view makes child health incidental to apparently greater issues such as adult social security, better housing, and the like, It is a view which is entitled to a very great deal of respect, and which places an unerring finger on some of the major reasons for physical deficiencies in children. But the danger is very grave that such persons will lose sight of three facts fundamental to the whole question.

1. The imperative need of regular and thorough medical examination of children of school age. Cooperating school systems and government agencies backed with adequate funds could and should be in a position to -present reliable and complete statistics on the health of Canadian children as a national body, and to move swiftly into action to secure correction of existing defects.

2. The fact that in many cases environment works against the health of children is no excuse for inaction in the child health field itself. What is to prevent the expansion of recreational facilities in districts where this preventive work is most needed? Community buildings for recreation and athletics can be multiplied; school facilities can be expanded; physical training colleges can be backed with more adequate funds, and new ones built, staffed, and equipped, The vocation of physical training is a noble one which the ancient Greeks properly venerated, and which deserves to be given the funds, facilities, and public applause and support which it well deserves. It would seem, in face of the situation as I presented it in Chapter Seven, high time to have done with the hit-or-miss, pinch-penny policies which have too often marked our attitude as a nation toward a great integrated program to rear a vigorous, healthy child population from sea to sea.

3. Ill-health and physical defects in children constitute a cause as well as an effect of our social problems. It is not good enough to wait for the happy day when the country will see its deficient districts re-housed, its cities re-planned, and its postwar problems resolved. Every week of the year thousands of young folk are crossing the border line into adult life and activity, too many of them carrying with them physical defects and concomitant mental inhibitions, or habits based upon ignorance or indifference, which will poison with needless disease, worry, and lost efficiency and happiness the coming years to which many look forward so optimistically and discuss so abstractly. No democracy worthy of the name can ignore the link between the health of children and the nation's standard of living, the condition of its housing, and similar factors. But while legislators and citizens grapple with these social problems, the imperative fact remains that our children's health can be more adequately surveyed now, preventive and remedial measures more adequately planned and carried out now, and recreational facilities expanded within the framework of conditions as we now must face them.

It is true that some of those conditions within the world of the school itself are far from ideal. In a country whose space is the envy of less happy lands, the original ill-planning and overcrowding of major cities led to the four and five storey school rising bleakly from an asphalt-and-tar play space inadequate for the recreational needs of active children. Modern Canadian commissioners, superintendents, and principals often find themselves saddled with problems arising out of old, fashioned, unhygienic physical equipment which defy easy solution. But in the most difficult situations, whether in city or country, spearheads of advance are possible at some one or more points along such a health and physical education front as this which I offer as a suggested check-list for those who desire to check their own facilities against it: 1. A regular, very thorough biennial physical examination of every child in the school, with careful re-checking of low category children; 2. A most careful and systematic follow-up policy through to the home and the classroom teacher, with free medical services as needed; 3. Serving of hot SOUP to students bringing a cold lunch because of distance from school, both in city and country (an excellent, sometimes neglected, chance to correlate domestic science and health education); 4. The most modern available lighting to safeguard the precious sight of the children in your community; 5. A supervised gymnasium period daily for each class; 6. House or interclass sports in soccer, baseball, basketball, hockey, track, to bring the maximum number of students into competition in games supervised by teachers interested in the sports in question; 7. Best possible use of the morning and afternoon "breaks" for deep breathing and fight exercises, and watchful supervision of seating arrangements to guard against development of posture defects; 8. Integration of the school recreation program as far as possible with that of other community agencies (swimming-pools, rinks, parks and the like) to utilize all available equipment to maximum benefit through community exchange and cooperation.

Nor must mental health be left out of consideration. How many large systems can boast an adequate use of mental hygiene techniques and technicians, or an adequate number of classes for handicapped children? It goes without saying that in many small systems and in nearly all single school areas such facilities are not offered at all.

What of the obstacles that particularly face rural and'12 small town schools in our own province in the matter of the school medical examination and remedial work? It is a fallacy, long since exploded by careful surveys, that the country child is healthier than his city cousin. The fact that the reverse is statistically true in areas where the country school health services are poorly organized speaks volumes for the need of the most careful planning and organization of these services among provincial schools. Customarily at present they are dependent upon three forms of medical assistance; 1. gratuitous services offered by local physicians; 2. paid medical services by such doctors; 3. the county health unit.

