If the proper person to teach the child is the parent and if the parent does not know how, the obvious thing to do is to call the parents together and to try to teach them how.  Besides meetings for parents (fathers and mothers together), excellent results have come from meetings for fathers and sons addressed by a man, and from meetings for mothers and daughters addressed by a woman.

The following details as to arrangement and conducting of parents’ meetings may be of value.  For such meetings in the public school, the consent of the local school board must be obtained.  This ought not to be granted if those seeking permission are either cranks or quacks.  The Viavi people are said to be obtaining such permission for use of schoolhouses under the specious plea of social hygiene.  Others, well intentioned but with extreme purist ideas and unwise methods, occasionally volunteer their services.  The school authorities should be cautious.  But when those who apply are intelligent and honest and above question as to their standing and judgment, school boards ought not only to consent, but to support and cooeperate.  A grudging consent, mixed with indifference, finds its way by capillary attraction to the school principals and teachers and constitutes a real hindrance.  When the consent of the school authorities has been obtained, the next step is the selection and training of speakers and the notification or the parents.  Where permitted, the notices or invitations should be sent out by the school in which the meeting is to be held, by mail, sealed, to every home in the district whence pupils in that school come.  This should be done even if the local society has to pay the postage.  If the school authorities will not or cannot do this, then cards of invitation should be sent home through the pupils.  In either case, the invitation should be so worded as to do no harm to the children who may read it.

Parents’ meetings may be addressed by two speakers, a physician and a layman.  The two speakers should get to the schoolhouse in time to see that the speaker’s desk and chair are not on a high platform too far from the little group of parents.  The chair and table should be brought down to the floor close to the seats and the parents brought forward.  The principal of the school should introduce the layman, accompanying the physician, to be chairman of the evening.  The chairman should make a brief address, as outlined in the syllabus provided by the Committee on Education of the Society, introducing the physician.  The physician should make a brief address as outlined in the syllabus, and then, after proper explanations, the physician should resume his chair.  Both physician and layman, seated, should engage in a dialogue, in which the layman should endeavor with all the intelligence, sympathy, and skill at his command to put himself in the place of the humblest parent in the room and ask such questions of the physician as such a parent might ask or ought to ask.  For example:—­