THE TEACHER’S HEALTH
By Lewis M. Terman. Houghton, Mifflin Co. 136 pp. Price $.60; by mail of The Survey $.66.
“Teaching as a Dangerous Trade” might have been the title of this book. Eighty-four per cent of 159 teachers in Springfield, Mass., testified that in their opinion the teacher of average physical constitution suffers distinct impairment of health within five to ten years after beginning service. Between 1906 and 1909 over a quarter of the elementary teachers of Sweden were absent one year or more on account of illness.
But it is not as a matter of mere personal concern to the profession that the teacher’s health is here considered; rather as a factor in school efficiency. Medical inspection of schools is partial so long as it takes no notice of teachers, for “the health of the child is intricately related to that of its teacher.” There is a subtler way in which weak lungs and neurasthenia among the half million teachers who are molding the intellect and character of twenty million children in this country may affect the development of those children. As the editor’s introduction puts it: “If the teacher’s conscious pedagogical method transmits truth, it is the unconscious influence of his personality that gives it that bias of meaning which the fact will forever after have for the pupil.” And nowadays we are coming to know how much personality is shaped by physical and mental health.
Winthrop D. Lane.