Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/197

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
THE SCHOOL DOCTOR IN OTHER LANDS
171

for backward children. We have already seen how from 10 to 20 per cent of all children go to these for a shorter or longer time; and how, at Mannheim, many are more than ready after a time to go back to the ordinary school. This kind of "result" is being welcomed all the time by doctor, teacher, and parent, and it is altogether the result of training that is largely treatment. For in such schools the doctor is in a sense the head master, inasmuch as he is responsible for the order of the teaching, and all the details of the work, in a very special way.

Then the school bathing has had results. It has even results on paper. For it is found that only 1·8 per cent of all the children have to be classed as not clean. (Contrast this with our figures in Britain—the dreadful fact that one English doctor estimates that only 30 per cent of our children are clean and that nearly 35 percent are in a horrible state; that another writes that in some districts 45 per cent are very dirty, and only 12 per cent clean; and that yet another declares that taking an average roughly including children from various districts, 1 in 5 is very dirty.) Thus the class rooms have almost suddenly become safe and healthy places in comparison to what they once were, and in every city where the baths are installed there is a crowd of