ieve that they get better results for their children
from teaching hygiene informally and indirectly than from stated formal
lessons._ Whether instruction should be informal or formal is merely a
question of method to be determined by results. What the results are,
can be determined by principals, superintendents, and students of
education. It is easy to understand how at the time of a fever epidemic
children could be taught as much in one week about infection, disease
germs, antiseptics, value of cleanliness, etc., as in five or ten
months when vivid illustration is lacking. Physicians themselves learn
more from one epidemic of smallpox than from four years of book study.
To make possible and to require a daily shower bath will undoubtedly do
more to inculcate habits of health than repeated lessons about the
skin, pores, evaporation, and discharge of impurities.

If one illustration is better than ten lessons, if an open window is
worth more than all that text-books have to say about ventilation, if
a seat adjusted to the child is better than an anatomical chart, this
does not mean that instruction in hygiene should cease. On the
contrary, it means that provision should be made for every teacher to
open windows, to adjust desks, to use the experience of individual
children for the education of the class. If the rank and file of
teachers have not hitherto been sufficiently observant of physiological
and hygienic facts, if they are unprepared from their own lives to
detect or to furnish illustrations for the child, this again does not
mean that the child should be denied the illustrations, but that the
teacher should either have instruction and experience to incite
interest and to stimulate powers of observation, or else be asked to
give place to another teacher who is able to furnish such
qualifications.

5. _Children, like adults, can be interested in other people, in rules
of conduct, in social conditions, in living and working relations more
easily than in their own bodies._ The normal, healthy child thinks very
little of himself apart from the other boys and girls, the games, the
studies, the animals, the nature wonders, the hardships that come to
him from the outside. So true is this that one of the best means of
mitigating or curing many ailments is to divert the child's attention
from himself to things outside of himself that he can look at, hear,
enjoy. The power to concentrate attention upon oneself is a sign