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subjecting the pupils to overstimulation, bad air, improper temperatures, and too limited an amount of physical exercise. Everywhere it should be borne in mind that childhood should be sacred to growth and development.

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RIGHT-HANDEDNESS.

Educators have long been divided on the question of the desirability of attempting to develop ambidexterity in their pupils. One class maintains that “all want of perfect bilateral symmetry looks away from perfect sanity," that ambidexterity is the ideal condition, botn in regard to the perfection of development and utility. The other class maintains that a high development can be given to one hand only, that the left hand plays the most useful part when it aids and supplements the action of the right. Most physical exercises prescribed for pupils from the kindergarten through the high school have aimed at overcoming the tendency to right-handedness, while penmanship and manual training have yielded to this tendency. This question, like most educational questions, can be rightly settled only upon the basis of child-study investigation.

In the absence of any term corresponding to ambidexterity, and meaning unequal ability in the use of the hands without indication of which hand is the superior, the term unidexterity is suggested.

Reference to Table I shows that the children on the average are unidextrous, with the right hand superior at the time they enter school, and that the unidexterity increases during the early years of adolescence. It has long been known by those who have made a study of the localization of cerebral function that there is a connection between unidexterity and speech. J. Mark Baldwin, from a study of his children has discovered a parallelism between the beginning of unidexterity and the beginning of speech in the development of the child. Does not the pubescent increase in unidexterity parallel the change of voice? In his report of last year, Dr. Christopher intimated that the marked differentiation in the strength of the hands is a pubescent change, but the small number of pupils involved in the examination, and the consequent irregularities in the curves, forbade a definite assertion to that effect. The larger numbers involved in the present discussion justify the definite conclusion that the phenomenon is a true law of child life.

A glance at Table V will show that the more advanced of the 12-year-old pupils are more decidedly unidextrous than are the backward pupils of that age. That this association between decided unidexterity and intellectual power holds good throughout school life will be seen by a reference to Table VII. The apparent exception of the 16-year-old pupils disappears if the records of the left-handed pupils be excluded. Among the left-handed pupils at or above grade, the average strength of grip of the right hand is 91.8 per cent of the strength of the left. Of the lefthanded pupils below grade, the strength of the right hand is 94 per cent of that of the left. On the whole, the brightest are more decidedly unidextrous than are the average pupils, the average pupils are more unidextrous than are the dull pupils. TABLE VII.-Right-handedness and school standing.

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Age.

TABLE VII.-Right-handedness and school standing-Continued.

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GROWTH ABNORMALITIES AND MOTOR DEFECTS.

On the back of each card was printed a list of abnormalities of growth and defective movements, as follows:

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When the child came in the room to take the tests an observer carefully inspected him and noted the growth and movement abnormalities. A slight abnormality was marked with one X, a more decided by two, a marked abnormality by three, and extreme by four. The results of this inspection are shown in Tables VIII and IX. It is found that the dull pupils have more of these cranial and facial asymmetries and other growth peculiarities than the bright children. From the study of movements of children it is found that the dull children show more cases of imperfectly controlled movement than are found among the brighter children.

The John Worthy [reformatory school] boys far exceed even the dull pupils of the other schools both in the average number of growth abnormalities and in the number of motor defects.

All this forces us to the conclusion that, with children, a high, symmetrical intellectual development is likely to be attained only when there is an approach to physical perfection.

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Number examined... Average number of abnormalities seen

years. years. years. years, years. years. years. years. years. years. years.

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GENERAL BALANCE RELAXED

OBESITY

LORDOSIS

TABLE IX.-Motor defects.

8

Age.

12

13

11

15

9 10 11 16 17 18 years. years. years. years. years. years. years. years. years, years, years.

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The sight of the pupils was tested in the Kozminski, Andersen, and Tennyson elementary schools and the Englewood and Lake View high schools. This test of visual acuity was made by means of the ordinary Snellen's type, the test cards being selected by Dr. Frank Allport, consulting oculist and aurist to the department of child study. Well-lighted rooms were used for these tests. In testing sight the child was seated in a chair placed 20 feet away from the test chart, and, with the left eye covered, he was asked to begin at the top of the card and read aloud down the card as far as he could. After this was done the right eye was covered and the left eye tested. The last line of which the pupil was able to read the majority of the letters showed his visual acuity for the eye used. Visual acuity was recorded by placing the number representing the normal reading distance of the last line which the pupil was able to read as the denominator and the distance from which it was read (20 feet) as the numerator of a fraction. Thus, if a child seated 20 feet from the chart could read the majority of the letters of the line normally read at 30 feet, but could not read a majority of the letters of the line normally read at 20 feet, he would be 38 in visual acuity for the eye tested.

These tests were made without spectacles where the pupils wore glasses, as the aim was to find the number with subnormal visual acuity for each year.

Four thousand seven hundred and sixty-five pupils were tested-2,030 boys, 2,735 girls. Thirty-five per cent of all the pupils tested were found defective-37 per cent of the girls and 32 per cent of the boys. Thus 5 per cent more of the girls were found to be defective than the boys. Table X shows something of the results of these tests. Thirty-two per cent of the 6-year-old pupils were found subnormal in vision. For the first three years of school life the per cent of those defective rapidly increases, suggesting that the school work of that period is hard on the eyes of the pupils. After the age of 9 years is passed the per cent of pupils having eye defects decreases; at first slowly, then more rapidly until the age of 13 is passed. This decrease in the per cent of eye defects parallels so closely the period of rapid growth and development that the improvement may be considered a manifestation of the improved health of this period of florid growth. The slight rise at 14 is probably due to the larger proportion of girls found in the high schools at that and the following years. It will be remembered that girls have a larger per cent of eye defects than boys.

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