PART IV. OFFICIAL MACHINERY FOR ENFORCING HEALTH RIGHTS
CHAPTER XXVII[ToC]
DEPARTMENTS OF SCHOOL HYGIENE
The term "school hygiene" generally suggests no other school than the public school. State laws say nothing about compulsory hygiene in military academies, ladies' seminaries, or other preparatory and finishing schools. Yet when one thinks of it, one must conclude that the right to health and to healthful school environment cannot equitably be confined to the children whose tuition is given at public expense. There is a better way to check "swollen" fortunes than by ruining the health of "fortune's children." The waste and danger of slow-minded, noticeably inefficient children are no less when parents are rich than when parents are poor. There is no justification for neglecting the health of children in parochial schools, in private schools for the well-to-do or rich, or in commercial schools for the ambitious youth of lower income strata. Nor has the commercial, parochial, private school, or college, any clearer right than the public school to injure or to fail to promote pupils' health. So far as school hygiene is advisable, so far as it is right to make hygiene compulsory, its personal and social benefits should be shared by children of school age without regard to income, and its laws should be enforced by all teachers, principals, and officers that have to do with school. In presenting a programme for school hygiene this chapter refers to the hygiene taught, the hygiene practiced, the hygiene not taught, and the hygiene not practiced in buildings and on grounds where children and youth are at school, whether these children are in kindergarten or high school, in reformatory or military academy, in charitable school, or in finishing and preparing center for society's juniors.
The question of the local, state, and national machinery by which proper standards of school hygiene shall be made effective will be taken up after we have considered individual steps in a comprehensive programme for school hygiene.
1. Thorough physical examination of all candidates for teachers' positions and periodic reëxamination of accepted teachers.
Teachers would be grateful to be told in time their own physical needs and the relations of their vitality to the vitality of their pupils. Are your teachers examined? Do they know the laws of health and the signs of child health? Are they permitted to continue in schoolrooms after tuberculosis is discovered? Are normal graduates given physical tests before being permitted to teach and before being permitted to give four years to preparation for teaching?