vicinity. Where teachers are alone in seeing
the need for cooeperation they can quickly interest young and old,
physicians, dentists, pastors, health officers, in home visiting,
street cleaning, nursing, helping truants, needed changes of
curriculum, etc. _Getting things done_ is easy because it is human to
love the _doing_; getting things done is _doing_ of the highest order.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] The importance of recognizing the family as the unit of social
treatment is presented in Edward T. Devine's _Principles of Relief_, and
in Homer Folks's _Care of Dependent, Defective, and Delinquent
Children_.

CHAPTER XIX

SCHOOL SURGERY AND RELIEF OBJECTIONABLE, IF AVOIDABLE

The popular arguments for free meals, free relief, free medical
treatment at school, are based upon the assumption that there are but
two ways to travel, one leading to a physically sound, moral, teachable
child, the other to an undernourished, subnormal, backward child. They
tell us we must choose either school meals or malnutrition, school
eyeglasses or defective vision, free coal or freezing poor, free rent
or people sleeping on the streets, free dental clinics at school or
indigestion and undernourishment, free operation at school for adenoids
or backward, discouraged pupils. If there is no other alternative than
neglect of the child, if we must either waste fifty dollars in giving a
child education that he is physically unable to take, or pay two,
three, four, or even fifty dollars to fit him for that education, the
American people will not hesitate. Whether there are other roads to
healthy children, whether it is cheaper and better for the school to
see that outside agencies prepare the child for education rather than
itself to take the place of those outside agencies, is a question of
fact, not of theory.

Facts prove, as we have seen, that there is more than one way to
prevent malnutrition. Parents can be taught to attend to their
children; hospitals and dispensaries will furnish eyeglasses where
parents are unable to pay for them; charitable societies will go back
of the need for eyeglasses to the conditions that produce that need and
will do vastly more for the child than can eyeglasses alone. If
parents, hospitals, dispensaries, and charitable societies will attend
to children's needs, then relief at school is unnecessary, even though
it may seem desirable.

The objection to school surgery should be clearly before us, so that w