Health Work in the Public Schools | Page 2

is prevention and cure.
Ever since its establishment the good results of medical inspection have been evident. Epidemics have been checked or avoided. Improvements have been noted in the cleanliness and neatness of the children. Teachers and parents have come to know that under the new system it is safe for children to continue in school in times of threatened or actual epidemic.

HEALTH AND SCHOOL PROGRESS
But medical inspection does not confine itself to dealing with contagious disease. Its aid has been invoked to help the child who is backward in his school studies. With the recent extensions in the length of the school term and the increase in the number of years of schooling demanded of the child, has come a great advance in the standards of the work required. When the standards were low, the work was not beyond the capacity of even the weaker children; but with close grading, fuller courses, higher standards, and constantly more insistent demands for intellectual attainment, conditions have changed. Pupils have been unable to keep up with their classes. The terms "backward," "retarded," and "exceptional," as applied to school children, have been added to the vocabularies of educators.
School men discovered that the drag-net of compulsory education was bringing into school hundreds of children who were unable to keep step with their companions, and because this interfered with the orderly administration of the school system, they began to ask why the children were backward.
The school physicians helped to find the answer when they showed that hundreds of these children were backward simply because of removable physical defects. And then came the next great forward step, the realization that children are not dullards through the will of an inscrutable Providence, but rather through the law of cause and effect.

EXAMINATIONS FOR PHYSICAL DEFECTS
This led to an extension of the scope of medical inspection to include the physical examination of school children with the aim of discovering whether or not they were suffering from such defects as would handicap their educational progress and prevent them from receiving the full benefit of the free education furnished by the state. This work was in its infancy five years ago, but today Cleveland has a thorough and comprehensive system of physical examination of its school children.
Surprising numbers of children have been found who, through defective eyesight, have been seriously handicapped in their school work. Many are found to have defective hearing. Other conditions are found which have a great and formerly unrecognized influence on the welfare, happiness, and mental vigor of the child. Attention has been directed to the real significance of adenoids and enlarged tonsils, of swollen glands and carious teeth.
Teachers and parents have come to realize that the problem of the pupil with defective eyesight may be quite as important to the community as that of the pupil who has some contagious disease. If a child who is unable to see distinctly is placed in a school where physical defects are unrecognized and disregarded, headaches, eyestrain, and failure follow all his efforts at study. He cannot see the blackboards and charts; printed books are indistinct or are seen only with much effort, everything is blurred. Neither he nor his teacher knows what is the matter, but he soon finds it impossible to keep pace with his companions, and, becoming discouraged, he falls behind in the unequal race.
In no better plight is the child suffering from enlarged tonsils and adenoids, which prevent proper nasal breathing and compel him to keep his mouth open in order to breathe. Perhaps one of his troubles is deafness. He is soon considered stupid. This impression is strengthened by his poor progress in school. Through no fault of his own he is doomed to failure. He neglects his studies, hates his school, leaves long before he has completed the course, and is well started on the road to an inefficient and despondent life.
Public schools are a public trust. When the parent delivers his child to their care he has a right to insist that the child under the supervision of the school authorities shall be safe from harm and shall be handed back to him in at least as good condition as when it entered school. Even if the parent does not insist upon it, the child himself has a right to claim protection. The child has a claim upon the state and the state a claim upon the child which demands recognition. Education without health is useless. It would be better to sacrifice the education if, in order to attain it, the child must lay down his good health as a price. Education must comprehend the whole man and the whole man is built fundamentally on what he is physically.

OBJECTIONS TO MEDICAL INSPECTION
The objection that the school has no right to permit or require