PRINCIPLES OF HEALTH EDUCATION IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS By FRANKLIN BOBBITT, Professor of Administration, College of Education, University of Chicago* S ECONDARY education, like all education from kindergarten to graduate schools, is being redirected. High school is for giving a specific type of human service. Its purpose is to improve the quality of human living. We used to think that secondary education was for the purpose of storing the mind with prepared packages of knowledge; and that fifteen packages, stored away without undue evaporation, constituted one full-sized secondary education. Even yet, in this modern age, that is still the prevailing conception. But in the reorganization of a secondary education, of which nowadays we hear so much, this archaic academic conception is being supplanted. More and more we are coming to see that education should be the wholesome upbringing of human beings, to the end that they may live wholesome human lives. We are coming to see that the objective of education all along the line is wholesome living; and that the means of such education can be nothing other than wholesome living. Health education in our high schools has been much neglected. In proportion to need, it is greatly undeveloped. In the quite evident expansion of community understanding and appreciation of health matters, it cannot be said that the high school has contributed its proper portion. But there are compensations. As a consequence of this under-development, secondary health education has no great body of crystallized academic traditions to hamper the development of a modern program. In formulating such a program, the first step is to take a general over-view over the entire field and to note the fundamental factors. The abundant literature of health education is making these fundamental factors fairly clear. It is our purpose here to present about fifty specific statements which seem, at least, to represent the direction of professional thought relative to the nature of the fundamentals of education in this field. We are stating the matters with a good deal of overlapping in the thought of the several statements in order that each may assist in making the others clear without any great amount of explanatory discussion: 1. Education is to promote the quality of human living. 2. This human living takes place at all ages and stages of one's life. Education is therefore to improve the quality of human living at every stage of human existence, from infancy to old age. 3. Health education is to improve the quality of one's physical living; and of all those intellectual, emotional, and social matters which are bound up with one's physical living. 4. This physical living takes place at all ages. Health education is therefore to improve the quality of one's physical living from infancy to old age. 5. The objective of health education is not a mind stored with knowledge; but rather the process of living continuously and consistently in a physically wholesome manner. The objective is a process. not a stored body of inert information. It is a process that goes on for seventy years. 6. This central educational process, applicable to all fields of education, is represented by the old dictum-old because universally recognized as true that one learns to do by doing. One learns the process of living wholesomely by long con *Read before the Health Education Conference, the University of Chicago, June 22, 1925. tinued and consistent wholesome living. This is the fundamental principle of all education of whatever type. 7. The fundamental process of health education is healthful living. Everything else is but contributory to this one fundamental thing. 8. Health education results from right physical living one hundred sixty-eight hours each week, fifty-two weeks each year, for all the years from infancy to full maturity. Health education results from continuity in right living. 9. One's life is one's curriculum. What is not a portion of one's life cannot be a portion of one's curriculum. A certain portion of the whole may be taken and administered by the schools; but in so doing this is to administer but a part of one's total curriculum. 10. From this point of view, there are no such things as extra curricular activities. Whatever one does, whether in school or out, is irrevocably molding the man or the woman. Education is concerned with whatever shapes the development of the individual. The so-called extra curricular is a part of the actual curriculum; sometimes the more important part. 11. Right physical living is not a general abstract thing, but rather the performance of a great number of quite specific and concrete activities: (1) Food activities; (2) Oxygenation activities; (3) Physical exercise; (4) Sleep; (5) Temperature regulation; (6) Guarding against invasion by micro-organisms; (7) Maintaining personal cleanliness; (8) Guarding against accidents; (9) Care of the teeth; (10) Care of the eyes; (11) Care of ear, nose, and throat; (12) Care of other specific organs; and others besides. For our guidance, the list should be made as complete as practicable. 12. One performs these many activities as an individual, and within individual situations. One lives as an individual. 13. Through individual physical examination and analysis of the nature and situation of each pupil, those responsible for physical education will discover the specific things which each needs to do by way of maintaining the process of physical living upon a high level. 14. The business of health education is to take in hand this physical living of each separate pupil and to perfect it so far as may be, and to keep it perfected, currently, and continuously. 15. Education must find a way effectively to influence the living of boys and girls during the one hundred and forty hours each week while they are not in school. This appears to be the major professional task as regards health education. It demands an educational technique which as yet has been very imperfectly developed. Born in the cloister, schools have tended to operate as cloisters. 