If the state requires the attendance of all children between the ages of five and fourteen at school for five hours a day, for five days in the week, for ten months in the year, then it should undertake to see that the machinery it provides for the education of those children for the greater part of the time for nine years of their lives--the formative years of their lives--is neither injuring their health nor retarding their full development. If the amount of "close-range" work is rapidly manufacturing myopic eyes; if bad ventilation, whether due to faulty construction or to faulty management, is preparing soil for the tubercle bacillus; if children with contagious diseases are not found and segregated; if desks are so ill adapted to children's sizes and physical needs that they are forming crooked spines; if too many children are crowded into one room; if lack of air and light is producing strained eyes and malnutrition; if neither open air, space, nor time is provided for exercise, games, and physical training; if school discipline is adapted neither to the psychology nor the physiology of child or teacher, then the state is depriving the child of a greater right than the compulsory education law forces it to endure. Not only is the right to health sacrificed to the right to education, but education and health are both sacrificed. In undertaking to enforce the compulsory education law, to put all truants and child laborers in school, the state should be very sure for its own sake that it is not depriving the child of the health on which depends his future usefulness to the state as well as to himself. TABLE XI EFFECTS OF A CHILD LABOR LAW Increase in Chicago Attendance Grades 4-9 ######## 1901-1902 ############# 1902-1903 ###################################################### 1903-1904 Grades 9-15 ####################### 1901-1902 #################### 1902-1903 ###################################################### 1903-1904 FOOTNOTES: [8] _The Sanitation of Public Buildings_, by William Paul Gerhard, contains a valuable discussion of how the school may avoid manufacturing physical defects. [9] By Professor Lila V. North, Baltimore College for Women, for the New York Committee on the Physical Welfare of School Children, 105 East 22d Street, New York City. CHAPTER XV THE TEACHER'S HEALTH "Teachers, gentlemen, no less than pupils, have a heaven-ordained right to work so adjusted that the highest possible physical condition shall be maintained automatically." This declaration thundered out by an indignant physician startled a well-meaning board of school directors. The teacher's right to health was, of course, obvious when once mentioned, and the directors concluded: