p I have no hesitation in repeating time and time again that health care is the most important task of the teacher. Children’s buoyant zest 111 for life or their lack of it determines the quality of their emotional life, world outlook, intellectual development, the consolidation of their knowledge and their faith in their own potential. If I were to measure up the work and anxieties I encounter with children during their first four years at school it would emerge that a good half are devoted to the children’s health. (10, 87)

p Concern for health is impossible without constant communication with the family. The overwhelming majority of discussions with parents, particularly during the first couple of years of the child’s school career, are about his health. (10, 87)

p Many of the children were not receiving important food substance in their diet essential for the strength of their growing bodies and to ward off colds or disorders in their metabolism. Only eight of my pupils had honey at home and honey, speaking figuratively, is a slice of sun on your plate. I used to talk to the parents persuading them how important eating honey was for their children’s health. By the end of the first month of the term thirteen families had started bee-keeping on a small scale and by the spring the number had grown to twenty-three.

p In the autumn I advised mothers to make jam from rose-hips, sloes and other fruits and berries rich in vitamins to put by for the winter. I also spoke to parents about planting the 112 necessary number of fruit trees in their gardens, particularly apple trees. Children should be having fresh fruit all through the winter and this is easy to ensure in the countryside as long as people are prepared to make a little extra effort. (10, 41)

p Surveys and special research programmes have been undertaken . . . over a number of years which have revealed these disturbing facts: 25 per cent of young children do not breakfast before going to school, because they have no appetite; 30 per cent eat less than half what is necessary for a normal diet; 23 per cent eat only half a proper breakfast and only 22 per cent breakfast as they should by normal standards. Children who leave for school without breakfast are subject to dizziness after several hours at their desks because their stomachs are empty. By the time such pupils come home from school they have not eaten for several hours, but they have no real healthy appetite (parents often complain that their children are not interested in simple healthy food such as soup, milk-puddings or milk to drink but only want to nibble at tasty tit-bits. (10, 89)

p . . .We taught our youngsters not to be afraid of draughts; experience has shown that no draught need be feared, if a person has been exposed to them since childhood. It is just as important to make children intolerant of stuffy air in an unventilated room, as it is to instil into them cleanliness. (10, 91)

p The elixir of good health is air saturated with the phytoncides from cereals—wheat, rye, barley, buckwheat and other meadow grasses. I often used to take my pupils out into the fields and the meadows for them to breathe in the good air filled with the scent of cereals. I used to urge parents to plant hazel-nut trees under the windows of their children’s bedroom; these trees fill the air with phytoncides, which wipe out many disease-carrying germs. The scent of hazel trees is killing to various insect pests. Wherever hazel trees grow you will find no flies or mosquitoes. I also made sure that every family put up a summer shower in its garden. (10, 42)

p I used to worry about the fact that many pupils had poor sight, and how some pupils had to start wearing glasses as early as Class 3. My observations in relation to many young children led me to conclude that it was not so much a question of their being tired out by reading, as their incorrect daily routine, particularly the fact that their food was lacking in vitamins and that being physically weak these children caught cold easily. Some children’s diseases have a bad effect on the sight. A proper daily routine and diet, and plenty of exercise all serve to protect a child from disease and help him to enjoy the beauties of the world around him. (10, 42)

p The years I spent observing children brought me up against distressing phenomena: in the 114 spring from about March onwards all children are weaker than at other times in the year. Children seem to come to the end of their tether: their body seems less able to resist colds and their capacity for work falls off. Their sight is also impaired during these spring months.

p I found explanations for these phenomena in the works of doctors and psychologists: the rhythm of the interaction of the body’s various systems changes abruptly in the spring months. The reason for this is that the body’s supply of vitamins is coming to an end and the abrupt fall in the activity of solar radiation also makes itself felt so that prolonged concentrated mental activity tires the nervous system. (10, 42)

p Experience has shown us that in 85 per cent of cases where children are doing badly at school, the main reason for backwardness is poor health, some indisposition or illness, more often than not of a quite imperceptible variety but something that can only be put to right, provided there is concerted effort on the part of mother, father, doctor and teacher. Indispositions and disorders of the cardio-vascular system, the respiratory organs or the stomach or intestines are very often not actual diseases but deviations from the healthy norm, concealed from us by a child’s vitality and sprightliness. Many years of work among children have shown me that so-called retarded thought processes are in many cases the result of general indisposition, of which even the child himself is unaware and do not stem from any 115 physiological changes or disfunctions of the brain cells. In some children a sickly pallor or poor appetite makes it clear that something is wrong. The slightest attempt to improve a child’s diet evokes violent reaction which results in red spots. The most detailed tests are of little help, for on the surface everything is in order. In most cases it emerges that we are up against the disruption of a child’s metabolism resulting from excessively long periods spent indoors. In such cases children’s capacity for concentrated mental work is impaired. The number of such indispositions increases in particular during periods of marked growth and at puberty.

