Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1920-06-22
HEALTH EDUCATION
By H. Addineton Bruce


"HE need for systematic health educa-
ton in our public schools is rapidly be-
coming appreciated everywhere. Dell
mite programmes are being formulated and
in many places the stage of actual instruction
has already been reached
Now comes suggestion from an authori-
tative source that if the best results are to
be obtained, health teaching should not
merely accompany but should also precede
education in the ordinary subjects of the
school curriculum. Says DR.. w. G. Braisted,
surgeon general of the United States navy,
writing in the New York Medical Journal:
eve forget the pitiless logic of youth. The
lad or maiden who has for five, ten, or fiji
teen years been goaded to study grammar,
mathematics, languages, on whom there has
been exerted insistent pressure to acquire
mental attainments, cannot be persuaded
later that subject kept in the background
is the one of paramount Importance.
I'VE cannot expect the young to believe
that hygiene, physiology, and health are mat
tiers of prime Importance, that their parents
and teachers really esteem them as such,
when everything else has come ahead of these
subjects
Let us begin the childs education by
teaching him health before everything else,
first in point of time, first in Importance
And, more specifically:
what propose is to go back of the three
IS and begin all education by instilling into
knowledge of the human machine and the
the child before he can read or write some
knowledge of the human machine and the
laws that regulate it's upkeep."
1t may be objected to this suggestion that
it assumes, on the part of parents know
ledge which too few parents possess For
obviously, it is with home teaching that Dr.
Braisted's plan of health education would
have to begin.
But this is no real objection. If parents are
themselves Ignorant of health laws they can
readily acquire the information necessary to
enable them to instruct their children And
the parents, too, will profit from their study
of health handbooks.
There Is, however, another and more &C.
rlous objection. Unless parents give their
children health education in a really common
sense way there is danger that they NAV
make the children morbidly solicitous about
their health.
1t will never do, for example, to overem-
phasize disease possibilities, or to try to
brighten children into living hygienically.
Th1s, In fact, is what some parents do to-
day. With the result that we see children
growing to manhood and womanhood neu-
rotlc Weakl1ngs, perhaps afflicted with alb
normal breads of contracting this or that
disease.
What parents should do is to stress the
rewards or right living rather than the pen
altles of wrong living, and to teach by ex-
ample as much as by precept.
Ii they themselves live hygienicallv the
cnlIdren will tend unconsicously to hygienic
ways: mus the need for specific instruction
Will be appreciab1y lessened.
With these reservations a hearty indorse-
ment OF the BREASTED plan of home education
IN health may be made Childhood, the age
OF greatest lmpressionability, is assuredly
the age when every effort should be made to
imprint on the mind health conserving ideas
ana to form misunderstanding habits.