Comparisons

In an electioneering speech, Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister of Great Britain, declared that English schools were better than American. Said he: "We hear a great deal about American education, but from such opportunities as I have had of consulting those who have visited American schools., I do not believe the actual achievement of those schools is comparable to that of our schools. That judgment has been endorsed by American educators, themselves. I am told a highly competent observer has said that on the whole an American boy of 15 is in knowledge and achievement about two years behind an English pupil of the same age."

The First Six Years

Dr. Arnold Gesell, a director of the American Child Health Association, has published The Pre-School Child.*

His thesis is summarized in the following paragraphs:

"The character of the mental development of the child up to six is by no means purely or preeminently intellectual. Almost from the beginning it is social, emotional, moral and denotes the organization of a personality. The infant acquires perceptions and motor coordination; he is incorporating modes of behavior which do not, of course, constitute a mature personality, but which psychologically are at the core of personality.

"On every level of behavior, the psychological, the sensory-motor and the higher psychical, he is acquiring both healthful and unhealthful habits of activity. Though he may not learn to read in the pre-school years, he is mastering the alphabet of life. So potent are these fundamental lessons that this period easily becomes the soil of perversion, inefficiency and distorted or curtailed development. Psychoanalysis reveals significant instances in which the unfortunate experiences in the first years of life were competent to produce developmental disharmonies resulting in abnormal adult behavior."

Eating Problem

Delegates from 25 institutions assembled at Minneapolis to discuss the problems of financing, managing and disciplining "unions" for undergraduate men at colleges and universities.

The University of Minnesota union, which the delegates investigated, feeds an average of 2,500 men daily. The cost of meals is 16c to 18c for breakfast, 32c for the noonday meal, 28c for dinner.

*Houghton Mifflin ($1.90).