Civics and HealthAllen, William H. (WIlliam Harvey)
Science
Civics and Health
Allen, William H. (WIlliam Harvey)
Hygiene; Public health
To give working papers to children seriously handicapped by physical
defects is to buy future industrial trouble, hospital and poorhouse
bills. A boy with adenoids, a girl with eye trouble, should not be
permitted to begin the fight for self-support without at least being
clearly shown that the correction of these defects will increase their
earning power. At present a schoolgirl with incipient tuberculosis, or
predisposed to that disease, can get working papers, go to a hammock or
tobacco factory, work long hours, breathe bushels of dust, deplete her
vitality, spread tuberculosis among her co-workers and home associates,
infect a tenement,--and all this without any help or advice or any
protection from society until she is too sick to work and her physician
notifies the health department that she is a danger center. We may
disagree about society's right to control a child's act after the
defects are discovered, but who will question society's duty to tell
that child and her parents the truth about her physical needs before it
accepts her labor or permits her to "enter society"?
4. _Supervision by physicians of hygiene practiced in schoolrooms and
on playgrounds._
Superintendent Maxwell, of New York City, and other educational leaders
urge teachers to do their utmost to learn the physical conditions and
home environment of the individual child, and to fit school treatment
to the individual possibilities and handicaps. But experience proves
conclusively that try as they will, teachers and principals have
neither the special knowledge nor the time to acquire the special
knowledge requisite to use the facts disclosed by the physical
examination of school children. Physicians and nurses are needed, not
so much for treating children, as for teaching children, parents,
teachers, family and dispensary physicians.
Private schools have visiting physicians who may be consulted; they
need physicians to supervise, with power to examine or to require
certificates of examination. The Committee on the Physical Welfare of
School Children found that when a visitor was detailed for that purpose
it was easy to secure the cooeperation of parents, teachers, family
physicians, dispensaries, school boards, and charitable societies. The
Hawthorne Club's school secretary has been similarly successful in
Boston, as have those of Hartley House, Greenwich House, and the Public
Education Association in New York.
5. _Restriction of study hours at school and at home to limits
compatible with health._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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