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RESEARCH IN HEALTH AND EDUCATION
Differences in People.
As an officer of the Education Committee I am deeply interested in education.
During this year I was asked to help in an investigation conducted by the
National Foundation for Educational Research on why it is that some boys and
girls who pass the examination at 11 plus for entrance to a grammar school fail
to progress, or sometimes even deteriorate; or conversely, some children who
fail to pass, and go to modern schools, are found at the top of their classes and
so presumably would have done well had they been sent to a grammar school.
This question is part of a wider one; why do some children, who show great
promise in the infant and junior schools, deteriorate as they reach adolescence
and adult life? And still wider: why are we all different, and what are the
basic differences? We are different in shape and size, in features and colour,
in character and intelligence, in sociability and determination. We vary too
in our health, in our ability to withstand infection, in the readiness with which
we get heart disease or cancer and other ailments, and in the onset of the
degeneration of old age.
Year after year my department collects information in the school health
service showing that out of about 7,000 children examined in the periodic
inspections in schools some 200 have poor physique, 250 have skin diseases,
450 have eye defects, 100 suffer from diseases of the ears, 200 have tonsils and
adenoids, about 100 have diseases of the heart and lungs, 250 have deformities
of various sorts, and another 200 a miscellaneous assortment of ailments. Not
all of these are serious; most of those with eye defects can be corrected with
glasses, and remedial treatment can be provided for nearly all the others. These
figures refer only to those children with defects found at the medical examinations
in schools; in addition, about 3,500 attend the clinics mostly of their own
accord, and another 3,000 by appointment in the specialist clinics.
The Influence of Home.
In 1951 we began to look for causes as to why a proportion of all children
are always found with defects of various sorts. It has long been known that the
influence of a child's home is of enormous importance. Therefore, as each child
was examined in school at the periodic medical inspections, we made a note,
based on information obtained from the health visitors, about the child's home.
We used a very rough classification of three grades, good, average, and bad.
We recorded also the height and weight of each child, and his position in the
family—first child, second or third, etc. To record the ailments and defects
more accurately we used the International Classification of Diseases where
each disease is listed and given a code number. There were about 7,000 children
examined altogether; the particulars about each one were arranged in code form
and the results punched on cards for use in the Powers Samas machines in the
County Treasurer's department. Various tables have been made which classify
the children in a number of ways.
The final analysis is not yet complete, but a preliminary examination of
the figures has shown conclusively that the children from poor homes have more
defects, suffer more from ill health, are less in stature than the children from
better homes. This leads at once to the question—what do we mean by a good
home, an average home and a bad home? A bad home is not one caused by
mere lack of money and possessions, although this can be an important cause.
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