truant officers, and child labor laws. We admit the facts, but, in our
practices, strive to circumvent their application. If the school is good
for one child, it is good for all children. Indeed, the school is
maintained on the assumption that all children will take advantage of
and profit by its presence. If there were no schools, our civilization
would surely decline. If school attendance should cease at the end of
the fifth year, then we would have a fifth-year civilization. It rests,
therefore, with the parents of the children, in large measure, whether
we are to have an eighth-grade civilization, a high-school civilization,
or a college civilization.

=Parental attitude.=--Schools are administered on the assumption that
every child is capable of and worthy of training, and that training the
child will make for a better quality of civilization. The state regards
the child as a liability during his childhood in the hope that he may be
an asset in his manhood. In this hope time and money are devoted to his
training. But, in the face of all this, there are parents, here and
there, who still look upon their own children as assets and would use
them for their own comfort or profit. They seem to think that their
children are indebted to them for bringing them into the world and that
their obligation to the children is canceled by meager provision of
food, shelter, and clothing. They seem not to realize that "life is more
than fruit or grain," and deny to their children the elements of life.

=The rights of the child.=--All this is a sort of preface to the
statement that the child comes into the world endowed with certain
inherent rights that may not be abrogated. He has a right to life in its
best and fullest sense, and no one has a right to abridge this measure
of life, or to deprive him of anything that will contribute to such a
life. He goes to the school as one of the sources of life, and any one