War has played havoc in some communities with both gratuitous and paid medical services of local doctors to the schools. The draining of physicians into the necessary work of the armed forces, and the enormous demands placed upon existing medical services by the sudden swelling of population in various centres because of war shifts have both contributed to make the pressure of community service even heavier than is normally the case for those physicians who carry on the work. This imposes new difficulties on school boards who have built their program of child health work upon the assistance of local doctors. As for the county health units, even in time of peace, to say nothing of new difficulties imposed by war, they valiantly attempted a program of staggering proportions. With a county staff of one medical officer, a sanitary inspector, two or three visiting nurses and a secretary, the units in larger counties presented, for example: first aid classes, hygiene lectures, family visits, control of communicable diseases, T. B. clinics, distribution of vaccines and serums, vaccinations and immunizations, maternal hygiene lectures, baby clinics, laboratory work, and. sanitary inspections (altogether a splendid example actually of medical pioneering) ... and then, as in the case of one unit, essayed the task of medically examining as many as 2,700 school children! Is it reasonable to expect under such circumstances the thorough and complete physical examination advocated in this study, or a complete and insistent follow-up system, or an early enough examination of the children concerned in the school year to ensure remedying of defects to benefit the school progress and happiness of the children during that year?

How then is the difficulty to be met of adequate medical coverage of school children in the country schools? The answer in Quebec province would seem to lie in the adoption of the larger administrative unit bill for country schools which still lies on the council tables at Quebec City. When four or five secondary schools are brought together in one administrative unit along with a number of rural elementary schools in that area, it should be possible to establish an integrated school health service which can draw up and carry out a systematic program of inspection, remedial, and preventive work. A new brief of the Youth Problems Committee on post-war reconstruction further suggests the possibility of appointment also of a trained expert in mental hygiene and student counselling to such larger administrative units as may in time to come desire and be able to appoint one.

I was delighted to learn the other day that one school commission, already among those leading the way in school medical examinations and remedial work, met to devote a whole board meeting to the subject of child health alone. With such a spirit, legislators, departments, commissioners, principals, teachers, and all those " who love the young can never fail to promote and protect the potentially richest of all our national re, sources ... the health of our Canadian children.

"Great changes in the whole structure of the educational systems are in the making, affecting most the position of the colleges and of the high schools. The greatest challenge is to the high school, this most precious and unique feature of our educational setup . . . heart-piece of the democratic character of our school systems but their problem child as well."

These words of Professor E. C. Kollman, applied to the American schools, may well serve as a text for any study of the war-time curriculum in our own schools. Hon. Wilfrid Bovey early pointed out in the present war, from his vantage point in guiding educational programs for the Canadian Army, that the conditions and demands of wartime would present new problems and demand new contributions from the schools in the matter both of teaching and of the curriculum. War-time conditions have underlined his words by placing fresh emphasis on intensified and more usable teaching of mathematics, science, foreign languages, social studies, and physical training. Professor C. H. Siemens of the University of Southern California recently presented one phase of the matter vividly when he stated: "4,000,000 men are expected to compose the Army Air Force by 1944. Of this personnel, 63 per cent. are designated as specialists. Pilots, navigators, and bombardiers depend especially upon their knowledge of and training in applied science and mathematics, and the great majority HAVE NOT ATTENDED COLLEGE. Hence the mathematics and science of this war in the fighting front are chiefly of high-school level or below. It is the applied science and mathematics included in a high-school course in aeronautics that will win the air battles of this war."

It is a fact that long before the outbreak of war there was widespread dissatisfaction on the part of both parents and students with what many believed the over, academic nature of the traditional high school curriculum. Lack of technical school facilities in our own province was, and still is, one considerable source of discontent. Despite considerable gains in the field of school construction and equipment, and the addition of new subjects to the optional list of the high school leaving examination, many still felt that college preparation seemed to dominate the curriculum of the high school, and that many students of very considerable ability in work other than what might be described as the traditional academic program were prematurely lost to our schools. This was strikingly brought out by the Pupil Shrinkage Survey Report (1941) of the Youth Problems Committee. Most interesting are the figures from six major high schools on Montreal Island, which disclose that in not one case did half the students entering Grade Eight enter Grade Eleven three years later. Reports from nineteen other large high schools in the province disclosed pupil shrinkage ranging from fifty to eighty per cent. loss of the first year high school students during the four-year course. Of two major reasons which were repeated with monotonous emphasis in the replies to the sub-committee compiling the report, one was economic conditions, the other failure of the existing high school course to meet adequately the interests and vocational needs of the students.

