“Advice on Lice”

These days, my kids watch educational YouTube videos. My son mostly does things on his own personal computer, being in junior high, but I know that they play videos on screens for the whole class in the elementary schools. There are also designated websites that they use. And that’s fine. It doesn’t bother me, particularly. I think there’s a use for screens in education, provided you use them correctly, and it’s hardly as though using screens in education is new to the current generation.

The only version of this available online, however, is not the short film some children would’ve seen using a projector back in the ‘80s. It’s the filmstrip. A bunch of children are staging a production of Rapunzel, because never let it be said that educational shorts weren’t as on-the-nose as possible. One of the boys has head lice, which are animated because this is from Disney. His brush is used as a prop in a moment in the play, and the girl playing Rapunzel ends up with lice herself. The school nurse teaches her what to do.

It’s worth noting that head lice are not in and of themselves dangerous. Body lice spread diseases such as typhus, but head lice are mostly just a nuisance. They do consume blood, so they’re not a good thing to have, but they’re annoying parasites, not dangerous disease vectors. The short never mentions this, because I’m not sure you really want to get into the differences when discussing things for literal children. Also because it’s easy to imagine a child wanting to avoid the nuisance of treatment when there’s just a little itching involved.

The advice on how to treat an infestation is just fine, though, and hasn’t changed much since 1985. You still use special shampoo and a comb to get rid of all the eggs, or nits. (A fairly effective treatment is actually heat, which desiccates them.) The short also makes sure to emphasize that getting lice isn’t proof that you’re dirty, because regular shampoos don’t do anything against lice. It also shows that the way to fully remove an infestation involves treating everything in the house that lice can live on for any length of time, generally a few hours.

I’m sure the animation was, you know, fine. It’s educational short animated lice. It’s not going to be great art. There’s a song, which is a bit weird. It doesn’t have much to do with anything; it’s just part of the kids’ production of Rapunzel, I guess. I don’t know that the production would’ve been great, but you know, it’s an elementary school play. That’s if anything less likely to be high art than an educational filmstrip.