2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

Elizabeth␣ A. Toon Cornell University
HSS Abstracts
Measuring Up:
Educators, Schoolchildren, and Representations of Physical Growth
in the Interwar U.S.
In the 1920s and 1930s, leading educators set out to revolutionize the ways in
which American schoolchildren learned about their health. Energized by new
biomedical knowledge and new philosophies of education, these experts
stressed the acquisition and practice of health habits and “learning-by-doing”
classroom activities intended to demonstrate the relevance of biomedical
science to everyday life. The ultimate expression of this new approach to health
education, this paper explains, was its emphasis on measuring and representing
children’s physical growth. Model curricula and educators‚ handbooks prodded
teachers to devise activities requiring children to chart their own growth and
that of other organisms, while textbooks narrated the progress of fictional
classrooms where students meticulously tracked physical growth and its
relationship to health habits. By the end of the 1930s, two strategies for
representing health scientifically came to dominate school health education.
The first was the growth curve, where progress was typically represented by
children climbing and planting a flag atop the “Hill of Health.” The second
was the tale of the two rats, which juxtaposed pictures of a healthy rat and his
withered, scrawny, or bow-legged twin and drew a scientific moral about
children’s health habits from the differences in the rats‚ fates. As an instructional
focus, these representations of growth seemed especially versatile and
meaningful. Growth was an exciting personal event for children, and thus
considered likely to spur their interest in a previously dull subject. Moreover,
educators argued, teaching children to chart their height and weight progress
or the relative growth of organisms introduced them to scientific method—
observation, measurement, and quantification. This precision was especially
attractive to educators who were expected to convey a broader, positive
definition of health—”Health is what Nature gives you plus what you give
yourself,” for instance, to their young charges. Finally, growth was an event
which adults hoped to monitor and control. In some school systems and often
at the behest of foundation and government sponsors of school health programs,
educators and health workers used aggregate progress in height and weight as
one measure of the efficacy of health education. In this context, I argue, the
upward march of children’s growth curves signaled to observers not only that
children had learned to understand their physical selves in scientific terms but
that school health advocates had tangible evidence that their interventions had
been worthwhile. In everyday practice, educators found that their own progress
towards this new, more self-consciously “scientific” health education was more
difficult than anticipated. Several prominent child health experts argued that
the relationship between gains in weight and gains in health was far more
ambiguous than assumed. Furthermore, skeptical educators suggested that
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