LABOUR AND CHILDHOOD
CHAPTER I
DISEASES AND THEIR CAUSES
THE first, the most obvious reason why the doctor is wanted to-day in schools is because a great many children are ill. Let us briefly run over a few facts and figures collected very recently.
A few years ago a Royal Commission was appointed to inquire into the condition of school children. The evidence then gathered was very disquieting. In Edinburgh one school doctor found 700 cases of neglected, and even unrecognized phthisis. (Dr. Leslie Mackenzie found in one slum school two children with acute phthisis, doing the ordinary school drill with the others!) In Edinburgh, 1300 of the children attending school had heart disease, and there were 15,000 cases of throat disease! The school-doctors of London have given evidence of the same kind. Dr. Thomas reports that 8 per cent of the non-wage-earning children are deformed, and that 8 per cent have heart disease, while 25 per cent of all the children are anæmic. Among the wage-earning children matters are much worse. From 20 to 30 per cent are backward or dull from causes that are altogether physical in the ordinary sense.
Diseases vary in different countries—just as human types, and even animals and plants, vary. The East has its own plagues. And there are no two Western countries that have exactly the same ways of getting ill and unfit. The alien brings with him his own disease—as, for example, the disease known as favus which exists in London, but not among English-born children, save in the case of a few who have caught the infection from foreign children. On the other hand, England has her own scourges—phthisis, for example, which still carries off young and old in great numbers. Then among school-going children there is the very common ailment called adenoids. In Scotland and in England the number of these is legion. In some quarters of Scottish cities 25 per cent of the children suffer from the distress of blocked-up nostril and throat. The Report of the Committee on Physical Deterioration had the evidence on this point of Mr. Arthur Cheadle among others. Mr. Cheadle examined the state of the ears, throat, and nose of 1000 school children between the ages of three and sixteen in the Hanwell district school, which receives the children of the poorest class from Southwark and the City of London. Of the children examined, 341, or only 34 per cent, had normal ears and hearing, and 449, or 45 per cent, were suffering from adenoids in some form or other.
Then there are the victims of eye-disease—a great army. Some of them suffer from what is known as "blight"—a word which expresses very well the sad appearance of the tearful dim eye and its red and powdered lids! Some have what is called "pinkeye," a contagious eye disease, as is "blight." Taking the children in the standards, an average of 10 per cent have bad vision. In one of his later reports Dr. Kerr mentions about a dozen eye-diseases found in the school-children of London. Many of these need skilled medical treatment. But a great many cases yield to simple hygienic treatment.[1] There is the blind group, then, in our schools. But above them there is another section of children, who are not blind, but whose vision is such that the ordinary school education must injure them. These have to be discovered and provided for; but they cannot be discovered, treated, and provided for without medical aid.
Then there is the group of skin diseases—a formidable one. Dr. Leslie MacKenzie mentions nine or ten distinct skin diseases found in our schools, and they are, of course, nearly all very contagious. Most of them, indeed, are passed round from one child to its neighbour as quickly almost as flame is passed from one dry grass-blade to another. Yet they are all preventible, and most of them, though by no means all, can be quickly as well as perfectly banished.
The majority of parents have a horror of them all—or of nearly all. And the majority of children, therefore, would be safe from them did safety depend on their home-life. But it does not depend entirely on that, for they go to school. So a very large class of children run grave risks at schools. Many people, of course, will not let their children run risks. It is certain that the bulk of the middle classes will avoid the elementary schools until many diseases are banished. As long as these refuse to use the schools, as it were, and choose to pay for their children's schooling elsewhere, the raising of the status of the people's schools is held back, to the sad loss of children of all classes. The Germans have understood this, and have taken such very energetic measures that their primary schools are safe places for all to a degree undreamed of by us. That there is no safety in mere exclusiveness the record of death and failure in the past in families of high rank amply proves. In "select" schools nothing new could be discovered—the vista was too small, and the eye of teacher and parent became indolent. (This does not apply, of course, when children are isolated or taken in small schools because of some defect that makes ordinary work impossible, and when one of the objects of the teacher is close observation.)
