Civics and HealthAllen, William H. (WIlliam Harvey)
Science
Civics and Health
Allen, William H. (WIlliam Harvey)
Hygiene; Public health
The term "school hygiene" generally suggests no other school than the
public school. State laws say nothing about compulsory hygiene in
military academies, ladies' seminaries, or other preparatory and
finishing schools. Yet when one thinks of it, one must conclude that
the right to health and to healthful school environment cannot
equitably be confined to the children whose tuition is given at public
expense. There is a better way to check "swollen" fortunes than by
ruining the health of "fortune's children." The waste and danger of
slow-minded, noticeably inefficient children are no less when parents
are rich than when parents are poor. There is no justification for
neglecting the health of children in parochial schools, in private
schools for the well-to-do or rich, or in commercial schools for the
ambitious youth of lower income strata. Nor has the commercial,
parochial, private school, or college, any clearer right than the
public school to injure or to fail to promote pupils' health. So far as
school hygiene is advisable, so far as it is right to make hygiene
compulsory, its personal and social benefits should be shared by
children of school age without regard to income, and its laws should be
enforced by all teachers, principals, and officers that have to do
with school. In presenting a programme for school hygiene this chapter
refers to the hygiene taught, the hygiene practiced, the hygiene not
taught, and the hygiene not practiced in buildings and on grounds where
children and youth are at school, whether these children are in
kindergarten or high school, in reformatory or military academy, in
charitable school, or in finishing and preparing center for society's
juniors.
The question of the local, state, and national machinery by which
proper standards of school hygiene shall be made effective will be
taken up after we have considered individual steps in a comprehensive
programme for school hygiene.
1. _Thorough physical examination of all candidates for teachers'
positions and periodic reexamination of accepted teachers._
Teachers would be grateful to be told in time their own physical needs
and the relations of their vitality to the vitality of their pupils.
Are your teachers examined? Do they know the laws of health and the
signs of child health? Are they permitted to continue in schoolrooms
after tuberculosis is discovered? Are normal graduates given physical
tests before being permitted to teach and before being permitted to
give four years to preparation for teaching?
2. _Thorough physical examination of every single child in every single
school upon entering and periodically during school life._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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