Conservation of Health in the School Boom
The Psychological Clinic Vol. III. No. 5. October 15, 1909. :Author: S. L. Heetek, Superintendent of Schools, Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Despite the advance made of recent years in school architecture and in tlie mechanical equipment of schools by modernizing our plumbing, heating, and ventilating; despite the scientific methods of municipal boards of health in dealing with contagion and infection; despite the fact that our schools are better to-day than ever before in the history of the world, our teachers better trained, better informed and more conscientious than ever before, we cannot refute the charge that we do not properly protect and promote health in our school rooms. Great crimes of ignorance and neglect are committed against health in our city homes, flats, schools, churches, office buildings, railway coaches, and all places where people congregate.
So far as the public schools are concerned we have not yet met the problem of sanitation. I believe it is largely due to the fact that we have not placed the responsibility where it belongs. I believe we have too long held teachers exclusively responsible for matters that should be under the supervision of some one else. We certainly cannot consider our teachers responsible for the choice of a building site, for the condition of school grounds, for bad architecture, lack of drainage, defective plumbing, unsanitary water supply, the care of our school buildings and the spread of contagious and infectious diseases. And I have been forced to conclude of late that we cannot and should not ever trust our most conscientious teachers to regulate heat and fresh air in our school rooms.
Here arises the proverbial quarrel between engineer and teacher, caused by the need of fresh air on the one hand and the inadequacy of mechanical devices on the other hand. She must have fresh air and the windows go up. He cannot heat “all out doors” and the success of his mechanical device depends upon hermetically sealed rooms.
There is one question no longer in my mind. It is not a teacher’s business to sweep her own floors, scrub her own blackboards, dust her own erasers, empty her own waste basket, regulate her own dampers, do messenger service day after day to engineers and janitors. We should not make sweeps and scrub-women of our teachers. I wonder if we should hold that teacher culpable who becomes so interested in the training of a child, that she forgets winds, dampers, registers, thermometers, and thermostats. Teachers and children alike should be furnished buildings properly heated, properly ventilated, and properly cared for from morning to night. The time must soon come when our engineers and janitors will be men of good health and good habits. They will then not only present a respectable appearance during school hours, but see to it that our school rooms are kept at a temperature of sixty-eight, that a constant current of fresh air is supplied to every room either by the new patent mechanical devices or by old-fashioned methods, all with due regard to health in our school rooms.
My point is that it is incumbent upon school authorities, not the teacher, to provide for our schools such physical environment as will both protect and promote health. Our laws will some day fix the responsibility and require that the heating and ventilating of every school building shall be in the hands of an expert,? engineer, janitor, or even the school principal,?some one other than the teacher doing active educational work,?who should 110 more be permitted to expose children and teachers live hours a day to a poorly heated and ventilated room than to expose them to small-pox in an unfumigated room.
The physical environment of the child will therefore be put under the vigilant supervision of some oi?e other than the teacher,? but there is a different responsibility that belongs to the teacher. She must come more and more to realize her obligations to the physical child. I am strong in the conviction that we as teachers have been giving more consideration to the minds of our pupils than we have to their bodies. We have made a specialty of psychology and have slighted physiology. Except in extreme cases, we take but little note of physical abnormalities?those defects of mind and body which undermine health and defeat school progress. Wo have thought more about the subjects taught, methods, devices, courses of study, than about sleep, diet, physical habits, exercise, and a score of bodily ailments common to childCONSERVATION OF HEALTH 123 hood. Class room instruction rather than the child and the direction of his daily life still engrosses our attention. We still crowd our children into uniform, non-adjustable desks; we fail to detect incipient cases of physical ailments and ignore the retarding effects of abnormal physical conditions; we fail as yet to adapt our requirements to the period of adolescence. We continue to classify our children according to mental attainments or years of age, and not according to physiological age; we have thus far made but little investigation into fatigue, its causes, symptoms and alleviation; we are making only a beginning at a study of the problem of defective children, retardation and elimination. Only within the last few years have we known what is meant by an adenoid face; we have just begun to discover the corrective effect of play on fatigue, malposture, defective breathing, poor circulation and similar evils; we deny our children outdoor recesses and offer no organized play and group games in the open air. The school life of the child has been lengthened, our population is congregated in cities, contagion and infection are more difficult to control, attendance is seriously interrupted by children’s ailments, and yet we make our chief concern the course of study, examination, tests, promotions and graduations. A new responsibility is laid upon us,?not the responsibility of school room sanitation, dealing with the environment of teacher and child, which should be left to board of health, school board, architect, engineers and janitors,?but a responsibility in meeting the physical needs of the individual child. Health must come first in our education scheme. Mind and body can no longer be separated in our educational process. All education must have its beginning in the physiology of the human body. For twenty-five years our American schools have endeavored to break away from the lock-step, intellectually. All children were received too long on an equality and treated alike regardless of varying mental capacities. Our American schools have developed on the supposed democratic theory that all children are equal in mental attainment; but they are not equal, never have been, and never can be.
So, the next movement in education will break the lock-step physically, and will lead to the adaptation of the schools to meet the physical needs of our mouth-breathing laggards, and our palefaced anemics,?boys and girls in our schools who fall behind in our intellectual programs, become disheartened, grow into an utter dislike of school, and drop out as truants only to become delin124 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLINIC quents and incorrigibles, filling our parental schools, juvenile courts, detention homes, and state training schools. Here is the problem before every city school system in this country, that of providing for the actual physical needs of the unfortunate half whose progress in school is defeated by abnormal physical conditions of body and brain.
We have opened the doors of five hundred thousand school rooms in this country, have offered the means of an intellectual education to the millions, have extended our school year from three to ten months; we have lengthened our courses of study and advanced our standards. We have passed our compulsory education laws and have attempted to force a modicum of learning upon every child whether he will or not. Hundreds of thousands of teachers in the length and breadth of this land make their monthly reports to parents, grade the intellectual progress or failure of children, and with it all, close their eyes to diseases, abnormalities and defects impairing school work.
Meanwhile, one-third of the youth in this land drop out of our schools with the sixth grade. They come to a point in our culture programs where they stop short. They are physically and mentally and socially incompetent to go farther. They arrive at a state of arrested development even inside our school rooms. They clog our educational machinery, constitute a drag on our school systems as an army of repeaters, or else they leave our schools as failures and join the rank and file of idle youth, or run up and down our city streets from one trifling job to another. Who dare in the face of these facts count the cost of a single school physician and a school nurse, and disregard the cost of ill-health, stifled ambition, inefficient and dependent lives, wrecked homes, and despondent families? The scientific physical examination of every child who enters our schools represents not expense but economy. Who dare say that the state has no right and no duty in this matter? We stand for a strict enforcement of compulsory education, and yet the law that compels school attendance of all kinds of children will be dangerous indeed if the larger assembly of pupils is not followed by closer physical supervision.
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