16. In organizing human life as education for education, this isolation of the school must be abandoned. 17. Right physical living is to be a matter of individual self-direction in the maximum measure possible; and of professional direction only in the minimum degree necessary for maintaining pupilactivities on a proper level. 18. The schools will provide the conditions of the greatest possible self-direction; and then see that that self-direction is exercised. 19. As parents delegate responsibility to the schools for supervising the children's life activities for thirty hours each week, they do not and cannot give over their responsibility for supervising their children's activities during the other 138 hours per week. For the effective accomplishments of the needed results, they are responsible for the co-operative supervision of the child's physical living. However much they may neglect this responsibility, they cannot shift it or evade it. 20. The work of the school is finished when the growing individual can of himself consistently and continuously hold to right methods of physical living. 21. The power of self-guidance in successful health care is a major objective of education. 22. The power of self-guidance is developed through the year-long and gradually increasing exercise of self-guidance. The responsibility of the school for directing the health activities should be an ever-diminishing one. Self-direction requires that the individual know what is right procedure. Obviously there is something that must be prior to, and back of, the practical and year-long health activities. One must find out how to act. In the main one ought to get this by associating all through one's growing years with more mature persons who are performing health activities in the ways in which they ought to perform them. The basic training in ways of doing things is the contagion of relatively unconscious social imitation. 23. The major factor in right physical living is the intellectual guidance that is provided by health science. The thinking, the planning, and the current guiding are indispensable portions of the activities. 24. The growing individual needs first the guidance of good example. For the highest results he should continuously associate with those who, habitually and relatively unconsciously, supply right examples of physical conduct, and who also supply example of the interests, understanding, and valuations of proper health conduct. The culture gains of civilization are crystalized in conduct. The growing individual needs to be a continuous viewer, and reader of this conduct. Here he reads health science, not in its raw state, but in its finished form. He reads it not as it exists embalmed in a book, but as it exists in living form in the current vision of those who are setting the patterns of conduct-both practical patterns and intellectual patterns. 25. For consistent self-guidance, the pupils need a clear intellectual view of the things involved in the several fields of health activity. In other words, they need the necessary technical information, but as an integral portion of the activity itself the planning and guidance portion. 26. The specific intellectual activities involved are rooted in and grow out of man's master activity of general, spontaneous, and non-purposive VISION. 27. From infancy to maturity there should be an ever-widening vision of the matters within man and without man which relate directly or indirectly to his physical nature and well-being. 28. In its original form, this vision of reality should be an activity for its own sake wholly, and with no consciousness of its values for guidance. 29. For providing this vision, there should be much revealing reading. 30. The various possible fields of human vision are of unequal degrees of practical value. In those fields related to health the values are great. 31. The fields of vision are of unequal appeal. When rightly revealed, however, those that lie as background to health understanding are of unusual interest. 32. Vision cannot be compelled. 33. The program of the activity here called vision cannot be drawn up in the service of any specific department of practical affairs. It is a background of all of them at one time. So far as it must have regard for practical activities, it must have for its use a statement of the needs of all of them as its program is formulated. 34. The reading materials needed for vision of things related to health should be selected as a part of a comprehensive reading program which relates to all important fields of vision. 35. The need of health care activities is a universal one. 36. The need is a continuous one. 37. Health training is a basic need. It cannot be elective or optional. 38. The high school science department 'cannot properly perform its part in health training until it has reformulated its purposes and processes in terms of human living. 39. To generalize that statement, no department of the high school is prepared to perform its proper share in the health training program until it has formulated its purposes and processes in terms of human living. 