Margaret McMillan

“ This book serves no purpose at all, if it does not serve to show that work, the rough labour of tillers of the ground, builders, sailors, carpenters, weavers, miners, foresters, iron-smelters, engineers, IS education. A strange sleep, an absence of mind comes to even the brightest looking people who have never at any period of their lives engaged in it. Their intellectual life is strangely barren. And no wonder! For in common work humanity was evolved, and purely as the result of such work the human brain was developed, and furnished with new chambers! ”

“ No trained nurse, no devoted mother, no clever teacher, no person in authority, can take the place of, or do the specific work of, a trained medical man or woman. And this special training is of course expensive, and those who receive it and give their services afterwards have, of course, a right to be paid at a reasonable rate.
But what does the phrase "a fully qualified school doctor" mean? Where are these "fully qualified" men to be found? The ablest and oldest school doctors know very well that they are not qualified—that they are only apprentices. ”

“ There the school doctor has to take a general oversight of forty thousand children! By dint of labour he can see every class in every school more than once a year. One cannot deny that something may be done by such medical inspection of forty thousand children. But can any one pretend that all these children are safeguarded? that all receive treatment? ”

“ But the brave will not pull down the blinds. They will go on fearlessly to note conditions—to unearth the causes of defect, disease, suffering, and failure, to set these open to the sunshine of an enlightened public opinion, and to lay the foundations of a happier order of social life, and a new era of human progress. ”

“ This growing power of the people is a thing in which every class of worker must rejoice at last and find his safety. For it cannot be well for a nation to fall under the power of any one class or profession, be it the priest, the doctor, the teacher, or any other It cannot be in the interest of science or progress that any one of these should usurp power, for then the mere love of this power, and the tyrannical use of it, would take the place (as has been seen before) of the higher hunger after knowledge, and the desire for the conquest of disease. ”

“ The new education will have none of these. It is, indeed, more personal; but it is more reverent and more gentle than the old. At every step it cautions us. We hear its voice even in the stiff German circulars. Rudeness will wreck all. The human body is not vile. It is the instrument of instruments. The first condition of success is not that the doctor has many degrees, it is that he should not offend one of these little ones. The behaviour of children—that is not a thing to judge in the first place. It is a thing to understand in the first place. ”

“ In vain the masses will ask for possession of the means of production. The power of producing is the factor in the problem of economic life which decides the fate of individuals and of classes. But the new education would offer the highest order of producing power to all who were able to win it. And in doing this it would not condemn all to one order of employment, but rather give life and meaning to all kinds of labour, and art, and learning. ”

“ Yet as years went by and new helpers were found in the school, the new learning began to be gained. It is won, as other kinds of knowledge are won, with effort and in doubt, and often only after many fruitless attempts and much labour. And now, though much has been fairly earned, it is still the day of small things—all the more because, after all, very few great scientists will go into an elementary school class room and think they have much to do with, or much to learn from, child or teachers. ”

“ But would not the experts have done better work had they been engaged as co-operators with teachers and parents twenty years ago, and long before any crime was committed? Truly the rich, as well as the poor, have some reason to desire the advent of the school doctor.
"But they can engage him," some may cry, "to work in a very exclusive way in the exclusive school!" No, that is impossible. There is, as we have said already, no training college here, or even in Germany, for school doctors! ”

“ The schools, then, are not alien places to them—that is to say if the education given there is worth anything. For in its earlier stages education should recall earlier forms of work. But when the stage of later forms is reached the children should not be withdrawn hastily as they are withdrawn to-day. They should be allowed fearlessly and eagerly to follow the path of human progress. That is to say, they should be allowed to grow up. They must become masters of the new tools, or be mastered by them. ”

“ The day will come doubtless when the task of those who prevent illness will be thought more highly of. The day is nigh, perhaps, when the elementary school will have quite openly as its first great aim the conquest of health and sanity for its children. ”

“ In short, the class room of to-day is not the class room of yesterday. It is full of new light—and of new shadows. As time goes on, some will make strange discoveries. And some, for the sake of comfort, may pull down the blinds. ”

“ In the great industrial centres the school doctor's advice was very often flung away. We know now that more than half of all the children are in such a condition that advice should be given about them to their parents! But in the poorer schools only 3 per cent of the children needing spectacles get them. Of the 30 per cent of all the children who have adenoids, of the 8 per cent even who have this distressing ailment in a very acute form, the school doctor may have inspected a great number; but how many even of these have received treatment? ”

“ THE British school doctor exists, but so small is the number of men appointed to this post (they hardly number as yet fifty) , and so greatly do the amount and nature of their work vary, that at present the phrase "school doctor" has no very clear meaning to many. Moreover, a great many people think that even if school children are examined, there need be no school doctor—that a medical officer of health will do quite well for this kind of work. It is clear that the British school doctor is hardly even a new arrival. He is a person who is being quarrelled over on the doorstep! ”

“ Into the hands of the working people the guidance and control of education is bound to fall in an ever-growing degree as the years pass. They will be drawn into this work through their own children attending school, and sharing the life of the school. ”

“ When the sick were made whole, and the stammering were made to speak, the parents saw very well the uses of the school doctor. And now, assured of their position, some of these doctors are looking further ahead and turning their thoughts to education itself as a physiological process. They were bound, of course, to come to this. No one, who deals with living things, can be thinking always of disease. The wild flowers are healthy enough. They fade quickly. The cultivated flower, the cultivated brain, has greater resources. ”

