Problems Posed

When little Tom, Dick and Harry and their female counterparts, Mary, Jane and Joan, gathered around the breakfast table one morning last week, according to their several dispositions, they found their parents reading with serious mien the editorial page of The New York World. Little did they know what seemingly diabolical plots were being hatched against them. Had it been otherwise, their post-toasties, shredded wheat or bran would have been pushed aside in a paroxysm of childish petulance.

The educational problems posed by the World concerned only New York City, where the perplexing question of finding a seat in school "for every child" has been miserably embroiled in the maelstrom of party politics. But the subject, the principles involved arc germane to almost every large city in the U. S.

The World asked two questions:

1) How can a more intensive use be made of school buildings to lessen the frightful building costs?

2) How can the number of teachers and students in school be lessened by more rapid advancement through the grades?

Then the World answered these questions:

It is absurd for New York City to retain a school calendar devised for the purpose of releasing big boys from rural school for haying and harvesting. It is absurd for healthy children in high school to have a ten weeks' summer vacation, with weeks off at Christmas and Easter, when their hard-worked fathers, who pay for it all, get little or none.

[The italics are not the World's.]

It is absurd and humiliating that American children of equal intelligence lag two years behind their more favored contemporaries in the better class of European schools.

It is absurd that the billion-dollar investment in school buildings is dark so much of the time.

It is worse than absurd, it is an educational crime, that our poor children who are not going on to college have not as much educational opportunity as would easily be possible before they get to work.

It is a cruel joke that the State, which decrees compulsory education within a certain age limit, should also decree that the student, forbidden to work, is barred out of school more than a quarter of his share of fleeting time.

As the World would have it, there would be shorter vacations or none, better education, better use of the public money by a longer use of the public schools. That is the economics of the situation.' The psychological and physiological factors are reconciled in another proposal.

The first important axiom in the education of a healthy child is that it shall be kept healthy; intensive education over long periods of time is too much for an average child's mind and eventually too much for its body. All of which the World endorses by renewing an old idea in the ''development of the work-play-study school," which seems the logical answer to the nation's educational problems. But if the Toms, Dicks and Harrys, the Marys, Janes and Joans ever catch their fathers and mothers agreeing to the monstrous proposal that summer, Christmas and Easter vacations are not an inseparable part of school curricula, their cereals will not remain uneaten on their plates, but will be plastered on the walls, ceilings, floors of many a breakfast room. As for the World, its unfortunate delivery boys will be ambushed as they make their morning rounds, will be roughly handled.