Schools also engaged in the battle to teach children, especially poor or immigrant children, some of the new ideas about cleanliness and health. The public health movement, reacting to publicity about appalling sanitary conditions and high mortality rates in cities and anxious to build "a strong and healthy race," brought hygiene into the schools. Children were taught to brush their teeth and were given medical examinations. "Tooth Brush Drill" is documented by this Ontario Board of Health photograph dating from the early 1900s. The movement hoped not only to benefit the child, but through the child to reach poor and immigrant families, whose values and customs often derived from their rural, European past and were considered alien or dangerous in urbanising North America.
