Difficulties of introducing Health Instruction
Health work in the schools, as it has risen to the level of a subject of instruction, has encountered the kind of obstacles met by every new school subject. Teachers are ignorant on medical matters, and the doctors who come into the schools are ignorant of methods of teaching. The result is that the instruction given by teachers is sometimes formal and unscientific, while the work of the doctors does not prove as effective as it might because it does not reach the pupils. A partial corrective for this difficulty can be supplied through a better system of training teachers.
The following extracts from a paper by Dr. Allison show how one state is attempting to cope with this problem:
In this tremendous but not superhuman task of teaching health, there seems to me no more effective method than to commit it to those who are and are to be the teachers. Progress in these matters cannot be made without an intelligent understanding on the part of the teacher. It is therefore important to teach the teacher. It is said that the normal school is historically the only institution in the country which has aimed to deal with the teaching problem.
The Board of Regents of the normal schools of Wisconsin felt the need of making the normal schools of the state instruments of public health and in 1912 appointed a physician for this work. The work as organized consists of: (1) exclusion of the physically unfit among the normal-school students; (2) detection of remedial physical defects with suggestions in regard to same; (3) instruction in preventive medicine.
1. The term “physically unfit” is very elastic, but we should have some physical standard. The public has not been in a position to protect itself against those physically unfit in the profession, but it is beginning to make certain demands. For example, what community will now tolerate a teacher who is known to be tuberculous? It is well to enlighten these physically unfit, and stop the source of the physically undesirable, as we would the intellectually undesirable.
My experience with several thousand young men and women during the last three years has shown me that the health habits of teachers need improving....
2. In the normal schools of Wisconsin a health-record card for each student is on file in the department of physical training. The side filled out by the physical-training teacher consists of a record of height, weight, and lung capacity, the neck, chest, and hip measurements, and a detailed record of posture. The physician’s report includes a record of the past medical history, personal history, sex history, family history, and the present condition of nutrition, skin, eyes, ears, nose, throat, teeth, glands, lungs, heart, and elimination. Each student is advised in accordance with the conditions which are found....
3. Instruction in preventive medicine consists of individual advice and classroom instruction as follows:
(a) Personal hygiene. This supplements what they have studied from the text and what they have received from the instructors of hygiene and physical training.
(b) A couple of lectures are given on the physical examination of school children. Teachers should be taught the essential facts about defective vision, defective hearing, adenoids, catarrh, diseased tonsils, nervousness, and mental defects....
(c) Lectures are given on the cause, avenue of infection, mode of transmission, period of incubation, symptoms, complications, results, and prevention of the following communicable and preventable diseases: measles, scarlet fever, chicken-pox, smallpox, mumps, whooping cough, grippe, pneumonia, tuberculosis, diphtheria, meningitis, and infantile paralysis.[92]