Where sewer system or water supply is not available either an indoor crematory, sanitary closet system or outdoor sanitary closet system shall be provided. So-called dry closets shall not hereafter be used. All outdoor closets shall be effectually screened and protected against flies.

Seating.-Class and study rooms shall have aisles on all wall sides. Center aisles range from seventeen to twenty inches in width and wall aisles from twenty-eight to thirty-six inches in width.

General provisions.-Furnace, boiler and fuel rooms shall be built of fireproof construction. No closet for storage shall be placed under a stairway. All doors must be unlockable within. Air must be humidified before entering the rooms. Vacuum cleaning is preferred. Dry sweeping or dusting is prohibited, and there shall be no sweeping while school is in session.

FOR TEACHERS' DISCUSSION AND STUDY

1. Has the recent general interest in health and hygiene reached your school and community?

2. Do you find it possible to ventilate properly your schoolroom? Do you give the matter careful attention? Do you notice dust in the air after the school has been marching or passing about the room? If so, what does this indicate?

3. What are the conditions about your school that need immediate remedy for the sake of the health of the children and yourself?

4. Compute the space in your room and see whether there is as much as two hundred and fifty cubic feet to the occupant. Also determine whether your room has window space equal to one-fifth the floor space.

5. Do you allow slates to be used? If so, how are they cleaned?

6. Has your school a good well? If so, has it a force pump. If it has the latter, an apparatus can easily be installed which will give you as good a bubbling fountain as in a city system. Could this not be installed?

7. Is the dusting of your schoolroom properly done, that is, is the dust taken up by dampened dusting cloths?

8. Are the desks misfits for any of the children, so that curvature of the spine is likely to result? Are the seats properly placed with reference to the desk tops, so that they do not require the pupil to sit on the edge of the seat or lean forward in order to reach the desk?

CHAPTER XXVI

Personal nature of hygiene

PERSONAL HYGIENE

Although the hygiene of the school and its surroundings may be made perfect, this is not enough. For hygiene must, after all, finally become a matter of personal standards, the demand of the individual for the conditions that favor health and longevity. Not until each pupil not only knows the laws of hygiene, but recognizes and desires their benefits in his own life, has the school fully accom plished its purpose in physical education.

In spite of the powerful effects of good examples, there are many pupils who will go from a well-ventilated schoolroom to sleep in a close and stuffy bedroom, or from a school where the temperature is moderate to sit in an overheated room, without thinking of its ill effects. Thousands of children in our schools learn to recite lessons on the care of the teeth, and yet never form the habit of the daily cleansing of the mouth. They study the effects of coffee on the growing organism, and yet freely drink it at their meals. They are fluent in describing the results of using tobacco, and still use it. They can pass perfect examinations on the rules for Theory versus practise

bathing, but violate most of these rules. They understand the danger of the common drinking cup and the roller towel, but

constantly dare the risks.

They are aware of the danger

of overstraining the eyes, yet they will sit facing a strong light while they read.

In some degree this discrepancy between theory and practise must be expected, for it is a part of human nature. None of us lives as well as he knows how to live; it is always easier to preach than to practise. Yet this does not affect the truth of the principles involved. The school must not only teach its pupils the laws of hygiene, and provide hygienic conditions under which to do their work, it must also so inculcate these lessons that they are practised in the daily lives of its youth.

Children should never be so taught as to have their minds centered on sickness and disease, or their fears of

Health the right death aroused; many nervous and

of the child

sensitive children suffer from the dread of these things as it is. On the other hand, the child should be led to expect and demand health and happiness. The pathetic fatalism that makes many children accept toothache, earache, headaches, colds and the like as part of the inescapable woes of childhood, should be removed. These pains should be understood as the penalty for the violation of certain physical laws, which it is a part of their education to discover and apply. They should come to demand health, instead of resignedly accepting suffering; and to have a pride in physical vigor and well-being, instead of in fortitude under pain. They should come to look on premature death and the ravages of contagious diseases, such as typhoid fever or tuberculosis, not as the visitation of an inscrutable Providence, but as a catastrophe resulting from our own blindness or unwillingness to follow physical laws that are perfectly well known. Approached from this point of view there is no danger of making a child morbid by

teaching him concerning disease; instruction makes for his peace of mind rather by showing him how to avoid sickness and gain health.

As the twig is bent

Training in hygiene should be begun before the habits of the child are fixed. Ordinarily nothing short of a complete collapse of health will shake an adult out of his accustomed habits of eating, sleeping or working. Even some of the world's greatest authorities on hygiene daily violate the rules they lay down for others, because they formed their personal habits before they acquired their knowledge of hygiene, and find it too much trouble to change. But the child can easily be led to form correct habits, providing the models and incentives are effective. Toothbrush clubs, fresh-air societies, coffee-prohibition unions, and other organized hygienic efforts can be made a great factor in fixing habits of right living among children.

The mouth is said by some authorities to be the most neglected and ill-kept organ of the body. Recent inHygiene of vestigations show that approximately the mouth ninety per cent. of the children in our public schools have diseased teeth or defective mouths. The decay of the teeth is one of the most prevalent diseases known to modern civilization; and the neglected mouth is a most fruitful breeding-place of disease germs, the open gateway through which they enter the system. It has been estimated that uncleansed mouths and decayed teeth are the cause of more diseases, ill-health and suffering, especially in childhood, than all the other organs put together.

The poisons coming from decaying teeth are a constant menace to the health, and seriously lower the vitality even when no specific disease is caused. A series of ex