THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES MONDAY, MAY 7, 1906. HEALTH AND EDUCATION.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 13586, 7 May 1906, Page 6

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES MONDAY, MAY 7, 1906. HEALTH AND EDUCATION.

It will be generally admitted that health and education''afe subjects of some importance, that each has a large bearing - upon the other, that they come sometimes into contact the one with the other, and that the consideration of tlieii relationship generally is of paramount interest. How to obtain both health and education in the highest degree without the sacrifice of either is a problem well worthy of study. ■ We frequently find very well educated persons without health, and, on the other hand, very healthy persons without education, and there are those who have a large share of both, and those again who have very little qf either. To secure an equally efficient education. of mind and body is not an easy matter; there is always a tendency to one-sidecjness, and any overattention to either is apt to react detrimentally upon the other. That complete health, good strong physical, mental, and moral health, is an acquisition more desirable than anything else is a doctrine that certainly appeals to the great majority of intelligent persons, and if intelligent people desirous of the general good had to' choosc in fixing the object sought in their educational system between on the one hand physical health (without more development of mind and character than the amount needed for the preservation of such) and on the other hand great knowledge, high intelligence, and high morality, without regard to physical health, they would certainly, we are assured, choose good physical health as their object, for healthy men and women who are not very intelligent or good may have children who are both physically healthy and strong and good and clever, whereas men and women who are clever and good, if they have ruined physical constitutions, canuot have children who are physi-

cally healthy as well as intelligent and clever. A person with a good income finds it possible indeed to be good and clever and sickly, but this is not- equally possible for those living' under the conditions that affect the lives of the great majority' of people in the community. In ordinary cases, lack of physical strength and health means inability to obtain employment, the result being morbidity of thought and feeling; and such things mean loafing, vice, and crime. Naturally all thjs leads up to the question of the power of the school to cause bad health or to prevent good health, and Mr T. C. Ilorsfall, writing on the subject on the foregoing lines in the Contemporary Review, has gone to Germany for his statistics, and tells us that the German child normally commences school work when it has completed its sixth year, and that in nearly all German towns the elementary schools are now under the charge of school doctors, one of whose duties is to examine . every child before it commences its school life. If a child of six is in such a condition of health that the doctor . believes that it will suffer from beginning school life, its entering into a school is deferred for a year, and in some places as many as 10 per cent, of the children are thus treated.' We are told also that Dr Schmid-Monnard found, that attending school almost stopped the increase of weight in girls for a year and much diminished their height, and that the more robust boys in Halle who spent their seventh year in school on an average increased 21 per cent, less in weight and 43 per cent, less in height than the more delicate boys who passed their seventh year at home. Another investigator found that in the lowest class of the village schools only 1,4 per cent, of the children were shortsighted, but the percentage was 55.8 in the highest class of the classical schools. In the year 1877 Dr Finkelnbilrg stated that the figures collected by the Prussian Statistical Office showed that of 17,246 youths who were qualified by the examination they had passed to serve as oneyear Volunteers, only 20 per cent, were physically fit for service, while of the ordinary recruits whose brains had been less burdened and who had had more physical exercise, from 50 to 55 per cent, were physically fit for service. The publication of such figures caused a great improvement to be made in the curriculum of the secondary schools. These are cases in which the school itself was the principal cause of the physical evil, but we are told that the investigations ■of German and Swiss school doctors show, as similar investigation would show elsewhere, the existence of a great deal of physical and mental diseases of ' which the school is not a chief cause, but a large part of which might be prevented or cured by the school. Nobody needs to be told that influences on health are not the same in all schools. Some schools probably provide conditions which directly give children a better . chance of attaining good physical health and strength than they would have in their homes, and the indirect influence of. most schools on physical health, through their influence on conduct, ,is much better than the influence of many of the homes would be. But, says the writer in the review referred to 1 " The direct influence on physical conditions of many of our schpols is very bad, and many of our schools have also a bad indirect influence oil physical conditions owing to the wrong mental training they give. The ignorance of our highest authorities respecting right principles and right practice of education could hardly be more clearly proved than by the fact that it is only this year that they have proposed that children under five years old shall be excluded from schools, and that they have not yet proposed that children shall be so excluded till they have completed their sixth year. It has been clearly ascertained that to teach very young children to read is to deprive them of nearly all chance of ever having their innate powers of rightly using their eyes, their ears, their hands, and their i

brains fully developed: that to bring young children into crowded rooms where there is neither enough l fresh air nor enough light for them, and to keep them sitting still . for half an hour together, when they ought to be moving about, and to keep them' almost silent when they ought to be constantly shouting and singing, is to deprive them of all chance of full physical, development." Such suggestive sentences are worth thinking over. The power of the school to cause or to prevent bad health is surely almost unlimited, and it cannot be doubted that education can be so shaped as to diminish racial deterioration or to advance its antithesis.