There is, over and above all these ailments and risks due to unhealthy conditions, a large group of diseases which all children are liable to, such as measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough. The first of these carries off an immense number every year; and as many children come to school even before the age of five, it is of course clear that school-going involves great risks for them. In some localities the epidemic rising from even one case rages in more than one class-room. And this is true of other diseases which are more dangerous, though not so common as measles (and therefore responsible for fewer deaths).
Then there are the ailments that arise from school life itself. Many of them are concerned with the nervous system. But they are not, as a rule, infectious; so we need not say anything of them here. Let us keep to the epidemics. Only a few words have we written or read, but they serve to show that the trail of disease is over the schools—that many suffer, that nearly all run grave risks.
But though the medical reports are alarming, yet they are not depressing. There is evidence to show that the evil can be fairly tackled, and the danger warded off. It appears that the heredity of the mass of the children is good in a very determined kind of way—that the human race is like clear water tumbling from a polluted spout, which rises clear, though it is stained almost from the first. Moreover, we are not on the down grade, but improving. A hundred years ago the death-rate was higher than it now is, the fit perishing with the unfit in thousands.
Having rescued Hope, then, out of the black waters of these modern medical reports, let us turn to consider the average school child. It is plain that the great majority of school children must be regarded, from the physical standpoint, as decidedly gallant little persons, who have wrestled through their infancy and have managed to come out of tribulations that have killed a large proportion of all the children of their birth-years. At least one in five of all perished before the end of his fifth year, and in many districts the dead are even more numerous. However, over three-fourths have managed to survive, and are now in school. "They at least must be strong," people would have cried long ago. But the circumstances of their early lives do not encourage us to think so. The strong baby falls a victim to disease quite as fast as the weak one in so far as the most fatal infant epidemics are concerned. And, what is more to the point, the same causes that killed many must have certainly crippled many of the survivors. The victory of the survivor is not complete. Indeed, when looking round the modern class-room, one is tempted to think of the refuges opened for brave soldiers who have been wounded. They—the veterans—are decorated, but they are minus a leg or an arm. The child conquerors are not decorated, and their wounds are so well hidden that even the most watchful parents often fail to perceive them—in time. But in Dr. Kerr's Report for 1905 he puts a question, and answers it. The question is this: "Do the weakly children get killed off in infancy? and do only the strong muddle through? Or does the thing that kills one in every five have a maiming effect on those that are left?"
| 1892 | 1893 | 1894 | 1895 | 1896 | |
| London | 154 | 163 | 143 | 165 | 161 |
| St. Saviour's | 187 | 154 | 145 | 205 | 213 |
| St. George's | 174 | 206 | 186 | 198 | 181 |
| Newington | 172 | 176 | 158 | 201 | 184 |
| Camberwell | 155 | 161 | 148 | 164 | 156 |
| Lambeth | 135 | 149 | 133 | 152 | 136 |
It would appear therefore that the children born in certain years have a harder fight for life, and that those who survive are less healthy and strong than are children born in other years. There is, however, no year that does not see a prodigious slaughter of the innocents. And there is no year, therefore, in which the children who survive are not severely handicapped through disease.
Disease, then, plays a great part in school life today. Not only the diseases that are infectious, but also others. Not only present diseases, but diseases that are supposed to be over and done with. And what is the effect of it all on children as learners? It appears that some kinds of disease and deformity do not hinder the development of the brain. There are few dwarfs who are inferior to other people in intelligence—not a few have been famous men—such, for example, as Æsop, and Pope. And some kinds of disease stimulate brain cells, as Dr. Kerr points out—more especially in its active stages—as, for example, when a servant girl in delirium remembers the Greek or Latin she has heard read.
Dr. Arkell, of Liverpool, points out that starvation has a strangely stimulating effect on the nervous system of some children. Emaciated little creatures, with skin harsh and rough, rapid pulse, nerves ever on the strain—have yet a look of lively intelligence. But, he adds, this is only the intelligence of a hunting animal. It is not intellect in any real sense. The steady tendency of starvation is towards the destruction of brain power; disease lowers it. And so true is this that a very large proportion of all the children of the country, though of good race, have become stupid merely through illness, underfeeding, and an unhealthy mode of living.
