EDUCATION 



1944 



EDUCATION 



Hygiene of Education 



. By educational hygiene is meant those 

 principles of health which apply to an indi- 

 vidual during his period of education, and 

 those which schools can promote through their 

 various health agencies. The school period is 

 one of growth and development, a period when 

 moral and physical habits are formed, a plastic 

 period when the young person is easily 

 molded. Whether life is to be personally 

 satisfactory and efficient, or unsatisfactory and 

 inefficient, depends very largely on how these 

 early years are spent. 



Both physical and moral character tend to 

 become fixed at a very youthful age. Changes 

 after the age of early childhood are hard to 

 bring about and require an amount of effort 

 greater than that required in early life. Spe- 

 cialists in child study are realizing more and 

 more that to a very large extent health, char- 

 acter and disposition are closely interdependent, 

 and that early experiences count very much 

 more than later ones. It is difficult to break 

 down a good start in life, but it is more difficult 

 to build up the results of an unfortunate 

 beginning. 



Educational hygiene deals with those simple 

 but fundamental principles of health which 

 affect daily living. It includes home environ- 

 ment, school environment, community environ- 

 ment, and personal health habits. It is a forma- 

 tive sort of hygiene and thus deals with the 

 formation of right habits, rather than with the 

 correction of wrong ones. 



In order to form health habits intelligently 

 one must have some understanding of the re- 

 sults of health neglect, must in some reason- 

 able degree understand the meaning of health 

 danger-signals, which are nearly always dis- 

 played, and finally must form habits of such a 

 fixed nature that they become almost auto- 

 matic, for the less we are obliged to think 

 about health the better. Health is fundamental 

 in life; health is the only real wealth; yet, 

 as has been well said: "On every side, the 

 world over, we are confronted by the fact that 

 health, including normal physical development, 

 longevity and good bodily resistance, is being 

 only very inadequately achieved by millions 

 of people." 



Practically no one lives up to his highest 

 possible degree of physical or intellectual effi- 

 ciency or even approximates such a desirable 

 result. Everywhere there is ruthless waste of 

 vital energy. The length of human life is less, 



by at least half, than what it might be; hap- 

 piness is only a relative term, because happi- 

 ness is conditioned largely by health, mental 

 and physical. Personal efficiency is probably 

 rarely over half of what it should be, and in 

 many instances less than one-third. 



Educational hygiene is to-day attempting to 

 point out the way for the correction of these 

 lamentable conditions, which after all arc 

 rather easily corrected when intelligently 

 faced. 



Physical Defects and Diseases of Children. 

 For purposes of convenience, a distinction is 

 made between defects and diseases as these 

 terms are ordinarily used in respect to the 

 various disorders of children. A defect usually 

 means some disorder of growth and develop- 

 ment quite apart from a sickness. For instance, 

 adenoids obstruct breathing but do not directly 

 cause disease. Near-sight is a defect and so is 

 deafness, but neither is a disease, strictly speak- 

 ing. The same may be said of improper pos- 

 tures, irregular teeth, nervous instability, stam- 

 mering, stuttering and many other disorders. 



Defects and true diseases do, however, shade 

 into each other. Of course, medical inspectors 

 in schools deal not only with defects of growth 

 and development, but also with a good many 

 actual diseases, such as colds, diphtheria, scar- 

 let fever, tuberculosis and other contagious dis- 

 eases. In the main, however, they are called 

 upon to correct defects, which, if neglected, 

 handicap a child and may easily lead to serious 

 disease either during his child life or after he is 

 grown. 



Every person of any education should under- 

 stand the nature of the common defects and 

 diseases of child life, because of their impor- 

 tance in relation not only to a happy child- 

 hood, but also to an efficient sort of adult life. 



Physicians are constantly learning more of 

 the intimate relations existing between dis- 

 . orders of health in the child and disordered 

 health in the adult. For example, until rather 

 recently tuberculosis, when it occurred in an 

 adult, was supposed to have developed perhaps 

 from a neglected cold or something else which 

 had reduced the general health of the indi- 

 vidual. Now we know that in the great ma- 

 jority of all cases of tuberculosis in adults, the 

 disease really dates back to an infection in 

 childhood which has perhaps lain dormant for 

 many years. In other words, if a child can be 

 saved from this infection during his child life, 