Yet while many have desired a broadened curriculum with greatly expanded facilities for so-called vocational training, public opinion in Canada has been slow to relinquish the idea that there is something sacrosanct about the traditional college matriculation certificate. Many parents have been reluctant to admit their children's ineptitude for the academic course because they have viewed the matriculation certificate as the symbol of social and intellectual achievement. To that kind of attitude the war has given a rude jolt. We now find technical knowledge at a premium; we want education we can use; and in the nation's frantic search for the technical skill which in many areas was allowed to rust unburnished in the pre-war years, many educators feel that not only must the high school curriculum and methods be swiftly adapted to meet the exigencies of the war years, but that post-war conditions will continue to provide challenging stimuli to the schools which will prevent an easy back-sliding to the less desirable features of the old order.

Acceleration of studies (earlier completion of courses through intensified work) which in Canada has affected certain university courses. has in the United States spread to some of the high schools as well. One motivating reason for this has been the earlier draft age in the United States which even more than in Canada has accentuated the importance of pre-induction work. Some high schools are sending on outstanding high school seniors by recommendation to universities halfway through their final year. Others are offering special facilities for education to those students who are at work in war-plant occupations. Still others are "telescoping" their courses by cutting down on the long holiday periods and graduating their students earlier. Intensive physical training courses for boys in their third and fourth years at high school are featured by many institutions. This tendency to intensify and accelerate in the high schools is not without its bitter critics, one of whom, Dr. J. R. Shannon, Director of Research at Indiana State Teachers' College, recently wrote, "Telescoping is based on a strictly subject-centred philosophy; it overlooks the fact that human nature cannot be speeded up. High schools are schools for adolescents. Their aim should be to surround adolescence with such an environment that their experiences while maturing will contribute toward ultimate happiness. The period of adolescence was fixed by nature before the high school curriculum was fixed by man. If nature had made the period shorter, man would have made the curriculum shorter; if nature had made the period longer, man would have made the curriculum longer. It is the adolescent period and not the high school curriculum that is primal. Man cannot change the length of the period by changing the length of the curriculum. Nature, in making adult human beings, as in aging vane, makes haste slowly; it cannot be rushed."

Rather more relevant to our own immediate situation have been the swift adaptations made by American schools to bring their curricular subject matter into line with the apparent demands of the war. Going whole-hog in this direction very recently have been seven major Chicago high schools which asked a large number of universities and colleges which normally receive their students, whether they would be willing to consider subjects in the following list acceptable for matriculation: home nursing, nurse's helper, consumer buying, care of clothing, fire and gas course, first aid, fundamentals of machines, welding, foods, fundamentals of shop-work, mechanical drawing, blue print reading, radio repair, automotive mechanics, code practice, physical fitness, photography, clothing, home canning, agriculture, nutrition, child care, typing, and shorthand. To conservative Canadian eyes it is an amazing list, but it shows the extremes to which some American high schools are prepared to go under the influence of present conditions. Most interesting were the reactions of the colleges and universities approached. The proposal received a very cordial reception from certain small, privately-owned, liberal-arts colleges which have been hard hit by loss of students to the industries and through the army draft. The women's colleges were without exception hostile to the sweeping changes presaged by the suggested program. In general the great universities approached took the attitude that while they might accept some of the subjects at some point in their optional program, that most of such work should be done outside the school daily time-table, and that at all costs a program of fundamental studies must be safeguarded. The fundamental studies almost invariably were listed as English, mathematics, science, a foreign language, and history.

