ual expenditure for medical inspection of schools in the
United States at the present time is perhaps $500,000. The money saved
by enabling thousands of children to do one year's work in one year,
instead of in two or three years, would greatly exceed the total
expense of examining all children in all boroughs.[9]

[9] Quoted in Report on National Vitality, p. 123.

The health of all our school children should be conserved by a system
of competent medical inspection which should secure the correction of
defects of eyes, ears, teeth, as well as defects due to infection or
malnutrition.

The statistics of medical inspection in public schools tell a pitiful
tale wherever it has been tried: thirty or forty per cent of the
children are found with defective or diseased eyes, ten to twenty per
cent with distorted spines, fifteen per cent with throat and nose
troubles, all of which directly affect their intellectual proficiency.

When these deficiencies are discovered and reported to the parents,
such is the apathy of disbelief that seventy-five per cent of the
cases usually go unattended; therefore the school nurse, who follows
the case home and explains the needs and sets forth the penalties, has
become a necessity.

The parent who permits his child to go to school physically unfitted
to profit from school opportunity is not only injuring his own child,
but is injuring his neighbor's child, and is taxing that neighbor
without the latter's consent.

It would seem as if such parents had forfeited their right to the sole
care of the children, and that government would be obliged, for its
own protection, to step in and do the work while it is needed. The
author has termed this _temporary paternalism_. The providing of penny
lunches during the morning recess, the service of the school nurse and
the home visitor to teach those parents who are willing to learn all
these schemes for the saving of the child, may be carried out in a
spirit of helpfulness with a support which may be withdrawn when no
longer needed.

Although all America has not become aroused to the undoubted fact of
tendencies toward physical deterioration, it is on the verge of an
awakening. The public school is the natural medium for the spread of
better ideals, and if the teachers of cooking and of hygiene would
cooperate and use all the material which sanitary science is heaping
on the table before them, we should soon see a betterment of the
physical