In the past 25 years increasing responsibility for the mental, moral and physical welfare of the child has been thrust upon the school, not shared by the home. But gradually the unity of education is being recognized, and also the need for the same standards of training in home, school and community. This is being brought about largely through the Parent-Teacher Association, which brings the parents and teachers together as allies, to discuss and unite in promoting a program which will be uniform wherever the child may be found.
From books alone it is no more possible to make a healthy child than it is to make an athlete; both tasks demand practice as well as preaching, of the many functions of this organization, perhaps the most fundamental is its service as a great school for parents. In this school they may come in contact with new methods and ideas and through intelligent cooperation with the teachers of their children may double the effectiveness of the school by making the home the laboratory and experiment station for the educational program.
In training for health this cooperation is not only advantageous; it is essential. Three major aspects may be briefly suggested.
First: The Parent-Teacher Association offers the only practical opportunity to make clear to all parents, without personal comment, the fact that, just as any one of them would class as incapable a teacher who failed to teach anything whatever to a normal child, so is the parent demonstrating inefficiency in his or her great business of being a parent by sending daily to school a child unsound in health. Such a child is unable to take full advantage of the education for which his parents and the other taxpayers are spending their money.
Second: The school health curriculum includes diet, sleep, bathing, exercise and proper clothing. This program may be set before the parents at the opening of the school year, and their active support may be urged as being as necessary as the provision of food and shelter. When it has been accepted by the members of an association as a feature of their health work quite as important as the purchase of playground equipment and the furnishing of the school lunchroom, it is then a natural sequence for the school to request further support, when the health of the pupils shows an evident failure at the home end of the partnership.
Third: Having thus been educated in the effect of good and bad health upon school standing, the Parent-Teacher Association assumes the responsibility for reaching the parents of preschool children in the district and urging the health examination and treatment which will send each little child to school free from remediable defects. This can be done, in cooperation with health authorities and with school officials, with a degree of success unattainable by any other agency, because it thus becomes a project of a community organization working from within rather than a benevolent enterprise applied from without—a movement "of the people, by the people, for the people."
PARENT PRIDE PUTS PARENT POWER TO WORK
Source:
Willis Reeve, Margaretta. What to Tell the Public About Health. New York: American Public Health Association, 1933. Print.
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