RACE OF SUPERMEN.

Northern Advocate, 7 October 1913, Page 7

RACE OF SUPERMEN.

In order to produce a race of supermen and superwomen, American educational authorities are making experiments the novelty of which must appeal even to a blase public. Harvard, America's greatest University, is arranging for a kindergarten class so that the mental development of the child shall be under close observation at the University from start to finish. It is believed that close observation will enable methods to be formulated which will lighten the children's labour and hasten their progress from the kindergarten to the high school, and so to the University .

Now Bryn Mawr College, which is just as famous in the United States as Girton in England, proposes another development of the super-edu-cation programme. Bryn Mawr this autumn will establish an open-air model school for girls, which will give the students the first chance that has ever been offered by an educational institution in America for instruction tending to make girls physically perfect above everything else.

According to Miss M. Carey Thomas, Dean of the College, it will take eleven years to ascertain whether the plan is going to prove a success. They will take twenty young girls as nearly perfect physically as they can get, ranging between 10 and 12 years of age, and train them for seven years in elementary subjects and bring them up as women should be educated. The girls will !be trained in the open all the time; they will have all kinds of physical exercises and outdoor life, and when they leave Bryn Mawr they will have not only perfect physical condition to aid them, but will have learned all the rudiments of English, Latin, French, and German, to solve algebraic problems, to draw, to model, to appreciate pictures, to interpret music by rhythmic movements, and to express musical impressions by dancing.

At the age of 17 they /ill be able to enter Bryn Mawr College and complete their classical education. The pupil in the open-air school who passes the best test after seven years' work will receive a £500 scholarship for her course *at Bryn Mawr. She will receive free tuition and all her expenses for four years.

The school will be housed in seven separate one-storey class-rooms constructed of wood and glass, and there the pupils will live in winter, bundled in furs and warm clothing. These twenty girls will never breathe the air of a class-room, summer or winter, except where they are housed, and the sides of the rooms are so arranged as to be let down in pleasant weather. 'In cold weather the girls are to be clothed in Esquimaux suits. Their hours in the class-room will be from 9 . till 3.30, and after . they will spend all their time in the air.

By means of open-air deep breathing, hygienic exercises daily, simple life, and rational diet, Bryn Mawr believes that the production of the American superwoman will be only a matter of a few years. The girls themselves seem delighted at the prospect, more especially since it was stated in an American medical paper lately that "starlight baths," that is, sleeping in the open, are the best things possible for the complexion.