In fact, the moderate liberal attitude in the United States toward a revised curriculum, is well summed up in a recent article by Prof. H. R. Douglass of the University of Colorado, Echoing Kollman's conception of the war as "global, industrial, total," Douglass's eight-point program envisages: 1. GREATLY INCREASED FACILITIES FOR PHYSICAL TRAINING AND HEALTH EDUCATION (the Washington, D.C., schools have recently added 45 physical training instructors, 5 more school physicians, 11 more dental hygienists and part-time dentists; one Montana high school has instituted a four-weeks course in boxing for all boys in Grades 9-12; and so the reports could be multiplied if space permitted). 2. MORALE BUILDING. The essential role of history in this regard is not overlooked. The propaganda cells of the enemy must be met by intelligent young democracy schooled in its history and the meaning of current events. 3. SIMPLE MATHEMATICS, SCIENCE, AND ALLIED SUBJECTS. In arithmetic, especially decimals and fractions. Elementary algebra, especially ratio and proportion, and use of formulas. Numerical trigonometry, Map-reading. Direction-finding. Simple physics. Meteorology. 4. SOCIAL STUDIES. Fundamental economics. Geography and political science, especially as affecting the present struggle and world relationships. 5. A FOR, EIGN LANGUAGE. Douglass favors this only for superior students, but majority opinion is against him. (I would also refer my readers to an extraordinary article in Reader's Digest, May, 1943: "Teaching Languages in a Hurry" by C. R. Walker). 6. GENERAL MECHANICS. In Douglass's view students ~& must be prepared to operate and give first aid to mechanical weapons," and he urges general mechanics as pre-induction training. 7. STUDY OF THE NORDIC MYTH. Douglass would have teachers utilize biology. English, foreign languages, social studies to "break down the illusion of Nordic superiority." 8. FIRST AID. A subject essential for soldier and civilian in time of modem war.

It is easy to sentimentalize birth of a nation, especially when the setting is one of such physical grandeur as that of Canada. "From sea to sea" . . . the national motto is a sublime under, statement of the Canadian panorama, which yet, like infinite riches in a little room, suggests the breadth and spaciousness of a land which fired the minds and secured the devotion of the Canadian pioneers. The salty tang of Fundy breezes; August sunlight dreaming over Quebec fields; the sparkling ski trails of the Laurentians; the thunder of Niagara, and the pine-scented hinterland of Northern Ontario; vast Western plains by night with the prairie moon hanging benevolently above, and the trans-Canada plane droning westward like a great glow-worm; the silences of the mighty Northland only intensified by the quick movement and call of wild creatures, and with sky-blue lakes draped in scarlet maples; the Rockies mighty and majestic brushing the sky with their heads, and the salmon rivers of British Columbia foaming sea-ward in vivid contrast with somnolent apple orchards; and always the seas, on East and West inrolling with matchless dignity and power ... some or all of these, or much more, call deeply to the Canadian heart. Indeed, in the words of Duncan Camp, bell Scott, "this is the land." Historians may remind us as they often do, and with truth, that the desire for Confederation was not unaccompanied by bald motives of political and economic power, products of the inevitable human traits of self-seeking and aggrandizement. But no historical cynicism can alienate the Canadian dream ... the dream of a Canadian nation where many races and faiths might five, work, and play in tolerance and mutual respect, growing in time to come spiritually into one people; where all men would be equal in rights and equal in opportunity; a commonwealth where the river of democracy would run pure and deep and sweet, fed by the different springs of the racial heritages which compose the nation, and sweeping away in its current the hatreds and injustices and impurities which have poisoned many wells of the older continents. This fundamentally was the dream of the pioneers and of the Fathers of Confederation; the dream, whether conscious or subconscious, spoken or unexpressed, of many thousands of thoughtful citizens in our own day from sea to sea.

