The past fifty or sixty years have been attended with a wonderful development of the science of education, as remarkable and important in its way as anything of which we may boast. We are proud, and justly so, of the admirable machinery of instruction which we have created, the fine buildings, laboratories, curricula, highly trained teachers, and so on, but there is a growing conviction that all this represents only so much mechanical, rather than human, progress. We have created a vast network of means, there is no lack of equipment, but we have largely neglected the human and most important factor, the child.[42] The futility of expecting efficient education when the teacher is handicapped by poor and inadequate means is generally recognized, but not so as yet the futility of expecting it when the teacher has poor material to work upon in the form of chronically underfed children, too weak in mind and body to do the work required of them. We are forever seeking the explanation of the large percentage of educational failures in the machinery of instruction rather than in the human material, the children themselves. The nervous, irritable, half-ill children to be found in such large numbers in our public schools represent poor material. They are largely drawn from the homes of poverty, and constitute an overwhelming majority of those children for whom we have found it necessary to make special provision,—the backward, dull pupils found year after year in the same grades with much younger children. In a measure the relation of a child’s educability to its physical health and comfort has been recognized by the correlation of physical and mental exercises in most up-to-date schools, but its larger social and economic significance has been almost wholly ignored. And yet it is quite certain that poverty exercises the same retarding influences upon the physical training as upon mental education. There are certain conditions precedent to successful education, whether physical or mental. Chief of these are a reasonable amount of good, nourishing food and a healthy home. Deprived of these, physical or mental development must necessarily be hindered. And poverty means just that to the child. It denies its victim these very necessities with the inevitable result, physical and mental weakness and inefficiency. [Illustration: A “LUNG BLOCK” CHILD IN A TRAGICALLY SUGGESTIVE POSITION ] II