Destroying the Children in Schools.
"Do American men and women realize that in five cities of our country alone there were during the last school term over sixteen thousand children between the ages of eight and fourteen taken out of the public schools because their nervous systems were wrecked, and their minds were incapable of going on any further in the infernal cramming system which exists to-day in our schools?" inquires Edward Bok, in the January Ladies' Home Journal. "And these sixteen thousand helpless little wrecks," he continues, "are simply the children we know about. Conservative medical men who have given their lives to the study of children place the number whose health is shattered by overstudy at more than fifty thousand each year. It is putting the truth mildly to state that, of all American institutions, that which deals with the public education of our children is at once the most faulty, the most unintelligent and the most cruel." A committee of the London School Board makes the following statement:— "At times, when there is no special distress, 55,000 children in a state of hunger, which makes it useless to attempt to teach them, are in the schools of London alone." And London is not alone. Millions untold are lavished upon needless luxury, upon intemperance, upon war, while souls and bodies are starving. It is a sad picture these 55,000 pale, pinched children make.