MEDICAL INSPECTION OF SCHOOLS 



for conserving and developing the physical soundness of rising 

 generations. But the movement is so intimately related to the 

 future welfare of our country, and has so signally demon- 

 strated its value, that it is destined to be universal and perma- 

 nent. 



For nineteen centuries the educational world has held as 

 the most perfect expression of its philosophy that half line of 

 Juvenal in which he pleads for the sound mind in the sound body. 

 It has remained for the first decade of the twentieth century to 

 awake to a startled realization that Juvenal was wrong wrong 

 because he bade us think that mind and body are separate, and 

 separately to be provided for. 



Only now have we come to realize the error and to take 

 steps to rectify it. Only in the last few years have we begun 

 to see that, educationally at least, mind and body are inseparable, 

 and that the sound mind and the sound body are inextricably 

 related both causes and both effects. 



All these things mean that it is our splendid privilege to 

 see and to be a part of a movement which is profoundly trans- 

 forming our traditional ideas of education. They mean that our 

 children and our children's children will be a better race of men 

 and women than are we or than were our fathers. 



Not alone our unwillingness to be outdone in this public 

 service by foreign nations, not alone our sense of practical fore- 

 sight, but our inherent feeling of obligation toward our children 

 and our recognition of this service as one of necessity for the 

 national well-being, are forcing upon us the incorporation of this 

 phase of public activity as an integral part of our public education. 



The human race will be a better race because of the lessons 

 that have been taught us by the child having contagious disease, 

 the backward child, and the physically defective child. Because 

 of these lessons, the youth of the future will attend a school in 

 which health will be contagious instead of disease, in which the 

 playground will be as important as the book, and where pure 

 water, pure air, and abundant sunshine will be rights, and not 

 privileges. He will attend a school in which he will not have 

 to be truant, tuberculous, delinquent, or defective, to get the 

 best and fullest measure of education. 



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