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It is hard to draw a line between the "diseased" and those who, without being actually ill, are living in a state of lowered vitality. If we consider the latter to be ill, then indeed whole classes of the community must be considered ill or diseased. The strange fact is, however, that in many cases they are not diseased. They lose strength, intellect, power of every kind, and yet escape disease and deformity in a wonderful way, just as if Nature kept the door of salvation for them open to the last.
The great cause of disease and defect is poverty—poverty, with its sad train—overcrowding, foul air, bad housing, insufficient or unsuitable food, worry, overwork. These play the greatest part in fixing the death and disease rate of the country. It is because of poverty and its train that evils are created, which must be met and paid for at a heavy rate. Asylums, prisons, schools for the feeble-minded, refuges, and homes for the homeless; all these are costly. And yet they are mainly the fruits of want!
Poverty reduces some well-endowed children to the condition of creatures deprived of the upper brain.[2] In forcing children to toil it destroys the intelligence of the brilliantly endowed (at least 14 per cent of the wage-earning children of London are reckoned to be above the average when they begin wage-earning), and it is one of the great causes of the drink craving. For that craving betrays a primal want in the case of thousands—though not of all drinkers—the want of food. In a late number of The Journal of Inebriety we read that the true vine is literally within us. The stimulating agents in the blood are tiny bodies called "hormones." These give the spur that leads to growth. These, too, make gladness possible; they warm the chambers of memory; they flood the consciousness with the rosy light of hope. But if the blood is poor, then the hormones languish, and the craving becomes fierce, stimulus is wanted more than food, and it is found in a ready-made poison. The ill-nourished have a smaller chance of reform than those who can eat good food, for they cannot, as it were, manufacture the true stimulant anew for themselves. Thus the food-and-drink question are nearly always, in so far as the poor are concerned, two sides of one question. The closing of public-houses to children and women is, of course, a step in the right direction. But it is only a step, not a goal.
Then there is another cause of disease of which school doctors did not speak for awhile, but of which they now speak freely enough. (It is true they are never reported, and there is still a conspiracy of silence on the matter.) This cause is—dirt, foulness of every description. Dr. Kerr puts it bluntly enough. "The majority of cases of injury to health," he writes, "may be traced originally to a want of cleanliness!" In one London school, which is of course typical of many, the school doctors declared 11 per cent of the children to be "dirty and verminous," and 34 per cent "dirty in body and clothes"—that is to say 45 per cent were unfit to sit beside clean children. There were only 12 per cent of the children in this school who might be described as clean—that is to say, as clean as their neighbours would allow them to be.
But this evil, as well as others, has poverty at its root. "Even if one is poor, one can surely be clean!" is a common remark, but it is rather superficial. Artificial heat of every kind is costly. Hot water is not laid on in all homes—or in schools! Cold water appears a very cruel thing to the hungry, though pleasant to the well-nourished. Even fresh, cool air has terrors for the ill-fed. To be sure many very poor children are very clean. And a little while ago—not a hundred years ago—the children of nobles were not washed much oftener than the children of slum-dwellers. Certainly a middle-class child to-day would shrink with horror from little nobles of bygone days if these could reappear just as they were under their fine clothes! The Court of Versailles was not dainty. The ladies did not bathe, and typhoid was a common disease in palaces not very long ago. The history of Queen Anne's children shows a worse record than that of almost any slum mother to-day. But dirt is largely a result of poverty, of lack of time, strength, and money, and this was discovered by the London Education Authority when it began to look into the problem of uncleanness.
Take London, for example. The London Education Authority began by assuming that all the children had homes; and they engaged nurses to visit, not only the schools, but the homes of such children as showed signs of gross neglect. To and fro went the new servants of the Education Authority, bringing counsel and tactful works, bringing help too, where it was needed, and there is no doubt at all about the value of their work.
