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London County Council
REPORT OF THE MEDICAL OFFICER (EDUCATION) FOR THE
21 MONTHS ENDED 31st DECEMBER, 1908.
This report to the Education Committee gives a review of twenty-one months instead of a
year, but any statistics given show figures for the year ending 31st March, 1908, in order to
be comparable with previous reports, and also the figures to the 31st December, 1908. The
change has been made to accord with the regulations of the Board of Education Code and to bring
London into line with the rest of the country, and with the Sanitary Authorities, whose annual
reports are made up to the end of the calendar year. The period covered by this report has been
marked by great activity in all matters concerning school hygiene and the physical care of children.
There are in prospect further and wide-reaching changes and in the metamorphosis of elementary
education, which is even now in process, it will be very necessary to have a clear idea of what education
is, what the duties of an education authority should be, and where the limits of those duties
should lie. The doctrines which guide our work, and, indeed, all educational work, must be
sharply realised, clearly defined, and understood, otherwise a labyrinth of legislative enactments or
a tangle of overlapping authorities will cause trouble and confusion in the future. During the plastic
period of development of the nervous system each individual acquires a stock of experiences of value
during the rest of life. The information and knowledge derived through reading, writing, and the other
conventions of civilized life form an addendum to the great mass of experience accumulated by
the mere process of living, and it is this addendum of a formal or artificial nature which it is to the
common interest to impart to each individual, if necessary, at the cost of the State. During this
plastic period, which in England is mainly the first sixteen years of life, the desires and needs of the
. growing organism of the child are essentially different from those of the adult and must always be
separately considered and have special provision. The whole State provision for aiding the growth
and development of the child from the time it ceases to be entirely dependent upon its parents until
it attains puberty—a period roughly embraced between three and sixteen years of age—now constitutes
this formal education. The only scientific doctrine to follow as a guide for legislation is
that any public supervision of, or provision for, the growth and development, that is, the
general care of children should be under the control of the education authority. The recognition
of this unifying principle will simplify laws and avoid endless overlapping and complications
in practice. Any attempt to separate duties or functions by artificial definitions is bound to result
in enhanced cost of working, unnecessary friction, duplication and possibly even actual failure.
Hitherto in our work it has, for practical purposes, been attempted " to render unto Caesar the things
that are Caesar's," by regarding all that concerns the child in school as under the control of the
education authority, and all that concerns it beyond the school as being under the control of other
(local) authorities, but in practice there is often lack of co-ordination, and sometimes differences of
standard, which occasionally give rise to results that are most grievous. In regard to cleanliness
of the person (see p. 34), any efforts to fully effect this throughout the schools have been frustrated
in many parts of the Metropolis by lack of provision for effecting cleansing. Again, for children excluded
from school as suspicious, during the prevalence of diphtheria, several Sanitary Authorities
have refused to test the conditions existing in such suspicious children in their districts, holding
that this is a matter for the Education Authority, who, from their standpoint, simply exclude the
children until the risk of infectiousness is deemed to be past, leaving the sanitary authority to deal
as they please with suspicious cases in their own districts. Probably the majority of children
refused admission to the special schools of the Council, as being for educational purposes imbecile,
are later on either refused care by the Guardians of the Poor or transference to any suitable institution
on the ground that they are not "imbecile." This question of the care of idiots and imbeciles forms
a very good instance of confusion. There is no authority having the statutory duty of caring for
imbecile or idiot children who are not paupers. The poorer classes have no institutions open to them
except those under the Poor Law. A child excluded from the special schools as imbecile by the
educational officers is generally refused help by the Guardians, but if this body accepts its care, then
the parents, even if they pay the whole cost of maintenance at such an institution as Darenth, are
thereby pauperised. The light shed in the last few years on the problems of ordinary education from
the study in our schools of feeble-minded and partially defective children would to a large extent have
been lost if these had not been under the educational authorities. The least costly and most practical
solution appears to be, that any public provision for protecting and aiding growth and development
of children during the years of school life—three to sixteen years of age—should be entirely
committed to the education authority. This would allow such matters as the feeding, teaching,
cleansing, medical treatment or social protection of school children, when these duties become
a public care, to be administered by the one authority, and by bringing all the various problems
into a correct relation and perspective would also effect considerable financial economy. On
the other hand, transient conditions in which the child bears the same social relations as any
other individual, as for instance when affected with typhoid or scarlet fever, or when guilty of a crime,
would still come under the same provision by the sanitary authority or police respectively as at present.
Fortunately this is the line taken by all the recent legislation in matters concerning children.
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