The physical record of each child should be kept from date of entrance to date of leaving school, showing condition at successive examinations, absence because of illness, etc.
3. _Thorough physical examination of children when leaving school, or when passing compulsory school age, as a condition to "working papers" and to "coming out."_
To give working papers to children seriously handicapped by physical defects is to buy future industrial trouble, hospital and poorhouse bills. A boy with adenoids, a girl with eye trouble, should not be permitted to begin the fight for self-support without at least being clearly shown that the correction of these defects will increase their earning power. At present a schoolgirl with incipient tuberculosis, or predisposed to that disease, can get working papers, go to a hammock or tobacco factory, work long hours, breathe bushels of dust, deplete her vitality, spread tuberculosis among her co-workers and home associates, infect a tenement,--and all this without any help or advice or any protection from society until she is too sick to work and her physician notifies the health department that she is a danger center. We may disagree about society's right to control a child's act after the defects are discovered, but who will question society's duty to tell that child and her parents the truth about her physical needs before it accepts her labor or permits her to "enter society"?
4. _Supervision by physicians of hygiene practiced in schoolrooms and on playgrounds._
Superintendent Maxwell, of New York City, and other educational leaders urge teachers to do their utmost to learn the physical conditions and home environment of the individual child, and to fit school treatment to the individual possibilities and handicaps. But experience proves conclusively that try as they will, teachers and principals have neither the special knowledge nor the time to acquire the special knowledge requisite to use the facts disclosed by the physical examination of school children. Physicians and nurses are needed, not so much for treating children, as for teaching children, parents, teachers, family and dispensary physicians.
Private schools have visiting physicians who may be consulted; they need physicians to supervise, with power to examine or to require certificates of examination. The Committee on the Physical Welfare of School Children found that when a visitor was detailed for that purpose it was easy to secure the coöperation of parents, teachers, family physicians, dispensaries, school boards, and charitable societies. The Hawthorne Club's school secretary has been similarly successful in Boston, as have those of Hartley House, Greenwich House, and the Public Education Association in New York.