Foremost in the Canadian dream is the welfare of our Canadian children. Its necessity transcends regional bounds and rises above and beyond racial and religious disputes. Wherever a boy's shout is heard, or a girl's laughter in our streets and fields, there is the Canadian dream. Gaily talkative busfulls of country children picked up at ten thousand different places on the map of Canada and deposited at the open doors of consolidated schools; red-cheeked, damp-haired youngsters carrying their kit-bags home from a football game; high school debaters engaged in the lively confident exchanges of youth, and hushed auditoriums of children watching a school play; young singers intent on every movement of the conductor as their voices soar melodiously behind the clear high notes of their soloist; one million Canadian boys and girls at school from East to West, tuned in to the voice of the teachers, the magic of radio or talking-picture, the gaily-jacketed books in the library, the wonder of the science laboratory, thinking, talking, comparing, arguing, sensitively absorbing the influences of a hundred sources, waiting tensely for the crack of a track pistol, alert to the referee's whistle in the gymnasium, on the ice, on the campus; solitary youngsters fishing over bridges, beside brooks and pools, sweating in sunny summer hay-fields, or watching as from time immemorial in harbors and at stations the eternal come-and-go of ships and locomotives ... these are the very heart and hope of the Canadian dream. Yet the curious paradox is that two of the classes most able to design it and build toward it, the legislators and the teachers, are also in the gravest danger of losing sight of its full radiance, and for opposite reasons: in the one case because public life absorbs a busy man's time with multifarious adult cares and concerns, formalizing his outlook along impersonal and statistical lines and tending to cut him off from the inspiration which comes from close contact with the warm flowing river of Canadian child life; and in the other, because a teacher through many years' day by day association with children may become the victim of familiarity: in the routine of the years he may do the daily round well and dutifully enough, but lose the glory and the gleam which first drew him into his profession.

For the average lay citizen, occupied with the fundamental task of getting and spending, the case can be simply stated. For him the Canadian dream naturally personalizes itself chiefly in terms of what he desires for his own son and daughter. If this is not the loftiest conception, it is none the less a splendid one at its best: since one of the noblest contributions to our national and community life is that of the parents who have reared or are rearing their children in traditions of love, honor, and obedience, to the fullest extent of their powers, and whose children are and will be a credit and a crown of honor to them; or who can say at the end of their lives that they have fully discharged their obligations to their children, whatever the ultimate issue may have been.

I have known many splendid parents in my own experience as a school principal, and I do not think it is either hazardous or presumptuous to state what I believe the average conscientious Canadian father wants his son to be. He wants a boy who is brave, honest, courteous, physically well-developed, emotionally well-balanced, and accepted on equal terms by other boys. He wants him to take part in sports, and he is happy to see him go off on inter-school trips and to supervised camps. He is not so foolish as to think he can fence the boy in from unpleasant experiences, disappointments, or the rough or dirty talk which at different times are bound to impinge on the boy's life; but instead he goes on with his job of building into the youngster those qualities of love, laughter, courage, and affection for the great outdoors which make sure the fortress in the boy's heart. He wants his boy to have the companionship of books, either because it means so much to him himself, or because he feels that he has missed so much not having it. He very definitely wants the best education for his boy; he wants a type of education suitable to the particular talents of his boy; and legislators and educators who think he does not are going to have a very lively time in the coming years. Of course, he wants security for his boy up to the time when the father's own responsibility is at an end. This is fundamental, and without it he cannot do the job which he must do for his son. If the youngster falls down in some of the categories I have mentioned, or otherwise appears to disappoint him, he does not become embittered, leave the defects unremedied, and look about for a scapegoat. He works away with love and patience, knowing that Rome was not built in a day; and that the delicate human organism, though it may fail ultimately in one direction, will often ultimately succeed nobly in another, provided it grows in the soil of faith and the sunlight of truth and love.

It is true that we are at present a long way from the Canadian dream as it affects our children. The slum areas that mar our bigger cities, together with other conditions of poverty and inadequate housing, breed juvenile delinquency, and oppose to school, church, and social agency dark tides of dirt, disease, frustration, and ignorance which affect the lives of thousands of our children. Economic insecurity and existence-level types of relief for decent and conscientious parents create a sense of inferiority, failure, and nagging worry which plays havoc with the parents' calm and reasoned upbringing of their children.