It was bold, however, to assume that all the children had homes. Many children live in one-room tenements. From these closely-packed chambers where they sleep, the mother, as well as children, depart, it may be, in the early morning. Of 110 boys, all very far below the average in physique, forty-four had a mother at home, but sixty-six were all practically motherless. In some cases the mother was dead, but in the rest the mother was absent all day at work.
And even in those cases where the mother was at home, what hope was there for the children? Without any kind of wash basin or tub in the room corner, supplied by water from a yard tap used by a legion of families, with no room, no privacy, and, above all, no desire or idea of the necessity for cleanliness on the part of the parent—what prospect was offered for the child? The law, of course, might intervene. There is even a Cleansing of Persons Act. What in so far as children are concerned is that Act worth? Supposing that they were seized and washed by law in a specially furnished kind of bath of correction, would such measures form the basis of new habits? It is, to say the least, very unlikely. As well hope that a child could learn to love books by being forced, at rare intervals, to have a spelling lesson in a police-cell!
Some English Education Authorities have taken another line. They did not begin by engaging nurses. They did not visit homes. There was ample opportunity to judge of the home from the open street door, and the appearance of the home-keepers in the street, as well as the state of the neglected child in school. They built baths, engaged a new order of teacher. They printed leaflets, too, setting forth the need for protecting the clean child, and for making school a desirable and safe place, as well as the duty of saving the neglected. It was prophesied that these leaflets though carefully worded would give offence to many. But no! They gave offence, as it happened, to none. It was prophesied that parental responsibility would die. But on the contrary, parental responsibility was born in many. In many it began for the first time to grow and flourish apace. It was foretold that the children who washed at school would be neglected at home. But as time went on the children who had been quite neglected at home began to wear cleaner clothes, to wash (for the first time) at home so as to come clean to the baths. What is more wonderful, the mothers came and wanted to use the baths and to learn swimming.
The mothers were not offended. They took to bathing quite as naturally as did their social superiors a generation ago. As for the prediction that parental responsibility would be destroyed, that always was contradicted in fact. The school experience that brought relief to the child brought awakening to the mothers. Parental responsibility was created by the new kind of school lesson. It was born in some; it was stimulated in many.
Last year, 1906, the Education Committee of London beginning to feel perhaps that the prophets were not prophesying quite truly (while medical inspection was making clear how much of all the sickness and unfitness in schools is remediable) sent their medical officer, Dr. James Kerr and the assistant educational adviser, Dr. Rose, abroad, to see and report on the school baths in Germany and Holland, and the general effect of their use on schools and children.
On their return these two travellers published a Report. In this Report they show that school baths are common abroad. Every town visited had installations for bathing children: school bathing arrangements are made, even in quite small places of three or four thousand inhabitants! In many schools 80 per cent of all the children use the school showers, but the percentage is in some places larger, in some smaller, and there are schools such as Am Zugweg at Cologne where all the children bathe. Many of these children must of course come from good homes.
There is no need to describe all the baths visited by the London officials. Many of them are described in the Report, but we need here name only one or two.
Take for example Blucher Street School, Wiesbaden. It was built in the shining light of public favour doubtless, for every school in this city has now its installation of shower baths, and no one questions the utility of this kind of class-room. Entering the playground with its pollarded trees, one passes into a school with large and pleasant halls and rooms gay, healthful and pleasant to look upon. The floors are oiled. The doors are decorated! From the dressing-room one enters the bath-room where are two rows of troughs, with dripping boards round and douches. At bathing times the water is heated to 95 degrees Fahrenheit, cooling down gradually ends at 65 degrees Fahrenheit. The whole installation cost only £150. Dr. Kuntz, the school doctor, reports, "The general results have been very satisfactory." All the class teachers and medical officers affirm that the appearance of the children is fresher and healthier and that the air in the school-room is greatly improved. And he adds, "This is true especially in all older schools, where the ventilation is less efficient than in the modern ones. The children show a distinctly increased capacity, and zest for learning. In school bathing, much depends upon the interest and energy displayed by the class teachers."
(This last pronouncement is just as true in England as in Germany. Success in England may almost be measured by the interest of the head teacher, and where there is failure it is almost entirely because his or her co-operation has not been solicited or where it is not offered.)
