PHYSICAL EDUCATION.
The physical education of children is a very simple matter, too simple to be much attended to without great perseverance and resolution on the part of those who care for the children. It consists, as we all know, in good air, simple diet, sufficient exercise, and judicious clothing. The first requisite is the most important, and by far the most frequently neglected. This neglect is not so unreasonable as it seems. It arises from pure ignorance. If the mass of mankind knew what scientific men know about the functions of the air, they would be as careful in getting a good supply of it as of their other food. All the people that ever were supposed to die of poison in the middle ages, and that means nearly everybody whose death was worth speculating about, are not so many as those who die poisoned by bad air in the course of any given year. Even a slightly noxious thing, which is constant, affecting us every moment of the day, must have considerable influence; but the air we breathe is not a thing that slightly affects us, but one of the most important elements of life. Moreover, children are the most affected by impurity of air. We need not weary ourselves with much statistics to ascertain this. One or two broad facts will assure us of it. In Nottingham there is a district called Byron Ward, “the densest and worst-conditioned quarter of the town.” A table has been made by Mr. William Hawksley of the mortality of equal populations in different parts of the town:
“On comparing the diagram No. 1, relating to Park Ward, with the diagram No. 7, relating to Byron Ward, it will be seen that the heavier pressure of the causes of mortality occasions in the latter district such an undue destruction of early life, that towards 100 deaths, however occurring, Byron Ward contributes fifty per cent. more of children under five years of age than the Park Ward, for the former sends sixty children to an early grave, while the latter sends only forty.” [116a]
Mr. Hawksley, the former witness alluded to, goes on to say—
“It has been long known that, with increase of years, up to that period of life which has been denominated the second childhood, the human constitution becomes gradually more resistful, and as it were slowly hardened against the repeated attacks of those more acute disorders, incident to an inferior degree of sanitary civilisation, by which large portions of an infant population are continually overcome and rapidly swept away. From the operation of these and more extraneous influences of a disturbing character, an infant population is almost entirely exempted; and on this account it is considered that an infant population constitutes, as it were, a delicate barometer, from which we may derive more early and more certain indications of the presence and comparative force of local causes of mortality and disease than can be obtained from the more general methods of investigation usually pursued.”
The above evidence is confirmed by Mr. Toynbee:—
“The disease of hydrocephalus, of water in the brain, so fatal to children, I find associated with symptoms of scrofula, and arising in abundance in these close rooms. I believe water in the brain, in the class of patients whom I visit, to be almost wholly a scrofulous affection.” [116b]
But supposing people aware of the necessity for good air, and therefore for ventilation, what is to be done? In houses in great towns certainly, and I should say in all houses, some of the care and expense that are devoted to ornamental work, which when done is often a care, a trouble, an eyesore, and a mischief, should be given to modes of ventilation, [117a] sound building, abundant access of light, largeness of sleeping-rooms, and such useful things. Less ormolu and tinsel of all kinds in the drawing-rooms, and sweeter air in the regions above. Similar things may be done for and by the poor. [117b] And it need hardly be said that those people who care for their children, if of any enlightenment at all, will care greatly for the sanitary condition of their neighbourhood generally. At present you will find at many a rich man’s door [117c] a nuisance which is poisoning the atmosphere that his children are to breathe, but which he could entirely cure for less than one day’s ordinary expenses.
I am afraid that ventilation is very little attended to in school-rooms, either for rich or poor. Now it may be deliberately said that there is very little learned in any school-room that can compensate for the mischief of its being learned in the midst of impure air. This is a thing which parents must look to, for the grown-up people in the school-rooms, though suffering grievously themselves from insufficient ventilation, will be unobservant of it. [118] In every system of government inspection, ventilation must occupy a prominent part.
The advantage of simple food for children is a thing that people have found out. And as regards exercise, children happily make great efforts to provide a sufficiency of this for themselves. In clothing, the folly and conformity of grown-up people enter again. Loving mothers, in various parts of the world, carry about at present, I believe, and certainly in times past, carried their little children strapped to a board, with nearly as little power of motion as the board itself. Could we get the returns of stunted miserable beings, or of deaths, from this cause, they would be something portentous. Less in degree, but not less fatally absurd in principle, are many of the strappings, bandages, and incipient stays for children amongst us. They are all mischievous. Allow children, at any rate, some freedom of limbs, some opportunity of being graceful and healthy. Give Nature—dear motherly, much-abused Nature—some chance of forming these little ones according to the beneficent intentions of Providence, and not according to the angular designs of ill-educated men and women.
I do not say that attention to the above matters of good air, judicious clothing, and freedom from bandages, will absolutely secure health, because these very things may have been so ill attended to in the parents or in the parental stock as to have introduced special maladies; but at least they are the most important objects to be minded now; and, perhaps, the more to be minded in the children of those who have suffered most from neglect in these particulars.
When we are considering the health of children, it is imperative not to omit the importance of keeping their brains fallow, as it were, for several of the first years of their existence. The mischief perpetrated by a contrary course in the shape of bad health, peevish temper, and developed vanity, is incalculable. It would not be just to attribute this altogether to the vanity of parents; they are influenced by a natural fear lest their children should not have all the advantages of other children. Some infant prodigy which is a standard of mischief throughout its neighbourhood misleads them. But parents may be assured that this early work is not by any means all gain, even in the way of work. I suspect it is a loss; and that children who begin their education late, as it would be called, will rapidly overtake those who have been in harness long before them. And what advantage can it be that the child knows more at six years old than its compeers, especially if this is to be gained by a sacrifice of health which may never be regained? There may be some excuse for this early book-work in the case of those children who are to live by manual labour. It is worth while, perhaps, to run the risk of some physical injury to them, having only their early years in which we can teach them book-knowledge. The chance of mischief, too, will be less, being more likely to be counteracted by their after-life. But for a child who has to be at book-work for the first twenty-one years of its life, what folly it is to exhaust in the least the mental energy, which, after all, is its surest implement.
A similar course of argument applies to taking children early to church, and to over-developing their minds in any way. There is no knowing, moreover, the disgust and weariness that may grow up in the minds of young persons from their attention being prematurely claimed. We are now, however, looking at early study as a matter of health; and we may certainly put it down in the same class with impure air, stimulating diet, unnecessary bandages, and other manifest physical disadvantages. Civilised life, as it advances, does not seem to have so much repose in it, that we need begin early in exciting the mind, for fear of the man being too lethargical hereafter.