Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/229

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THE SCHOOL DOCTOR AT HOME
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now carries on a public tournament with insanity experts in the court. This display of knowledge dazzles the public, and the persons who are the subjects of his psychological dissection suffer none the less because they are placed high in the social world. They are glad to pay for "dissection" because this may save the life of an erring son and brother? But would not the experts have done better work had they been engaged as co-operators with teachers and parents twenty years ago, and long before any crime was committed? Truly the rich, as well as the poor, have some reason to desire the advent of the school doctor.

"But they can engage him," some may cry, "to work in a very exclusive way in the exclusive school!" No, that is impossible. There is, as we have said already, no training college here, or even in Germany, for school doctors! They have to learn by observation, and the few and comparatively small schools of the richer class do not offer a wide enough field. Not through these could they develop an entirely new branch of applied physiology—that is to say, the science of the higher brain centres and their activity and development in childhood. No; this work must go on where it has begun—in the people's schools. Therefore the