conscientiously and not slighted.
- The schools should arrange for practical applications of the preparatory
knowledge in as many ways as possible. Children in relays can look after the
ventilation, temperature, humidity, dust, light, and other sanitary conditions of
school-rooms and grounds. They can make sanitary surveys of their home
district; engage in anti-fly, anti-mosquito, anti-dirt, and other campaigns; and
report—for credit possibly—practical sanitary and hygienic activities carried on
outside of school. Only as knowledge is put to work is it assimilated and the
prime purpose of education accomplished. - The corps of school nurses should be gradually enlarged, and after a time they
can be given any needed training for teaching that will enable them, as the work
is departmentalized in the grammar grades, to become departmental teachers in
this subject for a portion of their time. Their "follow-up" work will always give
them their chief educational opportunity; but to prepare for this the classwork
must give some systematized preparatory ideas.
In the high schools, training of boys in hygiene and sanitation is little developed.
The only thing offered them is an elective half-year course in physiology in the
senior year of the scientific and English courses in the academic high schools. In
the classical course, and in the technical and commercial schools, they have not
even this. Physiology is required of girls in the technical schools, and is elective
in all but the classical course in the others. While in one or two of the high
schools there is training in actual hygiene and sanitation, in most cases it is
physiology and anatomy of a superficial preliminary type which is not put to use
and which therefore mostly fails of normal assimilation.
The things recommended for the elementary schools need to be carried out in the
high schools also.