In addition to such motives for human prophylaxis, a more immediate interest should lead us to the pedagogic protection of weak children. The establishment of special schools for defective children, sanatarium-schools for tuberculous children, rural schools for those afflicted with malaria and pellagra, infant asylums for rachitic children, is a work of many-sided utility. They constitute a fundamental and radical purification of the schools for normal children: in fact, so long as intellectual and moral defectives and children suffering from infantilism and rachitis intermingle with healthy pupils, we cannot say that there really exist any schools for normal children, in which pedagogy may be allowed a free progress in the art of developing the best forces in the human race.
Still another useful side to the question is that of putting a stop to the physiological ruin of individual weaklings. Very small would be the cost of schools for defective children, asylums for the rachitic, tonics, quinine, the iodide treatment, school refectories for little children afflicted with hereditary taints and organic disease: very small indeed, in comparison to the disastrous losses that society must one day suffer at the hands of these future criminals and parasites gathered into prisons, insane asylums and hospitals, in comparison to the harm that may be done by one single victim of tuberculosis by spreading the homicidal bacilli around him. It is a principal of humanity as well as of economy to utilise all human forces, even when they are represented by beings who are apparently negligible. To every man, no matter how physiologically wretched, society should stretch a helping hand, to raise him. In North America the following principle has the sanction of social custom: that the task of improving physiological conditions and at the same time of instilling hope and developing inferior mentalities to the highest possible limit constitutes an inevitable human duty.
Accordingly it remains for the science of pedagogy to accomplish the high task of human redemption, which must take its start from those miracles that the twentieth century has already initiated in almost every civilised country: straightening the crippled, giving health to the sick, awakening the intelligence in the weak-minded—much as hearing is restored to the deaf and speech to the mutes—such is the work which modern progress demands of the teacher. Because such straightening of mind and body naturally lies within the province of those who have the opportunity to give succor to the human being still in the course of development; while after a defect has reached its complete development in an individual, no manner of help can ever modify the harm that has resulted from lack of intelligent treatment.
The prevention of the irremediable constitutes a large part of the work which is incumbent upon us as educators.
Summary of Stature
We have been considering stature as the linear index of the whole complex development of the body, taking it in relation to two other factors, the one internal or biological, and the other external or social. These two factors, indeed, unite in forming the character of the individual in his final development; and in each of them education may exert its influence, both in connection with the hygiene of generation and through reforms instituted in the school.
In the following table are summed up the different points of view from which we have studied stature in its biological characteristics and in its variations:
| Varieties of stature | Ethnic varieties and limits of oscillation | Stature in different races; extreme limits. |
| Stature of the Italian people; and its geographical distribution. | ||
| Limits of stature: medium, tall, low. | ||
| Biological varieties | Difference of stature in the sexes. | |
| Stature at different ages (growth). | ||
| Variations in stature | Variations due to adaptation | Mechanical | Transitory or physiological. |
| Permanent, often caused by deformities (Causes: the attitudes required by the work.) | ||
| Physiological | Nutrition. | |
| Physical | Heat. | |
| Light. | ||
| Electricity. | ||
| Psychic | Psychic stimuli. | |
| Pathological variations | Infantilism | Myxedematous. |
| Dystrophic | from alcohol. | |
| from syphilis. | ||
| from tuberculosis. | ||
| from malaria. | ||
| from pellagra. | ||
| Hypotrophic | Denutrition. | |
| Anangioplastic | ||
| Rachitis | ||