ed in schoolrooms and
on playgrounds._

Superintendent Maxwell, of New York City, and other educational leaders
urge teachers to do their utmost to learn the physical conditions and
home environment of the individual child, and to fit school treatment
to the individual possibilities and handicaps. But experience proves
conclusively that try as they will, teachers and principals have
neither the special knowledge nor the time to acquire the special
knowledge requisite to use the facts disclosed by the physical
examination of school children. Physicians and nurses are needed, not
so much for treating children, as for teaching children, parents,
teachers, family and dispensary physicians.

Private schools have visiting physicians who may be consulted; they
need physicians to supervise, with power to examine or to require
certificates of examination. The Committee on the Physical Welfare of
School Children found that when a visitor was detailed for that purpose
it was easy to secure the cooeperation of parents, teachers, family
physicians, dispensaries, school boards, and charitable societies. The
Hawthorne Club's school secretary has been similarly successful in
Boston, as have those of Hartley House, Greenwich House, and the Public
Education Association in New York.

5. _Restriction of study hours at school and at home to limits
compatible with health._

Whether the hours of study at school and at home are excessive cannot
be learned from treatises on pedagogics or physiology. Because children
differ in vitality as in ability to learn, the maximum limit for study
hours should be determined by the individual child's physical
condition. When the Japanese went to war with Russia the highest
authority in the field was the army surgeon. To this fact was largely
due the astonishingly small amount of sickness and the high fighting
capacity and endurance of the Japanese, working under unfavorable
conditions. No board of school superintendents or board of directors,
no state superintendent of schools or college professor, has the right
to compel or to allow study hours beyond the maximum compatible with
the individual student's physical condition and endurance. The
physician responsible for school hygiene should have an absolute veto
upon any educational policy, method, or environment demonstrably
detrimental to children's vitality.

6. _Establishment of a "follow-up" plan to insure action by parents to
correct physical def