“ All this will become plain to the masses when they cease to halt, as they halt to-day, in so far as their children are concerned, at the threshold of the modern world—hurrying their children of thirteen or fourteen into mills and into casual labour as if they feared to let them fairly escape out of the shadow of the Dark Ages. ”

“ A learned counsel has read nearly every book on the physiology of the nerves, and, armed with it, now carries on a public tournament with insanity experts in the court. This display of knowledge dazzles the public, and the persons who are the subjects of his psychological dissection suffer none the less because they are placed high in the social world. ”

“ And it is opportunity, not a bait, that is wanted to bring them into the field. Opportunity would be found for all, if, all over the land, education committees engaged medical men and women to take up it might be only a very small part of the whole duties of a school doctor. They might be engaged for example to visit a school twice or three times a year, and to report on the new scholars or on the sickly or abnormal children. They might, or might not, according to the desire of parents, be permitted to give treatment. ”

“ It is well known that these cases are often tedious, and parents cannot spare the time to go often to hospital. A large number cannot, or do not even go once after being warned. "He will grow out of it," they say of the sufferer. So the case is neglected, and the patient becomes in many cases deaf for life. Well, the school doctor cannot at present do anything—it is his business to note the evil, and then to leave everything to take its course—and hurry on to the next school. ”

“ If they offer a decent salary, say £500 a year, I don't see why one shouldn't go in for it." And, indeed, there is no doubt that if a large number of very good salaries were offered tomorrow, a large number of fully qualified medical practitioners would apply; but it is not at all so certain that these, if engaged, would advance the cause of education. It is much more likely that they would, for some time to come, set it back—perhaps set it back indefinitely. Obviously, this is not the way to find the right men. Where are they? And is there a supply of living enthusiasts always on hand? ”

“ It would make clear how all these were made possible, and the need for them created in the first place, by work; how every kind of learning has its origin and source in the expanding life of a human being struggling for food, for clothing, and shelter, but struggling in such wise that at last he must unlock all the secrets of Nature, use her terrible forces for his own ends, and enter into close relations with all his fellows. ”

“ They also know that they have to make the school perhaps where their successors will learn. For them there is no college. A little while ago, when they began work, they certainly did not even know that the new learning—the kingdom of knowledge that is now widening out before their gaze—existed. ”

“ If the expert medical officer begins this work, he certainly cannot begin it as an expert. He may learn rapidly, but still he is a beginner. This will mean that he makes a sacrifice.
One does not begin, as one of the youngest apprentices, by receiving a large salary.
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The popular way of looking for the good school doctor is to offer him a large salary. And yet it does not work out very well. "If there is one thing I hate," said a certain medico the other day, "it is this school hygiene, and all this child-study that people are going in for now. It's all nonsense. ”

“ In Germany, where the people have done everything, and the State (with the exception of Hesse and Meiningen) nothing, there is a popular movement to bring the whole child population under the care of the school doctor, and to use the State and its power to insure the gains that have been won. ”

“ And very slowly though public opinion is changing, the great public come to see that they want this new kind of doctor. But it is said, if he must come, then why should we not engage the services of the medical men we employ already? We are a conservative people—why not engage a medical officer, or his assistant? ”

“ They have to learn by observation, and the few and comparatively small schools of the richer class do not offer a wide enough field. Not through these could they develop an entirely new branch of applied physiology—that is to say, the science of the higher brain centres and their activity and development in childhood. No; this work must go on where it has begun—in the people's schools. Therefore the classes, as well as the masses, have an interest in the new education. ”

“ But since parents are obliged to send their children to school, and since they have to take risks in doing so, the schools should be made, in so far as is possible, safe places. Therefore it is right that some degree of medical inspection of all elementary schools should be compulsory. ”

“ Even the school doctor of Germany, moving about in schools every day, must have become conscious of all this. He too has become conscious of great events taking place as a result of the teaching given in the schools. ”

“ How then can we say that those who still engage in it are the uneducated. Ignorant some of them may be, and degraded even by the later forms of toil; but they are still near the source of education, since they have never ceased to work for the necessaries of life. ”

“ To judge is easy—it has been done for ages—to understand is the new task, begun very late. [6] To classify according to health is comparatively easy—it may be done by the three-card system. To classify ability and weakness is not so easy. Each child presents his own problem. ”

“ It would cost a great deal of money to engage a vast army of medical men for these new posts. That, it is allowed, might spell economy if it stemmed the great flood of disease bearing social wreckage for ever into our hospitals. But of course it would mean a great initial expense. For you cannot get first-rate advice on a large scale without paying accordingly. First-rate advice, the service of highly trained and accomplished school doctors, is bound to be costly. ”

“ And in the people's schools it must now go on as fast as the people will allow. Here the old garments of medievalism will be rent, its austere method exposed, its codes of punishment and torture scattered to the winds. ”

“ But as a matter of fact work in the schools, and the experience gained thus by doctors who have taken the ordinary diplomas, and whose attention is turned to scholastic problems, is the only means of getting an all-round training in England to-day. ”

“ They are reasonable—only they do not take account of all the facts. The only persons who could answer John Bull in an altogether illuminating way are the ablest of our own school doctors. And it is unlikely, for various reasons, that they will undertake this task. This is why the mere looker-on has to attempt it.
It is of course necessary to have trained medical men to undertake the work of giving advice in (and treatment later probably through) the schools. ”