Of the beautiful Schiller Schule, in Karlsruhehe, the Report says: "In this school of 1300 children, there is bathing always, summer and winter. Sixteen children bathe at a time; 200 daily, or up to 1000 a week. The bath-room has two long parallel troughs and rose douches; no cells or boxes, only forms and hooks for clothing round. … In school corridors there are 'crystal spring' drinking fountains: tasteful decorations, beautiful gymnasium with grand piano." The authorities testify: "The school air has been greatly improved since the introduction of baths: zest and capacity for work have increased. … In many cases the cleanliness taught at home by bathing has caused improved sanitary conditions at home. Every modern school without exception should be provided with shower-baths."
The third and last example here taken will be the beautiful Fluhrstrasse School at Munich. It is situated in a difficult area. All the bathing arrangements are under the control of the teachers. The children from six years old upwards bathe—80 per cent of all bathe regularly. "The dressing-room has forty-four boxes, 6 feet high, 3 feet deep, and the partitions, of varnished wood, are two or three inches clear from the floor. The bath-room floor has small red tiles, and the bottoms of the troughs are tiled. Coarse matting is laid down in the passages. … The girls wear a sleeveless gown of white and blue striped cotton." Here, as elsewhere, the testimony is that the bathing has resulted in a great improvement of the school atmosphere, in increase of zest for work and mental energy in the children, and a steady gain in self-respect, which must end in placing a great gulf between the past and the future of tens of thousands of citizens.
School bathing was begun thirty years ago in the schools of Mannheim. Since then it has spread all over Germany, and is now almost as much a part of the curriculum as are the three R's. It is not difficult to see some relation between it and the smallness of the percentage—not much more than 1 per cent—of neglected children in the Fatherland, only 1.8 per cent, while here, in England, in some districts the percentage is, not 1, but in some areas 50, 60, and 75 per cent of all the scholars. (Dr. Crowley, of Bradford, estimates that 35 per cent of school children are in an utterly neglected state—very verminous—and only 30 per cent very clean.) What a real saving these new bathing installations must represent, how they must tend to depopulate hospitals, and convalescent homes and asylums, and shelters for the decrepit and unfit, we shall try to show later, through comparative figures. The German nation is beginning to focus its energy in the schools as a centre for the prevention of disease, and by-and-bye, though, despite the economical ways of the German nation, the cost of schools may grow, yet there will be a saving in other departments. Early prevention will take more and more the place of cure, and early prevention is a pleasant thing—a matter of pure air, flashing water, sunny spaces, a kind of teaching and training that is almost perforce gentle. Such a training has lovely bye-products— is very rich in these. One need not be an optimist to prophesy that it must sooner or later re-create the atmosphere, not of schools only, but of homes and cities.
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It is said that skin diseases disappeared rapidly at the school bath centres. But apart from the more familiar order of good result from washing there are others, less familiar, less direct. We may be allowed to turn aside here for a moment to glance at some of these. Misfortune has opened the door as usual to this kind of study, and there have not been wanting persons in every age, who answered to the still, beckoning finger. There have been, as we can see, doctor teachers in all ages. A very notable group of these were active in France at the end of the eighteenth century. One of these, Father Itard (he was a priest, though he did the work of a doctor) had a strange pupil, the wild boy of Aveyron, and was led through him to make a study of the lower senses—touch, taste, and smell.
Many people know the story of the wild boy of Aveyron! How one day three French hunters, looking for game in a wood, came across a naked boy of twelve, who fled from them like a wild beast and tried to hide himself in a tree. In point of fact he was a wild human being, and perhaps the hunters had heard rumours of him. In any case they ran after him, captured him, and carried him off to a village, where they put him under the charge of a poor widow. The poor woman did not know very well how to deal with him, and he very soon escaped from her and ran back to the woods. There he roamed free for a while, but one very cold day he wandered, as hungry wolves sometimes do, very close to human habitations. He even ventured into a house at last and was "captured" again and carried off to Paris. There he was kept as a kind of show, and was stared at and wondered at; but as he proved after a while to be not at all amusing, people got tired of him. The good priest, Father Itard, saw him at last and took him home, determined to educate him and restore to him his lost humanity.
