It is not unnatural, therefore, that the school should loom large in our consciousness of the life of the child. The settlement at no time would, even if it could, usurp the place of school or home. It seeks to work with both or to supplement either. The fact that it is flexible and is not committed to any fixed programme gives opportunity for experimentation not possible in a rigid system, and the results of these experiments must have affected school methods, at least in New York City. [Illustration] Intelligent social workers seize opportunities for observation, and almost unconsciously develop methods to meet needs. They see conditions as they are, and become critical of systems as they act and react upon the child or fail to reach him at all. They reverse the method of the school teacher, who approaches the child with preconceived theories and a determination to work them out. Where the school fails, it appears to the social workers to do so because it makes education a thing apart,—because it separates its work from all that makes up the child’s life outside the classroom. Great emphasis is now laid upon the oversight of the physical condition of children from the time of their birth through school life; but the suggestion of this extension of socialized parental control did not emanate from those within the school system. [Illustration] Cooking has been taught in the public schools for many years, and the instruction is of great value to those who are admitted to the classes; but appropriations have never been sufficient to meet all the requirements, and the teaching is given in grades already depleted by the girls who have gone to work, and who will perhaps never again have leisure or inclination to learn how to prepare meals for husband and children,—the most important business in life for most women. The laboratory method employed in the schools never seemed to us sufficiently related to the home conditions of vast numbers of the city’s population; and, therefore, when the settlement undertook, according to its theory, to supplement the girls’ education, all the essentials of our own housekeeping—stove, refrigerator, bedrooms, and so on—were utilized. But neither were single bedrooms and rooms set apart for distinct purposes entirely satisfactory in teaching domestic procedure to the average neighbor; and the leader finally developed out of her knowledge of their home conditions the admirable system of “Housekeeping Centers” now sustained and administered by a committee of men and women on which the settlement has representation.