p The only radical cure for such conditions is to change patterns of work and recreation: long periods out of doors, open windows in bedrooms, early bedtime and early rising and nourishing food. (10, 39)

p Some children appear healthy and yet on closer scrutiny of their work it emerges that they are suffering from some latent indisposition. An interesting detail to note is that latent indispositions and ailments become particularly noticeable when teachers try to fill every minute of a lesson with concentrated mental work. Some children are quite unable to keep up with teachers who are all out to see that “not a moment of the lesson is wasted”. I have come to realise that an accelerated “tempo” of this kind is too much, indeed, harmful even for children in perfect health. Excessive mental effort only means that children’s eyes will start 116 to blur over and their movements grow languid. By then children will no longer be capable of anything, all they will be wanting is fresh air, while the teacher keeps them “in harness" and goads them on at an ever faster pace___(10, 40)

p We do not sanction experimentation with “effective” or “accelerated” teaching methods, based on the view that a child’s head is like an electronic device which can assimilate without end. A child is a living creature, whose brain is an infinitely intricate, delicate organ, of which we should take the utmost thoughtful care. The primary education course can be assimilated in three years, but only on condition that constant care is taken of children’s health and every step taken to ensure their normal physical development. It is not speed and concentration that are the key to successful mental work, but correct, carefully thought-out organisation of that work and the provision of a many-sided physical, intellectual and aesthetic education. (11, 147)

p A child’s health depends on the kind of homework he is given and how and when he does it. Very important is the emotional side of the process of independent study in the home. If a child takes up his books unwillingly, this not only acts as a damper on his intellectual energy, but it has a negative effect on the complex system of the interaction of his internal organs. I know many cases when a child 117 who has developed an aversion to schoolwork started to have severe problems with his digestion and to suffer from gastric disease. (10, 90)

p .. .If a child sits at his homework for several hours before bedtime, he will start to lag behind. Passivity while a child is nominally engaged in mental work at his lessons is more often than not the result of the fact that a child spends the hours he should be out of doors—in the garden or playing snow balls—poring over books. (11, 150)

p The recuperative role of sleep depends not merely on its duration, but also on the part of the night during which the person sleeps, and how and when he works during the day. Those who feel best of all are those who go to bed early, have sufficient sleep, wake up early and spend their first 5-10 waking hours engaged in intensive mental work (the actual hours depend upon the age of the person concerned). In the hours that follow work, intensivity slacks off. Intense mental activity, particularly learning by heart, is out of the question during the last 5-7 hours before bedtime (for those in weak health or recovering from sickness such activity is out of the question for the last 8-9 hours before bedtime). (11, 150)

p Experience shows that if teaching and educational work are organised correctly ( especially the study of new material at lessons) two times more mental work can be achieved in the 118 course of 1.5 or 2 hours (sometimes 2.5) in the morning, as in the same period after school. In the morning pupils from Classes 1 and 2 complete all their homework in 20-25 minutes, pupils from classes 3, 4 and 5 in 40-45 minutes. Homework, as school practice has shown, cannot be avoided. Work requiring considerable time (essays, the execution of complex drawings) should be spread over several days (exactly how this should be done is a question on which teachers should advise pupils). Mental work for a child in the morning starts with repetition of what needs to be learned, remembered and kept in his mind. (11, 154)

p Schoolchildren who stay on at school for lunch and afternoon homework sessions are not with their books all the time; their homework is completed early in the morning at home. Groups organised for such children facilitate domestic arrangements for the family at home, but do not substitute the family (indeed nothing can). Education lacking constant, daily communication between children and their parents is abnormal and distorted education, just as parents’ lives are abnormal and distorted if they are not constantly called upon to care for their children. (11, 155)

p The school opted for gymnastics and athletics as the main types of physical activities. .. . The aim of such exercise is to develop children’s sense of the beauty of movement, strength, harmony, agility and staying-power. When pupils 119 are working on new exercises at gym, much attention is given to aesthetic perfection, to beauty. The desire to achieve perfection in department is an important incentive that makes pupils start the morning with physical exercises. (11, 159)

p When performing such forms of exercise as running, skiing, swimming we attribute considerable importance to aesthetic perfection. For these and other types of sport it has become the rule to base adjudication on beauty, grace and harmony of movement, while speed has become a secondary factor. Beauty is not merely being demonstrated but created, and the same applies to physical perfection; in other words efforts are being made to achieve the main objectives of physical education. To sum up, we would never permit competitions in which the only criterion of success were the speed of movement. They encourage unhealthy excitement and ambition. Such competitions often lack beauty, aesthetic objectives and, most regrettable of all, mass appeal and consideration of individual opportunities. Sport must not be transformed from a means of physical education for all children into a means of achieving individual success; children must not be divided up into those who are good or bad at sport and unhealthy emotions should not be stimulated by an atmosphere of hysterical excitement at the prospect of the school’s sports prestige.

p Sport becomes a means of education when it is everyone’s favourite. (11, 160)

.. .Harmony between a healthy body and healthy mind is impossible without joy. If a child who is enthralled by the beauty of the fields, the sparkling stars, the endless song of the crickets and the scent of wild flowers starts making up a song, this means that he has attained the peak of that harmony between body and mind. Care for a person’s health, particularly a child’s health, is not simply a series of sanitary norms and rules, or a list of do’s and don’ts for the daily time-table, work, rest and food. It involves first and foremost care of the harmonious fullness of all man’s physical and mental capacities, and the high point of that harmony is the joy of creativity. (10, 92)