OUR BABIES.

Waipa Post, Volume IV, Issue 150, 1 October 1912, Page 3

OUR BABIES.

BY HVGIvIA

(Continued.)

Published under the auspices of the Society for the Health of Women and Children.

" It Is wiser to put up a fence at the toj of a precipice than to maintain an ambulance at the bottom."

A MODERN EDUCATIONAL UTOPIA. Whatever opinion our readers may have formed as to the entire practicability or otherwise of the Utopia of Canon Wilson, ex-head master of Clifton College, we have no doubt that that all will concur regarding the desirability of the main ideal he propounds for Boards of Education—viz., to aim to produce the healthiest, most intelligent, and best materials for the State.

Further, we shall, none of us, dispute the wisdom of any community that regards the insuring of the proper rearing of young children as "altogether the most important part of its work, and as the foundation of all the rest, not only because healthy children of six, well looked after, are such splendid material fof schools and subsequent labour, but because the parents, trained in care for the children so far, are so keen to keep them afterwards in first rate condition by securing them proper food, exercise, clothing, fresh air, and sleep. I was struck with the emphasis they laid on these essentials." We heartily wish it could be said of ourselves in the Dominion, as Canon Wilson says of his conception of what might be: — The belief of the people of my Utopia is that the condition to be aimed at is the health of the body, which alone can produce health of mind. The prenatal and postnatal care of their children has become with them an absolutely primal e.lucational axiom, as well as their pleasure and pride. They believe that any neglect of this care, with its sure consequences of weakness and disease, is virtually to make nugatory beforehand all educational and philanthropic effort which may be made for the children in later years. What these efforts are many of our teachers know. There is something infinitely pathetic in the way in which our teachers and doctors and voluntary helpers will feed and care for the poor children who have been irrevocably injured by earlier neglect in which we acquiesce (or which we don't attempt to stem).

I did not dare to tell my friends in Tsenon what they would see if they visited England. Still less could we in New Zealand afford to let the Canon's Utopians know what they would come across in the way of deficient stamina, bad teeth, indigestion, appendicitis, adenoids, and consumption if they critically examined our own rising generation, and how far they would find our women incapable of complete and perfect motherhood, in spite of the fact that we li/e in a young. Dominion with ideal natural conditions for health, and without the Old World curses of overcrowding and poverty to contend against. We ought not to feel proud of having to expend half a million sterling a year on hospitals—an expenditure incurred mainly in the imperfect patching up of people suffering from ailments easily avoidable by the timely exercise'of rational hygiene in aearing, habits, and cducaton Canon Wilson continues: — I must add that the sight of their schools and children, in contrast with the vivid memory of some of our own, filled me wiih fresh admiration of many of our teachers, who, in the face of the ceaseless stream of admission into their schools of the neglected waste products of our cities, keep up heart and courage and hope, and out of such materials save a few. It is splendid, but it is not national education. To return for one brief instant to Tsenon. There aim throughout has been to prevent, not to palliate, nor to punish. They have so far succeeded that, though they have not abolished Grime, they have practically abolished pauperism, destitution, and druukenness. They have raised the standard of duty to children and provided a new pleasure in life. They are unanimous in attributing the industry, sobriety, happiness, and good sense of fheir people to the health and vigour and brotherly-feeling that result from affectionate early care, and to theirintelligent and religious education, and to training in the use of freedom and of responsibility and of co-operation.

I hope that this brief narrative may have suggested some defects in our national conception of the scopes and aims of elementary education, and, in particular, its neglect of the earliest years of life.