Volume I Part 3 (2/2)
”When women have a voice in the affairs of the nation there will be more teachers, larger salaries, fewer pupils in each department, and more attention will be given to the temperaments and varying dispositions of children by their instructors.
”Instead of regarding the little ones who enter public schools as machines which must be taught to go according to one rule, each child will be studied as a threefold being, and his mind, body and spirit will be cared for and developed according to his own peculiar needs. All this will come slowly, but it will come.
”Before children enter the public schools there should be a great sifting process under the direction of a national board of scientific men. The brain equipment of each child, the tendencies given it at birth, should be tested; then the nervous, hysterical and erratic minds ought to be [24]
placed in a school by themselves, under the care of men and women who know the law of mental suggestion.
”Quiet, loving, wholesome rules, followed day after day and month after month, would bring these children out into the light of self-control and concentration. The hurried, crowding, exciting methods of the public schools are disastrous to fully half of the unformed minds sent into the intellectual maelstrom which America provides under the name of Public Schools.
”For the well-born, normal-minded, healthy-bodied child, who has wise and careful guardians or parents to a.s.sist in his mental guidance, the public school forms a good basis on which to build an education. For the average American child of excitable nerves and precocious tendencies, it is like deep surf swimming for the inexperienced and adventurous bather.
”The great foundation of education--character--is not taught in the public schools. There is no systematized process of developing a child's power of concentration; there is not time for this in the cramming process now in vogue and with the enormous pressure placed on teachers. No teacher can do justice to more than fifteen children through the school hours. In many of our public schools there are fifty and sixty children under one instructor.
This is fatal to the nervous system of the teacher and deprives the pupils of that personal sympathy which is of such vital importance.”
Luther Burbank, the famous California horticulturist, declares that the great object and aim of his life is to apply to the training of children those scientific ideas which he has so successfully employed in working transformation in plant life.
In an editorial, ent.i.tled, ”Teaching Health,” the _New York Globe_ states, ”Anatomy and physiology are reasonably exact sciences, and nine-tenths of the hygienic abuses against which the doctors are preaching would be prevented if the laity had an elementary knowledge of physiology. Such an educational reform could be carried out without causing any clash whatever between the warring medical sects.” [Page 25]
William D. Lewis, Princ.i.p.al of the William Penn School, Philadelphia, in an article ent.i.tled: ”The High School and the Girl,” in a recent issue of the _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_, wrote in part as follows:
... ”The first thing that society wants of our girl is good health. This is the first essential for her efficient service and personal happiness in shop, office, store, school or home. The future of the race so far as she represents it, depends upon her health. What is the high school doing to improve the girl's health? In the overwhelming majority of cases absolutely nothing. On the other hand, it is subjecting her to a regimen planned for boys, without the slightest consideration of the physical and functional differences between the s.e.xes.
”It pays no attention to the curvature of the spine developed by the exclusively sit-at-a-desk-and-study-a-book type of education bequeathed to the girlhood of the nation by the medieval monastery: It ignores the ch.o.r.ea, otherwise known as St. Vitus' dance developed by overstudy and underexercise; it disregards the malnutrition of hasty breakfasts, and lunches of pickles, fudge, cream-puffs and other kickshaws, not to mention the catch penny trash too often provided by the janitor or concessionaire of the school luncheon, who isn't doing business for his health or for anybody else's; it neglects eye-strain, unhygienic dress, uncleanly habits, anemia, periodic headaches, nervousness, adenoids, and wrong habits of posture and movements.... If you believe that the high school is a social inst.i.tution with a mission of public service, regardless of the relation of that service to Latin or Algebra, then you must agree that it should look after what everyone recognizes as the foremost need of the adolescent girl.
”One fact that every educator in both camps knows is that the home is not attending to the health of the adolescent girl. This problem is pressing upon us now largely because of the revolutions in living conditions that has come within the last quarter of a century.”
In a report of a recent Conference on the Conservation of School [26]
Children held at Lehigh University by the American Academy of Medicine, the following items appear.
Four great reasons why medical inspection in schools is needed were brought out by Dr. Thomas A. Story of New York, who spoke from the educator's standpoint:
”The first reason is concerned with communicable diseases, and the second with remediable incapacitating physical defects. It was reported in 1906 that over twenty per cent. of the children in the schools of New York City had defective vision, and over fifty per cent. had defective teeth. These defective conditions are amenable to treatment whereby the functional efficiency of the pupil is improved. He is capable of better work and the school efficiency is advanced.
”The third reason is concerned with irremediable physical defects. The cripples, the deformed and the delinquents whose incapacitating defects are permanent should be found and cla.s.sified. This enables special instruction and opens up educational possibilities otherwise unattainable, besides removing r.e.t.a.r.ding factors in the progress of the normal pupil.
”The fourth reason is concerned with the development of hygienic habits in the school child, and through the child, of the community. Medical inspection which influences the health habits of the ma.s.ses is a matter of supreme importance. The teacher will have pupils of cleaner habits and healthier, with fewer interruptions and disturbances from absences.
”To make medical inspection successful physical examinations should uncover the anatomic, physiologic, and hygienic conditions. Every piece of advice given to a pupil that can be followed up should be followed up and the result recorded. No system of medical inspection in schools can be complete and permanently successful which does not eventually educate the parent and child to a sympathetic and cooperative relations.h.i.+p with the system.
Medical inspection is a force working for a better general education in personal hygiene and should coordinate with the cla.s.s room instruction.
Hence it must be a system in sympathetic relations.h.i.+p with the general [27]
management of the school, and should be under the same responsible control.
Since it is an educational influence and so directly related to the success of the school, it ought to be a part of the school organization.”
A paper was read by Dr. Helen C. Putnam of Providence, R. I., on ”The Teaching of Hygiene for Better Parentage.” She said:
”Life is a trust from fathers and mothers beginning before history; to be guarded and bettered in one's turn, and pa.s.sed along to children's children. A definite conception of this trust is essential to right living.
Educators are finding that well directed correlation of human life, with phenomena of growing things in school gardens and nature studies, develops a wholesome mental att.i.tude. Since tens of millions of our population have only fractions of primary schooling, there is where the teaching must begin. These primary years are the time to lay foundations before a wrong bias is established.
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