Perhaps no one ever had a better chance of seeing what it means to have the doors of the lower senses half closed than had Father Itard. It goes without saying that the wild boy had had no human ear and eye training. It was not wonderful that he could not listen to music or human speech, that he observed nothing in his path that was not an obstacle or a fancied beast of prey, that he never walked, but ran or bounded along so that his teacher had to keep flying in the rear when he went out with him. But the most striking thing of all about him was the dullness of the lower senses. He had twenty-six deep wounds in his body, but he did not know how he had come by any of them. He could not feel when a thing was embossed or flat, when it was rough or smooth. As the skin is the organ of temperature this sense—of temperature—was lost with the rest. He would take up burning coals with his fingers, and take boiling potatoes out of the pot and stuff them into his mouth. The companion senses of touch, taste and smell, were so dull that the most delicious fragrance gave him no pleasure, and he swallowed disgusting things without any feeling of revolt. He could not fix his eyes, nor walk like a human being, nor shed tears, nor feel when he was bruised or burned. His restoration to humanity appears to have come through the education, first of all, of the lower senses, baths, massage, and treatment by an electric battery; and as this treatment began to take effect, taste-training through the offering of sweet and bitter things. Groping his way in the darkness (for little was then known of brain physiology in its relation to education), Itard succeeded after a time in awaking the dormant areas of this neglected brain, so that the wild boy began to feel heat and cold, consented to put on clothes (at first he ran naked in the garden in mid-winter), walked like a human being on two feet and with measured steps, shed tears, showed signs of gratitude, and joy, and sympathy, and even began to learn to speak.
Sometimes the lower sense doors are closed violently, and then there is sudden panic and breaking loose in what we may call the upper stories of the brain. "A young man, clever and rational," says one doctor, "suddenly gave himself to the worst tendencies. It was found that the sense of touch was lost, and he felt nothing at all." Later, sensibility came back to the skin, and in the same moment the moral nature righted itself— like a ship that, having been wedged in a frozen sea, finds again the water rising and falling below it, and spreads its sails to the breeze.
"What of this?" some may cry. "The children of the people are not wedged in polar ice." Fair and delicate are the babes born even in the darkest slum; soft is the baby-skin as a rose-leaf, and sensitive as the young aspen. The question is, however, not whether the babe is born sensitive, but whether he is allowed to develop as a sensitive being. Dr. Leslie MacKenzie found that the sense of smell was not blunted in the children he tested. But it is possible, nay likely, that the dulling of smell takes place later. Matthew Arnold said that the upper class were a little like barbarians, the middle class wanting in idealism, and the people lacking in feeling. Where does this apparent want of feeling begin? It begins, of course, in the skin. "We all know," says Luys, a great brain specialist, "how fine, delicate, and sensitive is the skin of woman in general, and particularly of those who live in idleness and do no manual work … how their minds are continually informed of a thousand subtleties of which we men have no notion. In idle women of society and men with a fine skin mental aptitudes are developed and maintained in the direct ratio of the perfection and delicacy of sensibility of the skin. The perfection of touch becomes in a manner a second sight, which enables the mind to feel and see fine details which escape the generality of men and constitutes a quality of the first order, moral tact, that touch of the soul as it has been called, which is the mark of people with a delicate skin, and whose sensory nerves, like tense cords, are always ready to vibrate at the contact of the slightest impressions."
This is all very well for the lady (it is so well for her that the tact she gains will often take the place of all the talents); but what about the "horny-handed son of toil"? "Compare the thick skin of a man of toil," continues Luys, "used to handling coarse tools and lifting heavy burdens, and see if, after an examination of his intellectual and moral sensibility, you think that he understands you when you try to waken in him some sparks of those delicacies of sentiment that are so very striking in people with a fine skin. On this point experience has long ago pronounced judgment, and we all know that we must speak to everyone in the language he can comprehend and that to try to awaken in the mind of a man of coarse skin a notion of the delicacies of a refined sentiment is to speak to a deaf man of the sweetness of harmony, and to a blind man of the beauties of colour."
