PRACTICE AND TEACHIN'G OF HYGIENE IN SCHOOLS. 183. 



pupil and the private pupil, and there is no special moral or legal 

 privilege vested in the private teacher which entitles him to risk 

 or ruin the health and eyesight of his pupils. 



Again, school hygiene does not of necessity involve elaborate 

 so-called " physical culture," although these exercises, if carried 

 out by a trained instructor and regulated by a competent medical 

 inspector, are both desirable and may yield excellent results. It 

 should never be forgotten, however, that serious damage may be 

 done to individual weakly children by physical overstrain. In the 

 absence of such a trained and supervised instructor, the ordinary 

 healthy child will derive more benefit from noisy scamper around 

 the playground than they will get from a half-hour's ordeal oi 

 club-swinging or toe-touching mechanically directed by an un- 

 interested and unskilled person. 



Neither does school hygiene of necessity involve " medical; 

 inspection," although the latter form of control is necessary for 

 the highest and best development of sanitary work (especially is 

 this so in large schools) ; for excellent results may be obtained 

 where this is absent. Medical inspection has been adopted in the 

 Transvaal but not in this Colony at present, as we were of the 

 opinion that for financial reasons it would be better to rely upon 

 the dissemination of information by educational means rather 

 than by the employment of the more expensive although highly 

 useful and desirable additional means of skilled inspection. 



Dr. Mackenzie perhaps put the case for the medical inspection- 

 of schools and school children excellently and concisely when he 

 said that " Education presupposes good health " ; they are parts 

 of one problem. Health is essential to education in any sense,. 

 physical or mental. 



If it is the case that the conditions of health fitting a child for 

 school life and school education cannot be ascertained without 

 medical inspection, then medical inspection must become a part 

 of school methods. It is simply an additional method of securing 

 that, as far as possible, the child shall be put into the state suitable 

 for his training. 



The teaching of elementary hygienic principles, therefore, needs 

 no apology. It deals with a subject highly interesting and 

 supremely important, possessing as it does a high ethical value. 

 and when still further combined with its allies domestic economy 

 and civics it practically conforms to that science of the method'^, 

 of improvement of the race comprised under the term Eugenics., 

 the latter science forming the keystone of modern education,, 

 towards which all the most advanced educational thinkers are 

 striving. 



The teaching indicated must be simple, direct and rationally 

 directed and adapted by local illustrations to local requirements.. 

 For instance, it is of little use to fill the heads of children of a 

 sparsely-populated colony like ours with the principles governing 

 the adoption and management of a modern water carriage system 

 of sewage disposal, when but three towns at the present time in 

 the Orange River Colony could probably afford to adopt such a 

 salutary system. The treatment of smoke nuisances and dangerous;. 



