Part 1 (1/2)
Health Work in the Public Schools.
by Leonard P. Ayres and May Ayres.
FOREWORD
This report on ”Health Work in the Public Schools” is one of the 25 sections of the report of the Educational Survey of Cleveland conducted by the Survey Committee of the Cleveland Foundation in 1915.
Twenty-three of these sections will be published as separate monographs. In addition there will be a larger volume giving a summary of the findings and recommendations relating to the regular work of the public schools, and a second similar volume giving the summary of those sections relating to industrial education. Copies of all these publications may be obtained from the Cleveland Foundation. They may also be obtained from the Division of Education of the Russell Sage Foundation, New York City. A complete list will be found in the back of this volume, together with prices.
HEALTH WORK IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Cleveland employs 16 physicians, one oculist, and 27 nurses to take charge of the health of her school children. The city spends $36,000 a year on salaries and supplies for these people. There are 86 school dispensaries and clinics. Cleveland is making this heavy investment because she finds it pays.
THE ARGUMENT FOR MEDICAL INSPECTION
Medical inspection is an extension of the activities of the school in which the educator and the physician join hands to insure for each child such conditions of health and vitality as will best enable him to take full advantage of the free education offered by the state. Its object is to better health conditions among school children, safeguard them from disease, and render them healthier, happier, and more vigorous. It is founded upon a recognition of the intimate relations.h.i.+p between the physical and mental conditions of the children, and the consequent dependence of education on health conditions.
In Cleveland, the value of medical inspection was recognized while the movement was still in its infancy in America. Here, as elsewhere, this sudden recognition of the imperative necessity for safeguarding the physical welfare of school children grew out of the discovery that compulsory education under modern city conditions meant compulsory disease.
The state, to provide for its own protection, has decreed that all children must attend school, and has put in motion the all-powerful but indiscriminating agency of compulsory education, which gathers in the rich and the poor, the bright and the dull, the healthy and the sick. The object was to insure that these children should have sound minds. One of the unforeseen results was to insure that they should have unsound bodies. Medical inspection is the device created to remedy this condition. Its object is prevention and cure.
Ever since its establishment the good results of medical inspection have been evident. Epidemics have been checked or avoided.
Improvements have been noted in the cleanliness and neatness of the children. Teachers and parents have come to know that under the new system it is safe for children to continue in school in times of threatened or actual epidemic.
HEALTH AND SCHOOL PROGRESS
But medical inspection does not confine itself to dealing with contagious disease. Its aid has been invoked to help the child who is backward in his school studies. With the recent extensions in the length of the school term and the increase in the number of years of schooling demanded of the child, has come a great advance in the standards of the work required. When the standards were low, the work was not beyond the capacity of even the weaker children; but with close grading, fuller courses, higher standards, and constantly more insistent demands for intellectual attainment, conditions have changed. Pupils have been unable to keep up with their cla.s.ses. The terms ”backward,” ”r.e.t.a.r.ded,” and ”exceptional,” as applied to school children, have been added to the vocabularies of educators.
School men discovered that the drag-net of compulsory education was bringing into school hundreds of children who were unable to keep step with their companions, and because this interfered with the orderly administration of the school system, they began to ask why the children were backward.
The school physicians helped to find the answer when they showed that hundreds of these children were backward simply because of removable physical defects. And then came the next great forward step, the realization that children are not dullards through the will of an inscrutable Providence, but rather through the law of cause and effect.
EXAMINATIONS FOR PHYSICAL DEFECTS
This led to an extension of the scope of medical inspection to include the physical examination of school children with the aim of discovering whether or not they were suffering from such defects as would handicap their educational progress and prevent them from receiving the full benefit of the free education furnished by the state. This work was in its infancy five years ago, but today Cleveland has a thorough and comprehensive system of physical examination of its school children.