The dangers of modelling in clay are obviated in my schools by excusing children with sore or cracked hands from the exercise. Those of syphilis by sending those with noticeable symptoms to myself or to the superintendent of health for examination. Those of tuberculosis are practically nil. Children do not get books as described. If typhoid fever has been proven to result from the inhalation of air befouled by the breaths of dirty children, alas for the stability of bacteriology and the germ theory.
The essayist declares that “where the greatest protection is needed the least is afforded.” That statement I deny. I never have seen any statistics that afford the slightest foundation for the popular idea that children are more susceptible to certain disorders than adults, though I have searched long and widely. I should like to find a single iota of evidence that the seclusion of a child from scarletina germs until ten, or even fifteen years of age, will diminish in the least his liability to contract the disorder upon the first exposure.
On the contrary, I believe that the children of the common people, those who cannot attend school beyond the age of fourteen years at the farthest, are cruelly robbed of a very considerable portion of their educational opportunities by unnecessarily rigid sanitary regulations. In the average family of four, unless it should chance that all are sick simultaneously or during vacation, each one is unjustly and to a great degree needlessly deprived of at least one-seventh of its school advantages, crippling to that extent its ability to fight life’s battle, darkening to that extent its life’s prospects. That is a point never considered by rabid sanitarians.
