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child's mind, has made great strides in recent years, making what
was once an abstruse science readily explicable in simple terms even
to the uneducated parent if the latter is receptive. There are
growing indications that within the next few years maternity and
child welfare work will become increasingly concerned with the
mental as well as with the physical development of the child, and
through its contact both with mothers and with fathers will be able
to give organised and systematic help to parents in teaching them
the course of normal mental as well as normal physical growth of
their children. Knowledge of the normal is one of the surest
safeguards against the development of the abnormal. In all such
developments the education authority must be most directly
interested.
3.—The conditions referred to above are primarily conditions
arising before admission to school. There are, however, conditions
arising during school life, militating against healthy physical and
mental development, with all of which the education authority is
directly concerned, and some of which it can control. Of conditions
bearing on the physical health of the school child I need
only refer to
(a) The need for establishing in every school-room conditions of
ventilation as closely approximating to those of the open
air as possible. In existing schools a large proportion of
the teachers recognise the importance of this factor, and
do their best to render it effective. It is to be hoped
that new schools as they are provided will be of a type
allowing truly open-air conditions, and capable of adjustment
to meet extremes of weather. Beyond this, an increase in the
number of playground classes during the summer months is greatly
to be desired; while still more urgently necessary is the provision
of an open-air school for those delicate children who do not flourish
in the ordinary school, but who are capable of flourishing there
after a period of recuperation with education under completely
open-air conditions.
(b) Among older children, during the years of rapid growth,
spinal curvature is a not infrequent condition. While this is not
solely due to the use of desks of antique type, or to the use of
desks too small in pattern, seeing that the faulty posture is much
more a product of ineffective control and supervision at home than
at school, there is no doubt that the modern type of desk tends
to assist the child in preventing the grosser degree of deformity.
It is therefore desirable that the replacement of the older type of
desks which the Committee has been proceeding with for some
years past should be continued at the greatest possible speed.