promote pupils' health. So far as
school hygiene is advisable, so far as it is right to make hygiene
compulsory, its personal and social benefits should be shared by
children of school age without regard to income, and its laws should be
enforced by all teachers, principals, and officers that have to do
with school. In presenting a programme for school hygiene this chapter
refers to the hygiene taught, the hygiene practiced, the hygiene not
taught, and the hygiene not practiced in buildings and on grounds where
children and youth are at school, whether these children are in
kindergarten or high school, in reformatory or military academy, in
charitable school, or in finishing and preparing center for society's
juniors.

The question of the local, state, and national machinery by which
proper standards of school hygiene shall be made effective will be
taken up after we have considered individual steps in a comprehensive
programme for school hygiene.

1. _Thorough physical examination of all candidates for teachers'
positions and periodic reexamination of accepted teachers._

Teachers would be grateful to be told in time their own physical needs
and the relations of their vitality to the vitality of their pupils.
Are your teachers examined? Do they know the laws of health and the
signs of child health? Are they permitted to continue in schoolrooms
after tuberculosis is discovered? Are normal graduates given physical
tests before being permitted to teach and before being permitted to
give four years to preparation for teaching?

2. _Thorough physical examination of every single child in every single
school upon entering and periodically during school life._

We believe a vast number of things that "ain't so" about the health of
country children as compared with city children, of private-school
children as compared with public-school children. Where do we find more
degenerate men, physically and morally, than in so-called "American
settlements," where, for generations, children have had all outdoors to
play in, except when in homes and schoolhouses that are seldom cleansed
and seldom ventilated? Open mouths and closed minds clog the "little
red schoolhouse"; there headaches do not suggest eye strain; there
deafness and running ears are frankly attributed to scarlet fever which
everybody must have with all the other "catching" diseases, the earlier
the better; there colds begin in December and run until March, to the
se