40. The general program of health edu cation should be formulated without reference to existing departments. After this is done, the responsibility can be distributed to the several departments to which the portions are appropriate. THE PHYSICAL STATUS OF ENTRANTS TO THE CHICAGO NORMAL COLLEGE I By D. P. MACMILLAN, Director, Bureau of Child Study and Physical N GIVING a physical examination to any group of persons it is, of course, taken for granted that the objective aimed at will determine the kind of examination given, its scope, the factors selected for uniformity in emphasis, the relative distribution of time consumed by each item canvassed, and finally the correct interpretation of the findings in each individual of the group, in the light of hereditary factors, social and racial history, personal history, and total health history. Thus, if the object be to determine the total expectancy of life-span, as in life insurance prerequisites, the emphasis in examining will be essentially different in many factors, as well as in viewpoint, from that carried out in finding the physical working efficiency of the body as a whole and its parts, such as many industrial insurance examinations insist on; and again, both of these types of examinations differ in many essential respects from examinations designed to work out a group, familial, or individual health program for general health and capability on the broad lines of nutritional demands and variant bodily reactions thereto. If, however, the standpoint is stated frankly in its objective as examinations for the purpose of physical development, then indeed we at once note a decided departure from all other ends and opera tions. When a group is examined, individual by individual, to ascertain asthenias, asymmetries, irregularities, abnormalities, all degrees of departure from normal, with the object in view of subsequently instituting corrective, ameliorative, and normalizing measures, then indeed we need not inform you in advance that this is work done in the field of education and that in its wildest connotation. Just another pertinent preliminary remark needs to be made anent physical examinations, viz: that there are all degrees and kinds of procedures from mere casual and surface inspection to the most minute and skillful use of all available instruments of precision for such aspects of life as are measurable, anthropometric, sensory, movement-action (internal and external), physio-chemical and bio-chemical, and including even mental make-up and personality complexes, and, be it added again, all to be interpreted in the light of a complete personal history of each subject-case. Judged from the standpoint here outlined, the factors, facts, and findings which I shall here present to you may seem superficial indeed, but they are constant as well as reliable within the scope intended, and are believed to carry their own import for general educational interests, and moreover are suggestive in a special way for teachers of physical education in high schools. The data presented were collected from the routine physical examinations of re- Because of the frequency of appearance of certain kinds of defects which caught the eye and engaged the attention of the physical examiners, I became convinced that it was worth while to assemble the data from the records of the entering class in February, 1925. Two hundred and sixty-six of the 315 class applicants belonged to the special group under consideration-recent graduates from city public high schools, parochial schools, and Cook County schools. It would be an easy matter to increase this number by near sixty times from my files, but the representativeness of this particular class is highly typical of conditions obtaining for twenty-five years from year to year in Chicago, and, according to my data, of high school graduates from other cities. at, or in other words and negatively, what defects disqualify from entrance, it is to be noted that emphasis was placed on the following kinds of data: Family History: In the usual health records there were taken the ages, occupations, and vocational attainments of family, immediate and antecedent, the health history of each member, and the like. The anthropometric data were limited to height, height-sitting, weight, strength of grip and manual index of strength and vital capacity. The sensory tests of vision and hearing were given. The former were limited to the usual ophthalmological examination for acuity and muscular control, and the hearing tests extended to cover inspection of the auditory-organ and tests of functional reactions to voice, tones, and noises. In the distinctly medical features of the examination, data were collected on general nutrition and diathesis; on the integumentary system, skin, teeth, nails, hair; the nervous system, with special reference to history in sanitaria, hospitals, of any specific derangement, nervous peculiarity or mental disability or disorder that might prove prejudicial to efficiency in teaching as a vocation; the respiratory system, as to obstructions, rate, and character of breathing; glandular system, particularizing with reference to enlargement of lymphatic glands, abnormalities of thyroid or other members of the endocrine system and tonsils; vascular system, emphasizing rate and character pulse, standing, at rest, and after exercise, the heart action as to the presence of murmurs or enlargements, the blood-vessels as to blood-pressure and pulse pressure, sitting. at rest, and rate of recovery after exercise; the digestive system; and the genitourinary system. General considerations. such as any deformity as lordosis or scoliosis or disability from disease or accident, such as disablement from infantile paralysis, or any nutritional disorder, and finally the personal health history of all As to how these desiderata were arrived diseases, injuries or infirmities, and recov The most general statement of the requirements for admission from a physical viewpoint centered primarily about the physical efficiency demanded nowadays in the vocation of an elementary school teacher in any or all the varied lines of activity. As a more immediate criterion of admissibility there was emphasized, first, general soundness of health and physical efficiency to withstand the strain of travel incident to this school life and study under pressed conditions, and more immediate still as well as prophetic of future capability, the ability to carry successfully the required units of physical credits in the prescribed course of study in their training courses. |