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

by Ellen H. Richards

Hope for the future is to be found in the conclusions of the immigration commission, that in one generation certain marked changes in stature and in head measurements have taken place in the children of immigrants of various nationalities, such changes as have hitherto been considered as the result of centuries. The commissioners credit the better environment and larger opportunities with these indications of increasing intellectuality and mental force.

Most human efficiency is the result of habits rather than of innate ability. These habits of mind, as well as of body, are developed by the home life at an early age. The home is responsible for the upbringing of healthy, intelligent children. Here is the place for fostering the valuable and suppressing the harmful traits. The school can never take the place of the home in this. With the large classes of the public schools, the teacher should not be asked to undertake this individual work. Moreover, correcting a child for personal habits can hardly be effective before fifty or sixty pairs of critical eyes.

The office of the home must be to teach habits of right living and daily action, and a joy and pride in life as well as responsibility for life. It is not fair that the parents should sit back and shift to the school the whole responsibility for the future citizen.

The little modifications can best be made in the home, permanent foundations can be laid and braced with habits so good and strong that nothing can shake them. Most powers are the result of habits. Let the furrows be plowed deeply enough while the brain cells are plastic, then human energies will result in efficiency and the line of least resistance will be the right line. Everything, therefore, which influences the child must be the best known to science. The houses of the land must be regulated by the scientific laws of right living. To the woman, the home worker, we say: “You must have the will power, for the sake of your child, to bring to his service all that has been discovered for the promotion of human efficiency, so that he may have the habit, the technique.”

To pay a tax today for the benefit of one’s children is a principle of insurance, of benefit association. This feeling of obligation means present sacrifice of ease and inclination, and it has been increasingly shirked, so that it is not surprising that a tax to insure one against future loss by disease is an unwelcome proposition.

The whole question of the child in the home is one of ethics, as the writers on social conditions have been trying to convince the world. If the swarms of dwellers in the busy hives of industry have no sense of their humanity, if they do not use the human power of looking ahead, that power which differentiates man from animals, what better are they than animals?

No one can be sorry that there are no children in thousands of homes one knows. It is better that children should not have been born than to come into an inheritance of suffering and mental and moral dwarfing. Social uplift will not be possible while parents take the view of cats, or even of a well-to-do mother who said, “I did not have my baby to discipline her; I had her to play with.”

No state can thrive while its citizens waste their resources of health, bodily energy, time, and brain power, any more than a nation may prosper which wastes its natural resources.

America today is wasting its human possibilities even more prodigally than its material wealth. The latter deficiency is being brought to a halt. Shall the human side receive less attention? A sharply divided line between home and school is no longer clearly drawn. Parents’ associations are being formed and are coöperating with the school-teacher. To what end? To the better moral and intellectual atmosphere of the home. Physical education has had its vogue, but too much as an endeavor apart, not as a necessary element in the whole.

The pedagogical world is now becoming convinced that physical defects are more often than not the basis of mental incompetence, and this leads logically to the teaching of the laws of right living in a practical way, not merely as lessons from books, but as daily practice. This practice must eventually go into the home, where the most of the child’s hours are spent. It is as useless to expect good health from unsanitary houses as good English from two hours’ school training diluted by twelve hours of slovenly language. Hence the imperative need of such teaching and example as can be put into practice; and since immediate house to house renovation and change of view are impossible, the school must provide for teaching how to live wisely and sanely, as well as for clear thinking and æsthetic appreciation. Practical hygiene, food, cleanliness, sanitation, all must eventually be exemplified by the schoolhouse and taught as a part of a general education to all pupils, boys and girls.