OFFICIAL DEPARTMENT. J. L. BUCHANAN, Superintendent Public Instruction, Editor. [The Journal is sent to every County Superintendent and District Clerk, and must be carefully preserved by them as public property and transmitted to their successors in office. | School Hygiene. By JOHN HERBERT CLAIBORNE, A. M., M. D., Ex-President and Honorary Fellow, etc., Petersburg, Va. There are no official communications specially demanding publication in this issue of the JOURNAL. We, therefore, very cheerfully give place to the following essay on School Hygiene. No subject can be urged upon the attention of parents, teachers, and school officers of greater importance than the one so earnestly discussed in this paper. The acknowledged ability of its author, and the unanimous endorsement of it by the Medical Society of Virginia, abundantly justify its publication. An appropriate introduction is furnished by the following letter: Hon. JOHN L. BUCHANAN, RICHMOND, VA., December 22, 1886. Superintendent of Public Instruction of Virginia: DEAR SIR, I am instructed by resolution of the Medical Society of Virginia, adopted during its recent session in Fredericksburg, Va., October 26-8, 1886, to call your attention to the paper by our ExPresident and Honorary Fellow, Dr. John Herbert Claiborne, of Petersburg, Va., on "School Hygiene," a copy of which I enclose. The resolution further requires me to request of you to give the paper as wide a distribution among the officers and patrons of schools in Virginia, as the means at your command will allow; provided, of course, your estimate of the value of the paper agrees with the favorable opinion of its merits as expressed by the unanimous vote of the Society. Very respectfully, yours, etc., LANDON B. EDWARDS, Recording Secretary, etc. Mr. President and Fellows : In a recent number of a popular monthly (Harper's), I noted an an article with the heading, "The Bodies of Our Children." The title of the article at once attracted my attention, and the text so forcibly and so clearly expressed my own thoughts, that I cannot but embody the author's ideas, indeed, in many instances, his words, in all that which I propose to speak to you to-day upon the subject of school hygiene. What are our people doing for the "bodies of their children?" Their minds are not being neglected, and their souls are certainly being well served. As to the latter, from pew and from pulpit, from library and from lecture-room, from parent and from preacher, the children daily receive line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little; whilst the Sunday-school, sending out into the streets and by-ways its devoted disciples, compels them to come in, and makes so plain, by means of plates and charts and objects and pictures, the way to the Better Land, that it can no longer be called straight, nor its gates narrow. Indeed, so many difficulties have been removed, so many asperities have been rasped down, so many rough places have been made plain, so many mountains have been brought low, so many dark valleys have been exalted, and so numerous, and so tender, and so skilled are the guides that Bunyan's Pilgrim would no longer recognize the road over which he walked in so much patience and pain and peril. From that Sunday afternoon of a summer's day in 1781, when Robert Raikes gathered a few village children around him and began to teach them the rudiments of the Life Eternal, the Sunday-school, as a seed warmed by the sun of Heaven, has germinated and grown, until now it is a mighty tree, under whose umbrageous foliage the nations of the world do gather. Even in America alone the Sunday-school scholars make an army more than a million strong, and march out annually with banners and song, crusaders for the kingdom of the Holy One; and who shall stay or oppose them? Not I. God speed them, I say. I only wish to show that the Church and the world is taking full care of the souls of our children. But what of their bodies? I affirm upon the highest ecclesiastical authority that the religion which the Christ came into the world to establish that the salvation which he confirms unto men-is a salvation from evil upon earth, as well as evil in the future. The care and the cure of the body was an essential office and element of His teaching and His life. I deprecate that religion which looks upon disease as a benison because it gives promise of an early immortality. Men were put upon this earth to live as well as to die; to live well; and to labor in hope and in strength; and every transgression of physical law is a sin against moral law. Sickness is almost as much of a crime as it is a misfortune, and it is certainly a crime that onehalf of all the children born in this God-favored country should die before they have attained to the age of five years. Oh, for a corps of missionaries and teachers of the body! But what of the minds of our children? Never before in all the history of the world has so much interest been evinced in the subject of popular education. The machinery of instruction has been multiplied beyond calculation. Schools and colleges and universities cover the land. In the United States there is expended annually upon such institutions eighty millions of dollars. The school property is valued at more than two hundred millions. In many States of the Union the attendance at school of all children between certain ages is made compulsory. Libraries-public, private, and circulating, books by the million of millions, standard works of other countries, stolen from their authors and reprinted here at a few cents a copy, periodicals by the hundred thousand, newspapers one billion five hundred million every year, with telegraphic messages from all parts of the world—all, all add their quota to the vast army of zealous and faithful teachers, who are giving their best years and best efforts to the great work of educating the minds of our children. Even political parties put into their platforms the public school as the biggest plank, and in their wild zeal threaten to sacrifice public credit to popular education. In the State of Virginia there was expended upon public schools-according to the last auditor's report to