Note and Comment

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D.C. · Jul 11, 1907

THE frequent sight of children eagerly poring over the colored supplement of a Sunday newspaper is enough to stir one's heart in pity for them. But how parents who have any appreciation of the effect early impressions have on the child's mind, can encourage or permit such grossly false ideals to be thus fixed in mind is truly astonishing. Therefore we cheerfully pass along these words of warning found in an editorial in the Independent of June 27:—

Almost needless to say the benefit to be derived from the picture supplements of the Sunday papers is more than dubious, while the positive disadvantages seem easy to appreciate at once. These crude pictures, badly drawn, luridly colored, with little or no meaning to them at best, and often meanings that are not good for children at worst, can not help but vitiate taste and deprave intelligence. It does not seem quite the proper thing that children should be shown the humor of playing tricks on anybody and everybody, parents and friends, relatives and servants, sometimes the old, often those who are helpless, and almost be taught to laugh at the predicaments they place them in, as if this were the right thing to do.

The editor then points out the special evils to the nervous system which by this means result from the cultivation of the imagination to a high degree, and concludes with words well worth pondering:—

The unconscious factors of education in our modern life, the newspaper, and the conversations that subjects made much of are likely to suggest, and that find their way into the large ears of these little pitchers; the theater, with its connotations in the same way; the summer books that are read—all these are quite as important as the more formal factors of education. This seems to be an excellent time, then, to call attention to the dangers that lurk behind the apparently harmless, though it would scarcely be called innocent, amusement that is afforded to children by the vicious colored supplement.