interest, and if persisted in, such methods soon
result in the overworking and exhaustion of some one particular system
of nervous centres, and in the depletion through non-nutrition of other
centres. As a consequence, the child is unable to take any part in
physical exercises or in school games with profit to himself. He is
content to loaf and do as little as he can. The evil is further
intensified if there is also present under or improper nutrition of the
child.

Thus along with our schemes for the physical education of the child we
must endeavour to improve the methods of our teachers, to make them
understand that experiences acquired through the arousing of the direct
interest of the child are acquired at the least physiological cost, and
to make them realise under what conditions this direct interest can be
aroused and maintained. No one indeed wishes to make everything in the
school pleasant to the child, or to reduce self-effort to a minimum. But
effort and interest are not opposed terms. The effort which is evoked in
the realisation of an interest or end of felt value is the only kind of
effort which possesses any educational value. The effort which is called
forth in the finding and establishing of a system of means towards an
end which the child fails to see, and which, as a consequence, rouses no
direct interest in its attainment, is an effort which should for ever be
banished from the schoolroom. Such, _e.g._, is the effort evoked in the
mere cramming of empty lists of words or dates or facts. Little mental
good results from such a process, and the physiological cost is often
great.

Let us now consider the conditions necessary for sound physical health,
and inquire how far the school agencies can aid in the providing of
these conditions: they are mainly four in number. In the first place, in
order to secure the full growth and development of the bodily powers,
there is needed a sufficiency of food. But mere sufficiency is not
enough, the food must be varied in quality in order to meet the various
needs of the body, and must be prepared in such a way as to be readily
assimilated and rendered fit for the nutrition of both body and mind.
Manifestly the home ought to be the chief agent in providing for this
need. But, as we have seen in considering the problem of the feeding of
school children, the home in many cases is unable adequately to provide
for it, and, for a time at least, some method of public prov