The kindergarten is not alone in its appeal to the child and in its affiliation with the community. Traditional grade education has likewise been modified and rehabilitated until it makes an appeal to parent and child alike. In the first place, a consistent effort has been made to provide accommodations for the physical education in the grades of the fifty-seven elementary schools. Twenty-five now have fully equipped gymnasiums in which children have two or three periods of exercise each week. In the schools not so equipped the physical work is confined to calisthenics. Each year the Board of Education appropriates five hundred dollars for the Public School Athletic League, which organizes meets and games, open to all public school pupils free of charge. Besides field days, baseball, soccer and football there is an athletic badge awarded to all pupils who pass an “efficiency” test in athletic activities.
The academic work of the grades is alive with enthusiasm. History, so often made a mass of dead names and dates, is taught in terms of life. The children learn that history is in reality a record of the things which people did, and of the forces which were at work in their lives; furthermore, that the commonplace acts of to-day will be the history of to-morrow. Translated into ideas and social changes, history stimulates thought, turning the child’s mind from the purely personal side of life to the social activities of which history is made.
Arithmetic and geography begin at home, in the things which the children know and do. Both are taught in terms of child experience. Both call to the child mind the things of daily life.
English, too, which is so important an element in education, is made to reflect child experiences. Teaching the reading lesson of “Eyes and No Eyes” one teacher asked her class: “Well, children, what did you see on your way to school this morning? What did you see, Elmer?”
“Well, I saw—I saw—” and Elmer sat down.
“I saw that it had been raining in the night by the mud in the streets,” said Alice; while John had seen trolley cars, and remembered that the number on one of them was 647.
A seventh grade girl had read the Psalm beginning, “Who shall ascend unto the hill of the Lord, or who shall stand in His holy place?” After asking what a psalm was, and who wrote the Psalms, the teacher asked:
“Who was David?”
“He was the king of Palestine,” replied one boy promptly. After straightening out the history the teacher next asked:
“For what was David noted?”