A new brief of the Youth Problems Committee points to these evils, and goes on to recommend in the strongest terms the establishment of residential school, homes for children from lower-income families where improvidence or hopeless conflict have destroyed the foundations of the home, and for children unmanageable in lower-income families who are not yet delinquent. Such school-homes should be as should be all homes for handicapped children, directed by the provincial departments of education, and should be staffed by the most gifted teachers obtainable, previously trained for this work. The need for widely-expanded facilities in equipment and trained personnel in dealing with legal delinquents is forcibly brought home, and the brief remarks that the term "reform school" and "reformatory" might well be discarded in favor of remedial school." The recurrent danger of child labor would be met by a compulsory education law to the age of 16, vigorously enforced, and curfew laws vigorously applied throughout the major cities. The brief remarks that compulsory education is not a universal panacea, and states that if children are to be compelled to go to school, the schools must be prepared to offer them development in the secondary institutions in terms of their own aptitudes. Facilities for technical education in Quebec must be extended; student counsellors should be attached to every large high school, groups of city elementary schools, and county educational units. Physical examinations of students conducted by cities and county educational units should be standardized and raised to high peaks of thoroughness and efficiency in correction. Mental hygiene facilities should be made available to city systems on an increased scale, and extended to the county educational units as they are able to provide for them following incorporation. The Federal Government should consider itself responsible to a far greater extent than up to the present for the health and general welfare of Canadian children. The Committee earlier recommended appointment of a Federal Minister of National Youth Welfare who, on a plan adapted from Britain, would work through regional boards of cooperating school and social agency officials to integrate and enrich existing plans and programs on the youth front. The Committee would have the Federal Government maintain in peace and extend its present war-time policy of granting government scholarships to numbers of university students.

But neither these nor any other plans of improvement and reconstruction will come to any fruit unless backed by the constant and interested support of the individual citizen. These years are not easy ones in the Canadian youth field, though in the consummation they and the immediate years ahead may well be wonderful ones. They mean lights burning later and later in Canadian schools, those powerhouses of democracy; they call for no easy service from Canadian teachers; they require multiplication of Parent-Teacher organizations, frequent meetings following carefully-thought-out study questions through to a conclusion, and extended membership campaigns. They demand such voluntary integration of community agency enterprises as, for example, the Notre Dame de Grace Community Council in Montreal is already showing, and as the new joint coordinating committee of the Youth Problems Committee and Group Work Committee of the Montreal Council will shortly show.

The air is full of post-war plans, even in the tide, of war, and it is well that that is so, since it shows the idealism which is fundamental to the Canadian character in a rather rare and beautiful way; but admirable though this work may be, one word of caution needs to be sounded. The perpetual tragedy of history is that the plans and dreams built for one generation have been swept under by the tidal wave of misery, malnutrition, and social poison carried over from the generation preceding it. If we neglect the domestic welfare of the nation now, if we put off until tomorrow the adequate care of our child population, we shall tomorrow reap a harvest in physically ill-equipped, mentally unprepared, and emotionally unadjusted citizens who will in large measure nullify the plans for a better postwar democracy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John McLeish was born in Calgary, Alberta. of pioneer Canadian stock. the son of Dr. James Archibald McLeish and Minnie Buchanan McLeish. An honour graduate of McGill University, he was appointed Principal of Gault Institute, Valleyfield, in 1939 following a wide teaching experience in both rural and urban schools. In addition to serving in a number of capacities in teachers' organizations, he is a Director of the Prisoners' Aid and Welfare Association, and a member of the Provincial Council, Quebec Home and School Federation. Articles by him on phases of youth problems have appeared in the Municipal Review of Canada, "The School" magazine, The Teachers' Magazine, and the Montreal Gazette. A former intercollegiate debater, he is a member of the Speakers' Panel of the Home and School Federation, and has delivered addresses on the theme of youth problems and guidance both to regional youth workers' conferences and over the air.

The Youth Problems Committee, formed on Mr. McLeish's initiative in 1940, has published survey reports on pupil shrink, age, and on the scholarships situation in Canada; it controls the Youth Problems Forum, designed to serve as a point of contact between teachers needing guidance in difficult problems with students, and trained specialists such as psychiatrists, social service experts, guidance counsellors, and the like. It also controls the Teachers' Bureau for Social Work, and publishes a Quarterly News-Letter which carries information on the pals, teachers, clergymen, social agency officials, and other interested newest developments in this field to several hundred principals, teachers, clergymen, social agency officials and other interested persons. Its representatives sit on the boards of several key social welfare organizations, and it serves as the channel of communication between the teaching profession and the social agencies. The Committee has been called "the social conscience of the Quebec teaching profession in action."