Civics and HealthAllen, William H. (WIlliam Harvey)
Science
Civics and Health
Allen, William H. (WIlliam Harvey)
Hygiene; Public health
If one illustration is better than ten lessons, if an open window is
worth more than all that text-books have to say about ventilation, if
a seat adjusted to the child is better than an anatomical chart, this
does not mean that instruction in hygiene should cease. On the
contrary, it means that provision should be made for every teacher to
open windows, to adjust desks, to use the experience of individual
children for the education of the class. If the rank and file of
teachers have not hitherto been sufficiently observant of physiological
and hygienic facts, if they are unprepared from their own lives to
detect or to furnish illustrations for the child, this again does not
mean that the child should be denied the illustrations, but that the
teacher should either have instruction and experience to incite
interest and to stimulate powers of observation, or else be asked to
give place to another teacher who is able to furnish such
qualifications.
5. _Children, like adults, can be interested in other people, in rules
of conduct, in social conditions, in living and working relations more
easily than in their own bodies._ The normal, healthy child thinks very
little of himself apart from the other boys and girls, the games, the
studies, the animals, the nature wonders, the hardships that come to
him from the outside. So true is this that one of the best means of
mitigating or curing many ailments is to divert the child's attention
from himself to things outside of himself that he can look at, hear,
enjoy. The power to concentrate attention upon oneself is a sign either
of a diseased body, a diseased mind, or a highly trained mind. To study
others and to recognize the similarity between others and oneself is as
natural as the body itself. Teachers are consulting this line of
easiest access to children's attention when they honor children
according to cleanliness of hands, of teeth, of shoes. Human interest
attaches to what parks or excursions are doing for sickly children, how
welfare work is improving factory employees, how smallpox is conquered
by vaccination, how insurance companies refuse to take risks upon the
lives of men or women addicted to the excessive use of alcohol or
tobacco.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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