BIOLOGIC SCIENCE AND HEALTH 



WILTLARD S. SMAL.L,, Ph. D., Lecturer on Hygiene at George 

 Washington University 



I will take a minute of my time to comment upon certain im- 

 portant utterances of preceding speakers. As a practical school 

 man, I wish to commend unreservedly the resolution reported 

 by the chairman of this meeting. If this resolution could be- 

 come operative in practice, it would work a revolution in the at- 

 titude of the teachers toward hygiene. I wish to endorse also 

 the ideal that President Davis is making a reality in his normal 

 school. It heartens me greatly to hear Dr. Whipple, whose first 

 love is psychology, give to the school hygiene the precedence 

 that belongs to it in the training of teachers. Finally, I would 

 say, with respect to Dr. C. O. Probst's demand for a health offi- 

 cer, co-equal with other supervisory officers, in every public 

 school system, that there is not an intelligent school administrator 

 in the country who would not welcome joyfully such a dispen- 

 sation. 



And yet through all these papers there has been an undertone 

 suggesting inadequacy, if not futility, of most of the attempts 

 at instruction in school hygiene. I am minded to ask, as was 

 asked by William Allen White in the case of Kansas, "What's 

 the matter with school hygiene ?" Briefly, the matter with school 

 hygiene is this: as a subject of instruction in normal schools and 

 colleges and teachers' institutes, sanitary engineering has been 

 palmed off in the name of school hygiene. A subject matter over 

 which in practice teachers can have little or no control and a 

 point of view remote from the practical professional interests of 

 teachers have rendered trie courses in school hygiene relatively 

 ineffective. School hygiene is a larger thing than sanitation. It 

 is in fact an educational philosophy and touches every phase of 

 school life. A systematic course in school hygiene must do three 

 things: (1) Impress upon the prospective teacher the convic- 

 tion that health is an important end in the educative process; 

 (2) make clear to them the relation between normal human de- 

 velopment and the various conditions, procedures, and prac- 

 tices that constitute the school environment; and (3) give them 

 as adequate knowledge as possible of the means of properly con- 

 trolling these factors. 



Obviously such a course of instruction cannot be erected upon 

 a foundation of quadratic equations, Latin declensions, or Burke's 



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