2. Few of the defects can be corrected by nourishment alone; plenty of fresh air, outside nourishment at school, or extra nourishment at home will not entirely counteract the influences of bad ventilation and bad light in school buildings. Country children have adenoids, bad teeth, and malnutrition. Plenty of food will not prevent bad teeth and bad ventilation from causing adenoids, enlarged tonsils, and malnutrition.
3. Children whose parents have long lived in the United States need attention quite as much as the recent immigrant.
4. A large part of the defects reported could be produced by conditions due directly to neglect of teeth.
From twenty such statements of fact and from its experience in getting things done for one year, the committee drew fifteen practical conclusions, among which the following deserve emphasis here:
1. The only new thing about the physical defects of school children is not their existence, but our recent awakening to their existence, their prevalence, their seriousness if neglected, and their cost to individual children, to school progress, to industry, and to social welfare.
2. Physical deterioration, applied to America's school children, is a misnomer. No evidence whatever has been given that the percentage of children suffering from physical defects in 1907 is greater than the percentage of children suffering from such defects in 1857. On the contrary, the small proportion of defects that are not easily removable, as well as a vast amount of evidence from medical experience and vital statistics, indicates that, if a comparison were possible, the children of 1907 would be found to have sounder bodies and fewer defects than their predecessors of fifty years ago. If there is an exception to this statement, it is probably defects of vision, with regard to which school authorities and oculists seem to agree that confinement in school for longer hours and more constant application under unfavorable lighting conditions have caused a marked increase. Positive evidence as to tendencies will be easily obtained after thorough physical examination has been carried on for a generation.
3. The effect of massing facts as to physical defects of school children should not be to cause alarm, but to stimulate remedial and preventive measures, to invoke congratulations and aggressive optimism, not doleful pessimism and palliative measures born of despair.
THE DARK-HALL EVIL IS HERE INDEXED BY ADENOIDS.
4. The causes of physical defects are not confined to "marginal" incomes, but, while more apt to be present in families having small incomes, are found among all incomes wherever there exist bad ventilation, insufficient outdoor exercise, improper light, irregular eating, overeating, improper as well as insufficient food, lack of medical, dental, and ocular attention.