Euthenics, the science of controllable environment / A plea for better living conditions as a first step toward higher human efficiency

by Ellen H. Richards

FAITH AND HOPE

Progress is a series of zigzags: now the individual goes ahead of the community; now the community outstrips the individual.

The community cannot rise much above the level of the individual home, and the home rises only by the pull of the community regulations, or by the initiative of a few especially farsighted individuals.

The steps need to be carefully measured, for if the family begins to rely on the State for the backbone it should have, it will not stay up, and its fall will be lower than the stage it rose from. “When man reverts, he goes not to Nature, but to death.”

The example set by the city in maintaining clean streets and well-kept parks reacts upon the home yards. The insistence by the police on city regulations as to alleys and garbage educates the family as to the general attention to be paid to such things.

The city authorities, on the other hand, are prodded to their work by well-informed individuals who see the great gain to the community from certain measures.

The centers of movement, civic and quasi-religious or philanthropic, are usually the outgrowth of individual effort. The great movements for betterment—water supply, street cleaning, tenement laws, etc.—are carried out by community agreement with a common tax outlay.

The clean city means streets of clean houses. The clean house in the midst of a dirty city may be the match to start a fire of cleansing.

Probably medical inspection in the public school is as good an example as may be given of helpfulness to the community. No quicker means of influencing both home and community life may be found, for in five years it might revolutionize the whole.

School buildings should be so constructed and so managed that they cannot themselves either produce or aggravate physical defects. Departments of school hygiene should be organized, not only in every city, but for every rural school under county and state superintendents of instruction. The general question of physical welfare of children involves too many considerations to be satisfactorily treated by school physician and school nurse alone, or by busy teachers and principals.