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no need of school education. All that it requites are opportunities
under a sanitary environment for the training of its own senses and
muscles in its own instinctive ways; in short, such training as is
afforded in the great majority of homes. In the small minority of
homes in which the child is neglected or exposed to bad influences
(moral and hygienic), other remedies are called for—other than the
partial remedy of bringing the infant to school; for the evil effects
of the home influences are little, if at all, palliated in these circumstances,
so far as children under 5 years of age are concerned.
It is, moreover, most important to protect the young child from
preventable disease, and guard its physique during the crucial years
of rapid development; and the exposure to cold and damp involved
in school attendance through the winter months could doubtless be
shown, were the facts available, to be the cause of a great deal of
unnecessary sickness amongst these infants.
If, in addition to the exclusion of children under 5 years of age
from elementary schools, all parents could be impressed with the
advantage of making efforts to protect their offspring from Measles
for as long as possible, and to regard the disease as one which
demands an anxious care to keep the child warm and protected
from chills for several weeks after the rash has disappeared, 1 am
confident that the death-rate from Measles, which now exceeds the
death-rate from Diphtheria, Scarlet Fever and Typhoid Fever combined,
would be very considerably reduced. At the Second International
Congress on School Hygiene, London, 1907, a prominent
German School Hygienist, said, "May I express, from a German
point of view, our great and sad surprise that you in England have
to deal with this question to such an extent? In Germany it is
strictly forbidden by law to admit children under 6 years of age to
public schools, and even up to 6i years the child is rejected for
another year if its condition of health is not fully satisfactory."
In 1905 the Board of Education added to Article 53 of the
Code a proviso that "where the Local Education Authority have so
determined in the case of any school maintained by them, children