Part 5 (1/2)

It would be so si, to rise, and when tired of writing, to desist, and then their bones would not be twisted Who can look on unmoved at the spectacle of children whose vertebral colues the instep was deforrounds is this odious torture judged to be necessary?

Because ato fore and likeness; and this cannot be done without subjecting a free creature to torture This is the only reason

We will now quote the remedies by means of which a so-called science proposes to counteract spinal curvature in school-children It has determined the exact position in which a childperiod of time without injury to the vertebrae

”The child, seated at the table, should have his feet planted flat upon the ground, or upon a foot-rest The legs should be at right-angles to the thighs, as should the thighs be to the trunk, save for a slight inclination of the bench itself The trunk should be in such a position that there will be no lateral inclination of the vertebral column, the arms should be parallel with the sides of the body, the thorax should not be interfered with by the front edge of the table, the pelvic basin should be syhtly bent forward at a distance of thirty centimeters fro parallel with the front edge of the table, should be horizontal; the forearms, two-thirds of which should be laid on the table, should rest on it, but without leaning upon it”

To realize all these conditions, it is necessary that the desk should be _exactly fitted_ to the proportions of the child; its constituent parts should agree with those of the body and li are the measurements which Dufessel considered indispensable in the fashi+oning of a desk suitable for children:

1 Height

2 The length of the leg, taken fros at right-angles to the thighs, and the feet flat on the ground This ht of the seat from the foot-rest

3 The diameter of the body from front to back, taken froives the proper distance froth of the femur, two-thirds of which represent the depth of the seat

5 Finally, the height of the epigastric cavity above the seat, aught of the reading-desk

We rowth of the child, these measurements should be taken twice in the course of the school year, and children should be e places in accordance with thesenaked into the world, chooses an eer and the shell becoht, it sallies forth and takes up its abode in a larger one This the creature does of its own accord, without a savant to measure it or a teacher to choose a new shell for it But to us and to scientists, a child is inferior to this lowly invertebrate!

The difficulty of keeping forty or fifty children ienic attitude, and of finding desks exactly adapted to these growing bodies,us The problem remains unsolved

Hence it has been deemed more practical to establish a kind of orthopaedic institution within the building itself in certain model schools in Rome It consists of a costly and elaborate apparatus, to which the pupils come in turn to be suspended by the head after the method adopted in medicine to combat spinal curvature in Pott's disease (tuberculosis of the vertebral column) and rickets

Healthy children, as well as the unsound, suffer by these applications; but on the other hand, the results afford encouraging statistics If this hanging treate of six years it strikes a perfect balance with the injury caused by prolonged deterioration induced by school desks, and children are delivered froy: overwork; nervous exhaustion=--Hygiene,its way into the school, discovered scholar's spinal curvature and scholar's y discovered the exhaustion due to overwork, and studied the _fatigue_ of the scholar It followed in the beaten track of ht to alleviate the ills it had diagnosed, and instituted a branch of science the title of which is not very clearly defined as yet, for soy applied to the school, others Scientific Pedagogy

It is necessary to rey was established in 1860 by Fechner, as a physicist accusto creatures, and who merely adapted the methods e psycho-physics The instruments specially invented for esthesiometric measurements were of extreme precision; but the results obtained showed such variations that by mathematical law they could not be attributed to ”errors of measurement,” but were obviously due to ”errors of method” Indeed, for the measurement of liquids it is necessary to have an instru solids, although we are still in the domain of physics; we cannot measure a stuff by the quart, nor wine by the yard; howphysical substances and spiritual energy differ?

After psycho-physics, psycho-physiology was introduced by Wundt

Wundt, being a physiologist, applied the ical functions to psychical study He did not make the exact metrical instrument his aim; but he measured nervous reactions exactly in _time_ Fechner's primitive researches made it possible to produce instruments so exact that they canfroht of a meter, while Wundt's researches have resulted in chronometers which can measure the thousandth part of a second But the spirit did not correspond to the exactness of research--the results showed by their oscillations that nothing was being measured--that the object to bethe nervous currents in rate of translion cells of the spinal ht meters, and Bloch at a rapidity of 194 meters, in the sa contrast between the precision of the e variations in the results, which were shown by y carried on extensive studies, under the illusion that it rested upon a mathematical basis

It is from this science that a branch has been detached hich to penetrate into the school, for the purpose of giving spiritual help to the scholar, and fresh vigor to pedagogy

Methods of research are no longer ical y, henceforth eins, has developed independently It now relies on purely psychological tests for its researches, and although it does not exclude the methods adopted in the laboratory, and the use of such accurate and trustworthy instruraph, the school itself has become the chief field of experiment

For exaive a printed page to be read over, with directions to strike out every _a_ on the page; the time taken to co aloud fro on arith, is a measure of the distribution of the attention, provided the time taken be calculated by the chronometer, and all errors be noted To make several persons perform similar exercises at the same time enables us to study comparative individual activities In schools, exercises in dictation which have been previously deter taken to note the ti the exercise and to compare the errors This is also an easy and practicalcollective results

These experiree should be carried out without interrupting the usual routine of the school They are to be regarded as an addition, an _extra_, andlight upon the regular psychical conditions of school studies