View report page

26
"The work of the school consultative clinic has not changed
significantly over the past year. The maintained good health of the
schoolchild has shown itself in a low level of referrals. As in the
past, most of the children are picked out by the school health
medical officers at their routine inspections.
"The increasing size of school children is a matter of general
knowledge; it is perhaps not so well known that biological maturity
now occurs much earlier than formerly. Wherever detailed statistics
have been kept, the figures show that the onset of puberty is
advancing by about one year, every thirty years of time. It follows
that the weight and height of children today are not really comparable
with those of their fellows of the same chronological age, one or
two generations ago; for now they are, compared with them, at an
advanced "pubertal age"—and that is what matters. Certainly most
of the schoolboys and schoolgirls who are referred to me after
their final inspection, when they are about to leave school, are
clearly young men and women, and not children at all.
"Plainly, this earlier ripening of children is a matter of great
importance both to the educationalist and sociologist. It is a curious
paradox that a century ago children left school at eleven or twelve,
when they were still children, and were expected to work and
behave as adults ; whereas now they are kept at their lessons till
fifteen at least, and treated as children, while in fact they have been
adult for a couple of years! It is ironical that the school-leaving
age should be rising just as steadily as the age of adolescence is
falling. The difference between the way society treats these young
people and the obvious maturity of their bodies, is bound to set up
stresses in their personalities, and may well be an important factor
in the most paediatric disease of our time—juvenile delinquency.