A STUDY OF FORTY NORMAL SCHOOLS 



Address toy the Chairman, HELEN C. PUTNAM, M. D. 



In planning the work of the committee appointed by the 

 American Academy of Medicine to investigate the teaching of 

 hygiene in public schools, after the first two obvious steps were 

 completed, detailed studies of laws requiring its teaching and 

 of textbooks/ the decision was promptly made that no method 

 of questionnaires would serve our further purposes. Its advan- 

 tages are comparative ease and inexpensiveness ; its disadvan- 

 tage in this instance is comparative valuelessness. This appar- 

 ently hinges on failure to accurately define or standardize terms 

 necessary to use. What some report as teaching hygiene others 

 find pitiably inadequate, and even teaching unhygienic practices 

 and ideas. 



In personal search for this teaching in over six hundred 

 schools in over forty cities during the last five years two vivid 

 impressions have been received ; one of the wonderful plas- 

 ticity of children, the other of the earnestness of teachers, who 

 are almost invariably doing the best they know or the best they 

 are permitted to undertake. It was soon realized that the cause 

 of the great poverty in this instruction must be looked for 

 "higher up/' in institutions training teachers and in officials 

 administering schools. 



Therefore very early in the study of children's schools was 

 begun also study of normal institutions with reference to the 

 teaching of hygiene, interpreted to include sanitation and teach- 

 ing by practice as well as by precept. 



Twelve normal schools were visited because of accessibility. 

 From annual reports of 50 others 28 were selected to be visited 

 because of inviting statements concerning this instruction. With 

 but few exceptions special emphasis is placed on their being 

 professional schools. A brief outline of this study of 40 schools 

 in the committee of the Academy will serve to answer in part 

 the question of our topic this afternoon, "How are normal in- 

 stitutions fitting teachers to establish through public schools 

 better practices in hygiene and sanitation and higher ideals of 

 parenthood ?" 



Experience proved that the majority of these reports greatly 

 exaggerated the worth of the preparation in hygiene ; that, in 

 fact, several courses were conspicuously poor, one or two surpass- 

 ing anything I have chanced to find in public schools. Few were 

 worth a journey to see good methods. 



iPublished in Bulletin of American Academy of Medicine, 1905 and 1906. 

 Address Easton, Pa. 



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