We are not always mindful of the fact that children in normal homes get education apart from formal lessons and instruction. Sitting down to a table at definite hours, to eat food properly served, is training, and so is the orderly organization of the home, of which the child so soon becomes a conscious part. There is direction toward control in the provision for privacy, beginning with the sequestered nursery life. The exchange of letters, which begins with most children at a very early age, the conversation of their elders, familiarity with telegrams and telephones, and with the incidents of travel, stimulate their intelligence, resourcefulness, and self-reliance. [Illustration] Contrast this regulated domestic life with the experience of children—a large number in New York—who may never have been seated around a table in an orderly manner, at a given time, for a family meal. Where the family is large and the rooms small, and those employed return at irregular hours, its members must be fed at different times. It is not uncommon in a neighborhood such as ours to see the mother lean out of the fourth- or fifth-story window and throw down the bread-and-butter luncheon to the little child waiting on the sidewalk below—sometimes to save him the exertion of climbing the stairs, sometimes because of insufficient time. The children whose mothers work all day and who are locked out during their absence are expected to shift for themselves, and may as often be given too much as too little money to appease their hunger. Having no more discretion in the choice of food than other children of their age, they become an easy prey for the peddlers of unwholesome foods and candies (often with gambling devices attached) who prowl outside the school limits. [Illustration] Even those students who are better placed economically, or who have the perseverance to go on into the higher schools, may have had no experience but that of a disorganized tenement home. Emil was an instance of this. He supported himself while attending school by teaching immigrants at night. We invited him to a party at one of our country places and instructed him to call in the morning for his railroad ticket. He failed to appear until long after the appointed hour, not realizing that trains leave on schedule time. Apparently he had never consulted a time-table or taken a journey except with a fresh-air party conducted by someone else. Next morning he returned the ticket, and I learned that he had not reached the farm because he did not know the way to it from the station. Somewhat disconcerted to learn that he had taken fruitlessly a trip of something over an hour’s duration, I asked why he had not telephoned to the farm for directions. This seventeen-year-old boy, in his third year in the high school, had not thought of a telephone in the country. Moreover, he had never used one anywhere.