practically the demand of the entire population of the Balkans. Because of the rapid development of outspoken democracy, it is beginning to appear that peace or war shall in the future depend more largely upon the sentiments of the people than upon the ambitions or whims of rulers as in the past. This being the case, the great cause of peace can best be served by campaigns of educating the sentiments and raising the ideals of the people. Some believe that an important evolution in these respects has already begun among the working classes and that their enthusiasm for war grows less and less. But an event like the new war with Turkey comes as a great awakening from such beliefs, and reveals the fact that there is still much to be done before arbitration can be relied upon as the solution for all difficulties between nations. And in this great work of educating the people to greater international justice and more peaceful thoughts, the school will undoubtedly play the most important part.

Decided progress was made during the year in regard to matters of health. Several new discoveries for the prevention and cure of disease were announced. But the most important developments in matters of health were along the line of arousing interest in better sanitary conditions and in producing among the people, in general, a better understanding of the laws of health. The school has helped in this work, but not to the extent to which it should. The good results have been more largely due to the enterprise of boards of health, the work made possible by private beneficence, and the devotion to the cause of health of a large number of enthusiastic experts. What has been accomplished by the school has been mainly in the line of rather ineffective health instruction, the opening of its doors in some places after school hours and in the evening for health talks, and through the interest it has taken in physical training and recreation. But the subject deserves a far more important place than has yet been accorded it in the work of the average school. The rapidly increasing interest in the problems of health is entirely in line with the development of our modern humanitarianism. There is a growing conception of the value of human life which encourages the search for the sources and preven

tion of disease and which demands the enforcement of health laws. Philanthropists, public-spirited citizens, statesmen, social workers, and physicians are now freely giving of their money, their time, and their energy to the solution of problems of health. Although this wide-spread interest, especially as it affects education in this country, began but a little more than a decade ago, nearly all cities and even whole states are now deeply interested in the movement. This means for the school not only a great financial gain, through the shortening of the time required by the great majority of children to complete the course of study, but a great gain in their physical, intellectual, and moral efficiency while in the school because of increased vigor of body and freedom from disease. Measures for promoting sane, every-day, common-sense methods of securing health for the individual, and of safeguarding the community from the dangers of ignorance and recklessness, cannot be too enthusiastically and liberally supported by the people. Nor must the school fail to impart the knowledge, and to endeavor to secure the practices, that will lead its pupils into the ways of health, and moreover to develop the habits that will make them continue to walk therein. The subject is of such importance that the first chapter of this year's Annals is devoted to a consideration of the problems of Health and Health Teaching.

PART I

CHAPTER I

HEALTH AND HEALTH TEACHING.

THERE never has been a time in modern development when interest in the welfare of the body has been so noticeable and so general. Athletic contests have given a high degree of prominence to the possibilities of the body in the way of skill, strength, and endurance; the devastations of tuberculosis and all the various forms of contagious and infectious diseases have called forth the most earnest and devoted efforts of physicians and philanthropists to stay their ravages; public campaigns for better medical training, for the proper care of babies, for careful sanitation, for pure food, for wide-reaching campaigns of instruction and enlightenment in regard to the prevention as well as the cure of disease-all these things are forecasting the time when the body shall truly come into its own. In some respects this is an age of the body rather than of the mind. At all events, we are beginning to see as never before the value of the body in the struggle for success and happiness. And this insight reveals proper care of the whole body as farther reaching in its effects than attempts at the unusual development or skill of some one of its parts. The ways in which questions of health and bodily vigor are affecting efficiency and morality are now recognized as among the most important economic and social issues of the day. They underlie the welfare of organized society in the community and in the state as well as in the family. While individual excellence will always remain the culminating point of any interest in physical development, the true test of progress in care of health is to be found in the broader results of a lower death-rate, in the stamping out of contagion, in increased longevity, and in an enhanced vigor

of all the muscles and nerves. Upon this vigor of the body more than anything else is dependence to be placed for the highest success. For we now know not only that physical vigor is the best of all agencies in warding off disease, but also that it is fundamental to success under the strenuous demands of our modern life.

Nowhere are the benefits of consideration of the welfare of the body more apparent than in school work. The great recreation movement, which is receiving so much consideration everywhere, is an important phase of the many-sided problem of public health.* Recreation, we are learning, is not only a natural need that dare not be ignored, but, under proper conditions, it does more than anything else to develop and safeguard the body. But recreation is only one phase of the problem, and the friends of education have need to widen the boundaries of their vision and to reorganize their efforts for enlightenment and training to include all the problems of health. Text-book instruction in physiology and hygiene has not yielded the results so hopefully expected. Much of this instruction has been faulty, full of contradictions, and pointless. Far too little of it has found its way into the life of the pupil. Moreover, it is quite clear that valuable time is lost by waiting till school age to begin the care for the body. Many of the most serious physical dangers and defects menace the body in its earliest years. Later efforts can usually only mitigate, but not eradicate, the baleful effects of early ignorance and neglect. Hence, educators are interested in the child before it comes to school. And, as the real measure of educational success, after all, is to be found in the tests outside the class-room rather than in it, we are also deeply interested in adult life in all of its relations to the body. Questions of public health have therefore a large place in the field of education, and it is extremely significant, as well as extremely favorable, that the public should regard with such intense interest every new movement and every new discovery that looks toward the safety and betterment of the body. And no friend of education can afford to be less interested in the entire subject than is the general public.

*See Current Educational Activities, pp. 23 to 96.

The Mind and the Body.

Many of the theories and much of the practice of the past have assumed that the mind is an airy, intangible thing which is entirely superior to and independent of the body. For centuries these ideas formed the groundwork for all philosophies and all educational practices. Although there has been a decided rejection of this thought, and in many instances a damaging trend in the opposite direction, it still remains true that much of our practice ignores the welfare, value, and influence of the body. Efforts to ignore and mortify the body, in its insistent demands for recognition, that were so common in monastic days, find their counterpart in the man or woman unduly absorbed in business or pleasure, or in those who build upon the kind of idealism that holds the Supreme Mind to be the only reality and all else as but phenomena in the workings of this true entity. To such, questions of the care of the body can be of but little interest. But to all who accept the reality of the physical world and who regard the mind as in some way a real manifestation or agent of the individual's existence, the subject of health is of supreme importance. To such the mind is as real as the body-a matter of substance or entity which in some way forms a part of the organized existence which each of us realizes as the ego or self. If we accept this belief, we are confronted by two radically different ideas,-one, that the mind is but a product of the body and entirely subservient to it; the other, that the mind and body are separate entitites which in some way interact or parallel each other. The first view makes of us mere automata, and is as radical in sweeping out of existence the mind as is extreme idealism in sweeping out of existence the body. Neither of these views seems justified by our present knowledge. As early as 1879 Professor James predicted that, if the " automaton theory" should ever prove to be true, it would be in a modified form in which our common-sense belief in the power of the mind in determinative activity would be recognized as essentially correct. In point of fact, the trend of thought seems now decidedly in favor of attributing a superior influence to the mind in the struggle between mind and matter, but without in the