THE HEALTH OF OUR BOYS.
THE article in the Times of Monday about the health of boys in public schools must have surprised as well as alarmed a great many households. We have all been • congratulating ourselves upon our sanitary reforms, upon our flushed drains and open ventilation, and careful inspeo. tion of all that can produce disease, and thanking beneficent science for our lowered rate of mortality and the improved health of every class. Yet here in the Times is "a physician of high standing" who has been examining our children, and finds the boys for the most part a rickety lot of whom any 8,,vage nation would be ashamed, and whom an ancient Greek would probably have weeded out by some summary pro- cess of selection. Of a hundred lads in a public school between thirteen and fifteen years of age, thirty-nine were below the average height, fifty-three below the average weight, sixty- eight below the average in chest measurement, sixty-three were the subject of deformities, two were ruptured, fourteen had varicocele, and twenty-two were the subjects of albuminuria. Only a minority, in fact, were really healthy or perfectly formed lads. It seems difficult to believe such a report, and yet it would hardly have been published except upon high authority ; and there are some facts known to us all which give it a colour of probability. Parents have been com- plaining for some time that boys are more "delicate" than they used to be; that school-life does not seem to " suit " them pet fectly ; that, in London especially, they suffer in a way which suggests distrust of the conditions of their environment. They grow pale, flaccid, and headachy. Their teeth fail them, they are liable to an unintelligible degree to constipation, and instead of being ready to eat anything from a paving stone to a blanket, they are dainty, wanting in appetite, and sometimes even "averse to food." Of the "deformities" mentioned, except pigeon-breast, we have not heard much, and cannot but suspect either accident or exaggeration, but that a sort of malaise is common among lads of the well-to-do class is the testimony of numberless mothers not usually given to depreciate anything that is their own. What is the cause ?
Two explanations are sometimes offered which seem at first sight sufficient, but which do not stand the test of .careful inquiry. One is that we are rearing babies who f rrmerly would have died, and that this survival of the un- fittest, due, of course, to increased knowledge and medical skill, is lowering the average of vitality. Another is that the generation which is producing the blys is over- worked, subjected to too much intellectual stimulus, and generally made neurotic, and that the children of such parents are naturally, if not diseased, at least delicate, and predisposed to suffer from every cause of unhealthiness to which they may be exposed. That sounds credible, though we must remark in passing that much feebleness is acci- dental, and that no one inherits a broken leg, but there is a very solid bit of evidence which seems fatal to both those explanations. If the tendency to weakness is congenital, the girls ought to display it as much as the boys, and they do not. If there is a fact that is certain in our Social life, it is that the girls of our day in almost every class are bigger, healthier, and stronger in every way than their mothers ever were. They are so much taller that the great shops have altered their "stock sizes "; they are so much heavier that they are rather ashamed of it, as destroying their claim to etherealness ; and they are so much stronger that they enjoy walks, rides on the bicycle, and gymnastic exercises which their mothers would have pronounced, and, in fact, do pronounce, impossible or injurious. If this is the fact—and no one who has eyes seriously disputes it— the question is not why our children do not profit by all the science brought to bear on their protection, but only why our boys do not.
We suspect, without being entirely convinced, that the truth is something of this kind. We are far too careless as
• ba what our boys eat at preparatory schools, being content if they are content, without sufficient inquiry as to the nutri- .tioneness of their food, the hours at which it is taken, and ;their supply of milk ; and we allow them to be worn out by an injudicious mixture of work which is for them severe, and exercise which would do them twice as much good if it were not quite so continuous. The brainwork by itself would not hurt them, or the energetic play, but the mixture of both before either brain or muscles are fully formed wears them out with weariness. They get "stale," as the athletes say. The old notion that hard work and hard study can go on together without injury to the average young man has long ago been discarded. The experiment was tried under most favourable circumstances at Cornell University, and was abandoned ; all the abler teachers, many of them prejudiced in its favour, confessing that it bad failed. We now tax the brains of boys of thirteen pretty severely in order that they
may be "prepared" for public-school life, and, while they are studying, encourage them to play games which involve what
is really violent and exhausting exercise. They are, in fact, physically and mentally worked hard, and unless they are exceptionally strong, or, as many boys do, refuse to let their minds exert themselves, they lose weight, grow too fast, and
do not acquire the capacity of chest necessary to health. They want more rest, and do not get it, partly, of course, by their own fault, their instinctive restlessness making them regard all rest as tedious. The nervous power, too, becomes impaired. In the schoolroom and the playground a fierce spirit of competition is generated, " eagerness " is abnormally developed, and the lad goes home for his holidays in a con. dition of half-conscious lassitude. The holidays recover him, an increase of age recovers him, the lounging habit of eighteen or nineteen recovers him; and the proportion who grow out of the "delicacy" of the earlier period is very con- siderable; but still a good many suffer through life from what is practically overstrain hardly noticed by parents, and watched with interest only by the few masters who have time to spare for noticing such a detail.
What is the remedy ? Probably there is none except increased attention on the part of both masters and fathers to the health of their growing lads, leading, of course, to better food, longer intervals of rest, and less driving, both as to mental exertion and success in the school-games. The intolerable cooking of public schools, which even twenty years ago was a distinct abuse, and drew down sharp remonstrances from men as experienced as the author of " Tom Brown's Schooldays," has, we believe, been partially corrected, as also has the system which left growing lads for twelve hours in the twenty-four without any supply of food which they cared to eat. They are still too often allowed to buy stuff in the way of delicacies, which they would be much better without ; but the system of diet
has, especially in preparatory schools, grown kindlier and more careful with every decade. The real evil now is overstrain, the mixture of two educations both urged on a little too rapidly, and that can only be improved by steady attention, created by the consciousness which articles like that in the Times help every now and then to awaken. The willingness to pay for education now is very great, the pre- paratory schools are very profitable, and their sanitary condi- tion is watched with anxious care; there is no wish to neglect any reasonable precaution, and if fathers will only observe carefully, and when it is needful remonstrate, the remaining evils will gradually be sweFt away. The principal of them, we feel confident, is the overtaxation of the lads in two pursuits at once—athletics and education—at an age when even slight overstrain inflicts on the frame an injury which is sometimes permanent. If the lade could only rest for an hour in the middle of the day the whole evil would be obviated; but an English boy never rests unless he is bending over a desk, which ought not to be so flat, or lying down in bed.
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