Page:Labour and childhood.djvu/196

 move, and are here to improve our methods of registering changes simply because, from our birth, and long before it, people were making observations and getting "results" that were trustworthy and acting on these. "Science" is only an extension or refinement of common sense and common observation, and to know the effect of the school doctor's work in Germany, we may take this kind of witness as well as the other. It appears, then, that medical inspection has had the effect of lightening, in many respects, the work of the teachers. On the whole it has lightened it so much that, even when all the new work is reckoned, it has brought, not a strain, but relief. The compulsion to attempt to make all children, sick or well, ill or well endowed, normal or abnormal, toe the line and reach one standard is given up. Moreover, if a child fails to-day, it is no longer at once surmised that the teacher is at fault. All this constitutes such a relief from the thrall of blind Power that the mere weighing, measuring and observing of children is a small burden in comparison.

To come now to more definite instances of successes attained through new departures for which the doctor is responsible.

At Mannheim there are "Hilfsklasse," or classes