Civics and Health

by William H. Allen

SPONTANEOUS PLAY ON ONE OF NEW YORK CITY'S SCHOOL ROOF PLAYGROUNDS

"After-school" conditions are quite as important as physical training and gymnastics at school. Not long ago a nurse was visiting a sick tenement mother with a young baby. She found a little girl of twelve standing on a stool over a washtub. This child did all the housework, took care of the mother and two younger children, got all the meals except supper, which her father got on his return from work. As the nurse removed the infant's clothes to give it a bath, the little girl seized them and dashed them into the tub. "Yes, I am pretty tired when night comes," she confessed. This child has prototypes in the country as well as the city, and she did not need physical training. She did not lack initiative or originality. She did need playmates, open air, a run in the park, and "fun."

The educational value of games and outdoor play should be weighed against the advantages of lowering the compulsory school age, and of bridging over the period from four to seven with indoor kindergarten training. Neither physical training nor education is synonymous with confinement in school. The whole tendency of Nature's processes in children is nutritional; it is not until adolescence that she makes much effort to develop the brain. Overuse of the young mind results, therefore, in diverting natural energy from nutritive processes to hurried growth of the overstimulated brain. The result is a type of child with a puny body and an excitable brain,—the neurotic. The young eye, for example, is too flat (hypermetropic)—made to focus only on objects at a distance. Close application to print, or even to weaving mats or folding bits of paper accurately, causes an overstrain on the eye, which not only results in the chronic condition known as myopia,—short-sightedness,—so common to school children, but which acts unfavorably on the constitution and on the whole development of the child. At the recent International Congress of School Hygiene in London, Dr. Arthur Newsholme, medical officer of health of Brighton, made a plea for the exclusion of children under five years of age from schools. "During the time the child is in the infant department it has chiefly to grow. Nutrition and sleep are its chief functions. Paints, pencils, paper, pins, and needles should not be handled in school by children below six." Luther Burbank, in an article on "The Training of the Human Plant," says:

The curse of modern child life in America is overeducation, overconfinement, overrestraint. The injury wrought to the race by keeping too young children in school is beyond the power of any one to estimate. The work of breaking down the nervous systems of the children of the United States is now well under way. Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, and tad-poles, wild strawberries, acorns, and pine cones, trees to climb and brooks to wade in, sand, snakes, huckleberries, and hornets, and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of his education.

Not every child can have these blessings of the country, but every child can be protected from the stifling of the nature instinct of play by formal indoor "bossed" exercises, whether called games, physical training, gymnastics, or Delsarte.

NEW YORK CITY'S SCHOOL FARM DOES NOT STIFLE NATURE INSTINCT

The answer to the protest against too early and too constant confinement in school has always been: "Where will the child be if out of school? Will its environment at home not work a worse injury to its health? Will not the street injure its morals?" Because we have not yet worked out a method of supervising the health of those children who are not in school, it does not follow that such supervision is impossible. Perhaps the time will come when there will be state supervision over the health of children from birth, parents being expected to present them once a year at school for examination by the school physician. In this way defects can be corrected and health measures devised to build up a physique that should not break down under the strain of school life. For children whose mothers work during the day, and for those whose home environment is worse than school, it might be cheaper in the long run to assign teachers to protect them from injury while they play in a park, roof garden, or out-of-door gymnasium. If parks and playgrounds come too slowly, why not adopt the plan advocated by Alida S. Williams, a New York principal, of reserving certain streets for children between the hours of three and five, and of diverting traffic to other streets less suitable for children's play? So great is the value—mentally, morally, and physically—of out-of-door play that it has even been suggested that the substitution of such play for school for all children up to the age of ten would insure better minds and sounder physiques at fifteen. It is generally admitted that the child who enters school at eight rather than at six will be the gainer at twelve. What a travesty upon education to insist upon schooling for children because they are apt to be run over on the street, or to be neglected at home, to shoot craps, or belong to a gang and develop bad morals.

Educators will some day be ashamed to have made the schools the catch-all or the court-plaster for the evils of modern industry. Instead of pupils and mothers going to the school, enough hygiene teachers, and play teachers, and district physicians could be employed with the money now spent on indoor instruction to do the house-to-house visiting urged in many chapters of this book. Such a course of action would have an incalculable effect on the reduction of tuberculosis, not only in making healthier physiques but by inculcating habits of outdoor life and love of fresh air. The danger of those contagious diseases which ravish childhood would be greatly reduced. An ambition for physical integrity would make unnatural living unpopular. Competition in games with children of the same physical class develops accuracy, concentration, dispatch, resourcefulness, as much as does instruction in arithmetic. Smoking can easily be discredited among boys trying to hit the bull's-eye. A boy would sooner give up a glass of beer than the championship in rifle shooting or a "home run."