33 2 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
introduce and make operative something like the following pro- gram of legislation and administration: 11
All children must complete the first eight years of the common school curriculum and attain a certain standard of education before they are permitted to engage in bread-winning occupations, and none under sixteen years should be wage-workers unless this standard has been reached.
All children, when they begin work, should be examined by a public physician, and held back from intense labor if in weight, stature, and development of muscles and nerves they are dwarfed. Physicians and nurses should be charged with the duty of seeing that school children are kept in good health.
All defective, deaf, and subnormal children, as well as the crippled, should have proper separate and special instruction.
Boards of education should provide playgrounds and vacation schools, under careful supervision, in order to prevent the evils of idleness, misdirected energy, and vicious associations.
Public libraries should extend their branch work, not only to different districts of the city, but, by means of home library agencies, into the very homes of the poor ; and the easy and pleas- ant use of the English language should thus be promoted.
The street occupations of boys should be carefully regulated and supervised, and the employment of girls in public ways should be prohibited.
Boys under the age of sixteen years should not be permitted to labor in mines or with dangerous machinery.
If parents and other adults are in any way responsible for the delinquency of children, they should be held penally responsible.
At the same time, the curriculum of the schools should be so planned as to lead by a natural transition from the play and study of childhood to the specialized industries of maturity, by means of evening schools, technical instruction for apprentices, regula- tion of hours and shifts, so that youth may lay a broad foundation for the specialization of the factory and mill.
Among the methods of preventive philanthropy is that of new
11 Suggested by the paper of MRS. FLORENCE KELLEY, published in this num- ber of the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY.
