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LABOUR AND CHILDHOOD

medical man—a medical officer, for example—will do for this work, he naturally feels that while he, himself, is a beginner, the majority of doctors have not even begun fairly to consider the needs of the schools. He feels that though there is no college for school doctors,[1] no chair, no Minister of Public Education, even, yet there is a new science of education. This is his discovery; or rather it is the discovery of the many doctors who have taken part for forty years or more in the study of the brain and the study of school children.

If the expert medical officer begins this work, he certainly cannot begin it as an expert. He may learn rapidly, but still he is a beginner. This will mean that he makes a sacrifice.

One does not begin, as one of the youngest apprentices, by receiving a large salary.

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  1. The medical faculty in Hungary have a special college for school doctors. Special courses and lectures for young school doctors are given in various cities, but such methods would be scouted for any other order of thorough professional training. One cannot learn this new work through attending lectures. Not but that some of the courses do of course afford a means of real training in certain departments of the work, as, for example, the class on the eyesight of schoolchildren held lately by Köhn at Breslau. But as a matter of fact work in the schools, and the experience gained thus by doctors who have taken the ordinary diplomas, and whose attention is turned to scholastic problems, is the only means of getting an all-round training in England to-day. It is perhaps the best method. It certainly is the only one, and it gets rid of the question of fees.