JI Magazine for your Reading Table
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS' PAGE
T HAS been es
timated that the
money value to
society of the
average human
life is about two
Dr. Daiido. S
thousand nine hundred dollars. On
this basis, our vital assets could be reck
oned at, roughly, two hundred and fifty
billion dollars. Against this, set the
one hundred and ten billions of dollars
at which the physical wealth of the
United States is figured, and even the
most arrant materialist will admit that
the conservation of human life is more
important than the conservation of
forests or the eradication of diseases
among cattle and hogs.
The most promising field for con
serving life and health is the unformed
and still plastic child. Tariff-making, coinage, banking and such are
comparatively incidental issues in this fundamental problem of raising
the physical, mental and moral level of the next generation. This leads
us directly to the teacher and the school-room.
Wholesome habits of living cannot be legislated into men and women,
but the health habits of the young can certainly be influenced and
foreshaped. Medical inspection of schools, which began as a reflection
of popular interest in matters of health, will end by becoming a most
effective means for the attainment of a higher national vitality. "Medi
cal inspection" has already become "health supervision" and the latter
is rapidly including more effective methods of health teaching. The
main purpose of health teach
ing is not so much to inculcate
knowledge about diseases as to
insure habits of living which
will enable children to escape
diseases and inefficiency. The
school hygiene of today is not
the school hygiene of yester
day, but infinitely broader. It
has earnestly attacked the
whole problem of child welfare.
And this is right, for there is no
other institution through the
agency of which we can come
so near reaching all the children
of all the people.
It would be rash to set any
bounds to the school's possible
contribution to this end. In its
vocational instruction, play
supervision, moral education,
health examination, school feed
ing, and medical and dental
clinics, the school has once for
all cut loose from its moorings
to the three Rs.
It is foolish and short-sighted
to suppose that greater care and
activity on the part of the
schools in these matters will
undermine the parental sense
of responsibility, as some think.
Instead, it seems to be a uni
versal law that the greater the
interest which society takes in
the child the more the parental
interest is stimulated.
Starr Jordan
A CRUSADE FOR TWENTY MILLION
SCHOOL CHILDREN
By David Starr Jordan
Chancellor of Leland Stanford University
The Heavy Toll of Disease
THE school must not think of
children merely in terms of
what they are. It must consider
also their probable future. Now
barring the possibility of some
great medical discovery which
For Everybody,
Everywhere
For workers with hand or brain for rich and poor
every kind of people in every walk of life there'
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.THE COCA-COLA COMPANY
ATLANTA, CA.
will eradicate the disease, the
certain fate of some two mil
lion of our school children
will be to die an early death
of tuberculosis. This is many
times the number that will
die of smallpox, diphtheria, scarlet fever
and typhoid combined. Of the girls
who die between the ages of ten and
fifteen years, tuberculosis takes one
third. Too often tuberculosis steals the
boy while teachers wrangle over rival
methods of teaching him grammar or
spelling. It is one of the functions of
school hygiene to discover means of
aborting this tragedy.
Consider that at least 10,000,000 of
our school children (fifty per cent) are
or have been infected with tuberculosis,
while other diseases claim a large toll.
Some 2,000,000 (ten per cent) are suffering from a grave form of mal
nutrition; 10,000,000 (fifty per cent) have enough defective teeth to
interfere seriously with health ; at least 2,000,000 (ten per cent) suffer
from obstructed breathing due to adenoids or enlarged tonsils; prob
ably 2,000,000 (ten per cent) have enlarged cervical glands which need
attention, many of these being tuberculous; 4,000,000 (twenty per
cent) have defective vision; over 1,000,000 (five per cent) have de
fective hearing; about 1,000,000 (five per cent) have spinal curvature
or some other deformity likely to interfere with health; not far from
500,000 (two and one-half per cent) have organic heart disease ; and at
least 1,000,000 (five per cent) are predisposed to some other form of
serious nervous disorder. To
grapple with this greatand grave
problem leading educators will
convene at Buffalo next month
in the Fourth International
Congress On School Hygiene.
Sex Hygiene For All
A NOTHER great need is the
teaching of sex hygiene.
This is not only one of the most
important, but one of the most
difficult and embarrassing du
ties of the teacher. The end in
view is to make certain elemen
tary ideas common property of
all intelligent people; to make
them a matter of course, to be
used unconsciously as a basis
of conduct.
So long as information of this
kind is forbidden knowledge, or
knowledge to be obtained on
the sly, so long will the danger
of sex perversion exist.
It is especially important that
teachers be trained to take the
biological point of view. The
task of molding a human life
can only be accomplished by an
appeal to those biological proc
esses common alike to animals
and to man. Therefore, teach
ers may be expected to famil
iarize themselves, for example,
with the laws of growth, the
order of physiological maturity,
the causes of mortality and mor
bidity, the relations between
physical and mental conditions
and the causes of fatigue. When
we have accepted this point of
view we shall cease to raise up
phantoms for children to fear in
their groping ignorance.
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