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Billy's history is that of every child who comes to the Village and can receive a moiety of benefit in the school. There are few, indeed, who cannot be strengthened and helped. His story, however, is not finished. Every day but adds to the sum total of his usefulness, to his contributions to the activities of the Village, and to the villagers' and his own happiness. His training still goes on. Part of his time is spent in the woodworking department where he makes things used in the cottages; much of it is given over to music, for he is a member of the thirty-piece band whose music is a never-ending delight to the entire Village. He is a useful and competent worker in his cottage. He is a leader among the boys. He has made himself a place in the Village world.

The big outer world needs many such readjustments as were made for Susie and Billy. Still a pupil, it has lessons to learn. Some of these are being taught by The Village of Happiness; but this big-world scholar is indifferent, lethargic, dull of perception and slow of comprehension. For every Billy and Susie in the Village there are tens and hundreds of thousands of them outside groping blindly for the road and struggling frantically to keep on it. The hurrying traffic of civilization crowds it and, weaving in and out, there are many human machines driven by infants. The highway is strewn with the wreckage they cause. They impede traffic. No one is safe.

These unskilled, inept infants are not responsible for being on the road. Society placed them there and Society prods them on with its "keep going," "get out of the way." They are trying their best to do both but they are confused by their own incapacity, terrified by the rush and roar of the highway. Society curses, blows its horn, and speeds by, unheeding if it does so safely; more thoughtful perhaps, when its own car goes into the ditch.

Society has established a few safety zones for these children. The Village of Happiness is one of them. They are all full, most of them over-crowded, yet so few of the great mass have reached these shelters. Nevertheless, as experiment and demonstration stations they have proved that these weaker, imperfect human machines have a definite place in the world. Their very presence in it and their great number are positive proof that they belong to the present order of things; the inevitable result of civilization's progress. But they do not belong on the crowded, for them and for everybody, dangerous highway on which civilization marches. It is a one-way, rapid transit thorofare. Slow moving machines have no business on it. It can be widened. Broad and safe lanes for slow moving traffic can be established.

The Training School has taken hundreds of these children off the road. In a sense it has taken them apart in its own school, research laboratory, hospital, cottages and shops. It has learned many of the reasons for their deficiencies; discovered many ways in which, properly adjusted, they can be made useful. Its methods, equipment and experience have suggested a definite program for society in the handling of the great multitude which never can hope to reach the few safety zones it has provided. It offers society the tools with which it can widen its highway to accommodate these slow-moving travelers and keep them in the right direction in comparative safety.

These tools are:

1. Social consciousness of and responsibility for the presence of these "children" on its highway.

2. Recognition of the fact that they have all of the rights of other children: to be understood; to be given a real chance for usefulness and happiness within the environment of their own homes and communities. Those who fail, after such a chance, to be taken off the road.

3. The utilization of the psychiatrist, the psychologist, the physician, special classes with capably trained teachers, all of the welfare agencies of the modern community, working together for a common purpose, viz., the identification, treatment, training, occupation suited to their abilities, wise and continued supervision, sympathetic regulation of the lives of all of those who need guiding hands along the road and at the steering wheels.

Two hundred of the Village children attend its school. Nearly three hundred, the older boys and girls, after eight to ten years of training, have entered into one or more of the numerous Village activities. Although the school period of those remaining in the Village covers an average of from eight to ten years the great majority do not pass beyond the fourth grade. A very few, whose capacity for learning has been too limited for any possible profit to them, are cared for in the cottages where at least nursery training is carried on. There are also a few who have reached comparative old age. Their physical powers are waning, but the sunset of their old age is made beautiful for them in their Village of Happiness.

The curriculum is a simplified one. It covers cultural, physical, manual and industrial training. Cultural training includes English, reading, spelling, writing, and numbers; nature study; music -- band, voice and piano; and kindergarten. Physical training includes calisthenics, drills, apparatus work, games and sports. Manual training includes basketry, needlework, woodwork and loomwork. Industrial training includes shoe repairing, brushmaking, broommaking, printing and presswork, farming and gardening and domestic science.