Your children work too early, too much and badly; ours don't work enough, he told me last year, some time before he died, illustrates this. English physiologist A.-D. Waller.
The truth is that the number of sick and overworked high school and college students this winter is considerable. A league was founded to improve the physical, intellectual and moral hygiene of schoolchildren. She tried to organize the collaboration of families, teachers and hygienists. It is not in its power to prevent our children from learning French, Latin and Greek, a foreign language, the history of their country and general history, geography, philosophy, arithmetic, geometry, algebra, mechanics, physics, chemistry and natural history. This catalog instruction overtaxes barely trained intelligences. This overwork, combined with hereditary influences, at a time when the struggle for existence causes so many nervous disorders among parents, determines in a third of the school population a state of abnormal nervous susceptibility and an extreme predisposition to illness.

What can be done to change this state of affairs? The remedies are simple. Everyone knows them. No one dares to take responsibility for applying them.

Children and adolescents do not get enough sleep. They need nine hours of sleep. If we only give them eight or seven, they will sleep in class or study. It is best to leave them in their bed. Eight hours of daily work well spent is a maximum for young people; five hours is enough for children, before the twelfth year. During the period of struggle which precedes the exams, one can reach nine hours of work. This is a concession that is not advisable.

A third of the day must be devoted to meals, washing, games, and recreational arts.
Students eat too quickly; their ablutions are too summary. A small heated swimming pool should be built in each high school. It would ensure cleanliness and relaxation for students. The Ancients claimed that the degree of civilization of a people was measured by the number of its swimming pools. Today they would class us as barbarians.

We have reduced the hours of study, but we have not reduced the programs, so that intellectual overwork is extreme today. The reduction of programs!... The minister had made commitments in this direction. The reorganization took place and, when it was completed, it was found that it had ultimately resulted in an increase in costs. For what ? Because the authors responsible for the program are eminent specialists in their order and who always defend their specialty. Everyone demands their share and strives to make it as important as possible.

We passed a law to limit child labor in factories. Why wouldn't we do another one to regulate work in schools? It is the health and future of the French population that are at stake.

Our adolescents are forced to perform intellectual forced labor to which no mature man would agree to submit for six or seven years. They inspire many students with a horror of study. so much so that these young people can no longer be reconciled with her and thus deprive themselves of one of the sweetest and most faithful enjoyments of life.

No doubt many undergo without much damage the system of education imposed on them, thanks to the admirable flexibility enjoyed by the adolescent's organism and the surprising resistance it puts up against the causes of destruction. But in this struggle they exhaust strength which would be precious to them for the battles of the future and some never recover from the ordeal. Only the strongest heads get through this difficult period without weakening.

Dr. Maurice Lebon.