any differences, but not even a single contradiction. This road is the abolishment of the old and the preparation of a new working school army, with the improvement of its working conditions.
And indeed, if we examine into the school methods of hygiene and if we carry into execution the measures recommended by science, we cannot imagine that the work will be successful, if the executors of the first customary rules of health preservation will demonstrate a skeptical indifference toward them and if their existence will be surrounded by anti-hygienic conditions. When a helper, while opening ventilation or removing dust, or a nurse, while attending the children, will only care to execute these operations as an order, as a hard duty, and, while removing the dust, or touching the child will carry from the dark, damp, basement, which so often is used in schools for housing and crowding servant people in them, his or somebody else's germs and his anti-hygienic habits—then such help is directly dangerous for the school. The helper-servant must, to some little extent at least, be acquainted in a general way with the elementary rules of school hygiene. The same may be said of the helpers in any other household line. Thus the school is in need of qualified workers, instructors in school economy. The creation of an army of such instructors is rendered possible all the more, since the remuneration for school work is at present sufficiently high.
How, then, to create such an army? Up to the present time there were conducted everywhere pedagogical and general educational courses for instructors of all school grades. Corresponding courses of school economy must be quickly organized in various localities for the school servants and for the instructors, and these courses must not be of a narrow technical scope but with a number of subjects of a general educational character. We may rest assured that the lower servants themselves, who undoubtedly aspire to education, will heartily respond to the idea of the courses and will lend their support to these tasks. Then we could cherish a hope for the creation of a new school army, where from young to old every one would be imbued with the common idea and where the difference between the old and young, between the "gentle" and the "common" work, would disappear. The union of the teachers-internationalists and its branches must pay special attention to this question and to advancing the problem, in co-operation with the labor union of the servants (along the lines of specialization), most decidedly and quickly. The
34
