CHILDREN SHOULD BE TAUGHT TO BREATHE PROPERLY.
By Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, in Chicago American, October 22. In a magazine called Suggestive Therapeutics I found the following extract:— Is there nowhere to be found a man of influence on school boards and the like, possessing a knowledge of the mere facts— - That tuberculosis kills more people than the sword, pestilence, or famine?
- That no child was ever born into the world suffering from tuberculosis?
- That compulsory deep breathing in schools would wipe tuberculosis off the face of the earth in two generations?
Is it not an astounding thing that no popular educator has yet grasped the simple, ordinary, everyday truth that consumption is always preventable? The daily practice of deep breathing, acquired in childhood, will make every human being, whatever his tendency or ancestry, proof against the inroads of the bacillus of tuberculosis. There should be two half-hours given up during the day's schooling to the practice of deep breathing, in the morning and afternoon sessions. This is a timely word of good sense. Children are being taught many useless and some disgusting things in our schools to-day, and this would be an excellent substitute for the time given to the dissection of dead cats and rabbits. A young girl was threatened with expulsion from one of our schools for refusing to dissect animals. In another, several children fainted when a brutal woman teacher chloroformed a cat in their presence, preparatory to its dissection for the study of anatomy. In neither of these schools was one word said to the children regarding deep breathing. It is much more important that a child shall know how to fill its lungs with fresh air—all its lungs—than that it shall learn how many bones are contained in the body of a rabbit. Very few persons know how to breathe. It is the first thing a human being does on arriving here, yet not one in five hundred ever learns to do it properly. The majority of children breathe like canary birds. I have known a boy who inherited a hollow chest and consumptive tendencies to become transformed in one year's time by being taught to inhale ten deep breaths through his nostrils—exhaling slowly—three times a day. I have seen a palid, anæmic girl grow rosy and robust through making her walk to and from school, a breathing exercise. She closed the lips and emptied the lungs, and inhaled while she took seven steps, and exhaled with the next seven. In a few weeks a marked improvement began to be visible in her appearance. As a beautifier, nothing excels this fresh-air lung bath. The lungs are composed of innumerable cells, and the majority of persons use only the “upper rooms” of this breath mansion. The lower ones are closed to the air, and are receptacles for dust and disease germs throughout life. One of the best things our teachers in kindergartens and public schools can do is to give the children one half-hour or four quarter-hour exercises in lung sweeping. Proper breathing is an aid to the mental and spiritual faculties as well as to the physical body. Let it become an important part of the educational system of our land.