The sins of youth, so often sins of ignorance, carelessness, and unbridled passion, which doom childhood to blindness, to congenital deficiency of all kinds, to permanent twist of mental powers, or to lack of ability to meet life's demands--these sins of youth will be less in evidence when education is fitted to life's full responsibilities of choice instead of being side-tracked in narrow lines of scholarly acquirement alone.
Meanwhile, for the parents whose children number one or more of the handicapped there is the comfort of securing for such all that science and special arts of teaching and institutional provision can give to make the life of those who can never grow up at least comfortable and free from exploitation by evil influences.

That some of the noblest and best of men and women are giving their lives in wise and loving ministration to these least among the children of men is proof of the overmastering power of human sympathy.

Meanwhile, again, we are finding out that the more discriminating observation of children and their more truly scientific rating will take many children from the lists of the "backward" and the "difficult" and even the supposed feeble-minded into the ranks of the educable toward full normality.
=Special Rooms in Public Schools.=--The special rooms in the schools and the special schools in the school system and the school nurses and school doctors and the visiting teacher, with her power of making connection between the home and the school and playground, all show that we are coming to a point where every child will have a better chance for having his mental and moral as well as his physical diagnosis correctly made.

And such a diagnosis we have already learned often shows that no congenital doom marks the child labelled "different," but rather some curable bad condition in his life that needs only wisdom and economic power to correct.

The "Observation Cards" to which allusion has been made as helping toward discovery of the specially gifted may also, if used with discriminating judgment, show that many whom we thought lagged behind their mates from native disability can be made to keep up with the procession if they are rightly fed, have enough sleep, get a chance at fresh air, and are not made the victims of industrial exploitation.
The new gospel of environmental change in the interest of better physical, mental, and vocational opportunities for all, includes not only the better care of all incompetent for self-control, self-support, and self-direction, it also is coming to include a far more searching investigation of the causes of degeneracy and backwardness, and many children are thereby lifted from the hopeless classes to the group of those requiring only special care and teaching to be able to be classed as normal.
=Training the Nervous System.=--Professor James said, "The great thing in education is to make the nervous system the ally, not the enemy.
For this we must make automatic and habitual as many useful actions as we can and carefully guard against growing into ways which are likely to be disadvantageous." His advice for self-discipline is to "seize every first possible opportunity to act on any resolution made, and on every emotional prompting in the direction of habits one aspires to gain." Professor Thompson, in his book on _Brain and Personality_, says, "We can make our own brains, so far as special functions or aptitudes are concerned, if only we have wills strong enough to take the trouble." These and many other admonitions in the direction of more effective mental training show the trend of modern education.