To counteract the bad effect of long sitting, even at properly adjusted desks, children should be frequently sent to blackboards, and at regular intervals a few minutes are to be given to "setting up" exercises.
Great attention should be paid to the eyesight of children. Those that complain of headache should have their eyes examined. The lines in school books should be not more than four inches in length, and they are to be printed in clear, well-leaded type. Slates are dirty and unsanitary: let the children write on paper that has a dull finish.
Teachers should prevent lounging positions at desks, especially stooping. They are not, however, to try to make children under fifteen years of age sit still. The youngsters can not remain immovable, and the effort to make them do so is irritating to no purpose.
Nervous children need outdoor exercise more than anything else. When nervousness takes the form of religious scrupulosity in school-children and novices do not immediately apply a moral theology to them—call in a physician that has common-sense, because there is a nervous scrupulosity which is much more frequently met with than the purely spiritual form. Aridity in prayer, a loss of sensible devotion, and similar troubles have to do with advance in the spiritual life, but they more commonly have to do with the liver in persons that are not nearly so important spiritually as they fancy they are; and in these cases the cook is the particular devil at fault, if they have exercise enough.
One of the chief sanitary evils in our boarding-schools, convents, and similar institutions, is the stupid sameness in the food which may be otherwise unobjectionable. The meat, for example, may be good, but the college and seminary cook sends it into the refectory chilled and clammy, or hot and overdone. In any case it is everlastingly the [{209}] same. Children can predict a dinner's ingredients a month in advance.
Give children meat twice a day; white flour in their bread, because it is digested better than whole flour; all the sugar they want at meals; milk rather than tea, and tea rather than coffee; but let it be tea, not a dose of tannic acid.
The physical education of girls is neglected. Their general education is effeminate rather than feminine. If a convent faculty grows bold and "modern" it hires a teacher of gymnastics, puts an "extra" on the bill of expense, and ten or twelve wealthy girls play at gymnastics if they are not too lazy. Even if the whole school is obliged to attend the club-swinging and posturing and the other nonsense, little good is done. Girls should be kept out of doors for their exercise, and fresh air is much cheaper than a gymnastic teacher. If school-girls were forced into the open air more, they would not have time for munching caramels over the erotic spasms of Araminta and Reginald in the popular novel, and there would be advantage in the change. The absence of daily, regular, and sufficient exercise renders girls listless, anaemic, sallow, foul-breathed, melancholy, stooped, irritable.
Do not permit boys under eighteen years of age to go into regular training for college track-teams. Their hearts are not strong enough for the strain.
Boys should not use tobacco in any form, but it is useless to try to make them believe this statement. Tobacco stunts a boy, causes dyspepsia, and renders his mind dull. The measurements made for years at Yale, Amherst, and other colleges, by physical directors, show remarkable reduction in the height and chest expansion in tobacco users as compared with boys that do not smoke. Cigarette smoking would not be different from other smoking if it did not so readily tend to excess. Cigarette smoke is inhaled more than the smoke from cigars and pipes, and thus more of the injurious ingredients of tobacco are absorbed.