which I have access-one million two hundred and eighty-eight thousand one hundred and eighty-nine dollars and thirty-two cents, exclusive of the annuities paid to the University of Virginia and the Military Institute and the cost of the Miller School. The pay of the teachers of the public schools was nine hundred and eighty five thousand eight hundred and seventy-nine dollars and fifty-one cents. The pay of the superintendents was forty-four thousand two hundred and forty-five, whilst six thousand dollars were expended for the purpose of purchasing books for those unable to buy for themselves. The cost of one school-house, the Normal College for the colored at Petersburg, was two hundred thousand dollars. Of the whole of the taxes levied for the support the Commonwealth, according to the same authority, more than one-fourth of the amount collected is expended on the public schools. We have no access to any statistics of the cost of the private schools or the amounts expended in them. Now, we have no quarrel with these expenditures; we only refer to them to show that everything has been done within, if not beyond reason, for taking care of the minds of our children. But what of their bodies? I again ask-their bodies, in the sound and vigorous exercise of which the hope of the State and the life of the State lie? What is being done for them? Even if we take into no consideration the individual, and the necessity of his health to insure him against suffering and pain, or the necessity of his strength to guarantee to him safety and success in the struggle of life, and sustenance and support in the scramble for place and for bread in the busy world about him—what, I ask, is being done for the body of the citizen? Nothing, worse than nothing. He is thrust out from school when the curriculum is ended, pale and limp, without muscle and without blood, thin-legged and emasculate, to do a man's work and to win a man's name, and to fill a man's high estate. Homer sings of a splendid line of heroes that made immortal a city whose siege goes far back of historic time, and tells of "A ponderous stone bold Hector heaved to throw, Not two strong men the enormous weight could raise, Yet this, as easy as a swain could bear The snowy fleece, he shook and tossed in air." A travesty indeed upon the citizen soldier of 1886! But it may be said our soldiers are not required to carry an hundred pounds of armor besides battle-axe and shield, nor is it necessary for our boys to become Græco-Roman wrestlers, nor champion boxers, nor oarsmen, nor go-as-you-please walkers! By no means. This is an exaggeration of physical requirement. But mind cultiva tion must prove futile, worthless, without a physical manhood, commensurably trained for all the high purposes of life. How many men, sir, of your acquaintance have there been who have failed to render the full service of labor for themselves, or for their families, or for the State, or who have rendered a feeble and perfunctory service simply because broken with sickness or hampered with pain? How many have succumbed to disease or have paid the forfeit of a premature death, just at that age when accumulated experience and matured thought had best fitted them for their high career and the great destiny of manhood? Happily, in some countries, they have a way of looking at these matters in a different light; and noted examples are furnished us abroad of concurrent cultivation of mind and body, in which both equally strong and equally poised show the ripe fruit of vigorous enterprise. Take some instances from the British statesmen-men who laugh at years, and make of three score-and-ten a frivolty and a joke. Mr. Gladstone, at the age of 78, cannot only cut down more trees in a day with his axe than a professional woodsman, but makes a walk thereafter of forty miles a constitutional, and then finds time, and develops the taste for classic and literary labor; and yet has strength left to grapple with the most trying and intricate problems of statescraft for a nation, upon whose dominions the sun never sets. And Mr. Gladstone does not stand alone in the history of English statesmen. But where are our old men? Who has the vigor to carry into the councils of this country the matured wisdom of three-score-years-and-ten? An old man now who sits in the Assembly of our State, or who keeps his place in the busy marts of trade, is pointed out as a marvel and a wonder. And the evil is growing. The school-room of to-day is an exaggeration and an infringement of the school-room of two decades ago. Six to eight hours of confinement in one room, ordinarily of bad ventilation, and too hot or too cold, the brain throbbing with blood that should be sent as well to the hands and to the feet as to the head, and on fire with the excitement of the struggle to grasp the many things and the varied things which are sought now to be acquired in such hot and unreasonable haste, and the pupil then dismissed to fill the interregnum until school is called again, with study and practice of music, and music and practice of study. And what may we expect but an enervate race of men and women, unfitted for the service and task of life, or even to enjoy for themselves or to illustrate for others that cultivation which has cost them their strength and health and peace? Now, I am speaking on a subject which is not agreeable to me, and I am saying some things which perhaps are not altogether agreeable to all who hear me, and I shall say more; but before I go any further, permit me to aver distinctly and unequivocally that I have no intention of reflecting unjustly upon that honorable and honored corps of teachers, public and private, who conduct the schools of this State. Many of them acknowledge and bewail with myself the truth of what I have to say, and hope and are willing to labor to make things better. Often, very often, it is the fault of parents and guardians, who expect that in a few, very few scholastic years, a pupil shall be instructed and grounded in mathematics, in physics, in the classics, in literature and in music, and shall come out of the school room, full-fledged and panoplied as Minerva from the brain of Jove. In the |