A great deal of rough work has to be done in the world, and this rough work is so far from being fatal to man's development, that it is pretty certain that no one has been really educated who at some time in his life has not done his full share of it. Yet to make the flesh rock is to shut life's doors, and to make it hard in childhood is to put up the shutters at daybreak.
Full sensory development implies, of course, the keeping fine of the lower senses—touch, taste, and smell—a literal "fine life below stairs" in the organism. It depends on clean air, pure water, abundant light, food that does not offend or degrade the palate, fragrance, but nothing to dull the sense for odours; and last, but not least, the habit of attending to sense impressions. By such means the whole surface of the body becomes more responsive, less hide-bound, and thrills at the presence of subtler influences. It seizes undertones of life, and reaps new harvests of sensation. But who can buy all these things? To-day in cities only the rich can buy them. Almost any one can buy sermons or books; any one almost can listen to lectures and concerts and visit picture galleries. The things that are wanted for the education of the higher senses are cheap and popular. But the things that are needed for the education of the lowlier senses are still very expensive, in cities at least, and expensive things are for the few. Many good things must be communalized first in the schools.
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The Americans, always practical, having realized this, have begun the systematic training of the lower senses so long ignored. They have begun it, not only in schools, but also in reformatories. In Elmira the whole treatment of the prisoner constitutes an appeal, not to the conscious, but to the unconscious part of him; it is a descent into the lower stories of life for the rekindling and restoration of the culprit's moral life there. Baths and massage are given, and physical exercises that have as their aim the inducing of a new sensitiveness. The diet is supervised with the same end in view. In England the prison is hygienic only in a very elementary sense. The conditions favour the maintenance of normal health in dull organisms! But in Elmira the avowed aim is much bolder. And there is evidence that the treatment has the desired effect, for in many cases the dullard criminal, incapable of remorse at the time of entrance, begins later to show signs of pity and repentance. The stone melts. The heart becomes flesh. The life of the emotions is reached. The nearer goal—that of the sensory nature—is touched by methods that are partly mechanical.
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In the school such methods are believed to be unnecessary. And of course it is true that no average child needs the radical kind of sense training dealt out to hardened criminals. But a child has something to lose—and a great deal to gain—from the lower sensory standpoint. America has no health centres in the ordinary school, and her appeals to the subconscious are not much more deliberate than are our own in so far as the basal sense of general touch is concerned. But the education of the sense of smell is carried on in many schools. Teachers armed with odorous things, flowers, spices, gums, sweet-smelling woods, test the range of smell in each pupil and develop the attention power given to this sense. Besides this formal, there is much informal training—the frequent appeal to smell in the lessons on chemistry, botany, or domestic science.
As for taste, the difficulty of keeping this sense delicate and healthy is often great, on account of the indifference of parents. It appears that no sense is more easily depraved and coarsened than is this one, and the mischief once done can hardly be undone. One authority declares that the sense of taste cannot be redeemed even a little in less than nine months—that one must have nearly three hundred meals in order to forget a sensation produced by a harmful dish (such as tinned fish drenched in vinegar), or rather in order to enjoy a good article of diet. Thus a slum child, ricketty and starving, will refuse to touch milk. Many will go hungry rather than swallow wholesome soup, and only after months will a depraved palate begin to tolerate the new food that, under natural conditions, it would have preferred from infancy. But this restoration of taste is certainly a greater triumph than the mastery of the art of spelling, and it will probably have more far-reaching results. It betokens a returning sensitiveness which will be its owner's best safeguard from degrading vices. And it is well to know that although fine taste is kept by few (Tolstoy draws attention in one of his books to the fact that men do not like sweets, and that to like sweets is nevertheless a guarantee that depraved tastes have not been acquired, or otherwise the innocence of the palate would have been lost), yet it is recovered by some—in childhood. When dinner-tables are laid in the schools of the people, a whole range of new and far-reaching educational opportunities will begin to present themselves.
Meantime, American primary education is interesting, not in what it has copied from other systems, but in what it is unconsciously putting forward in the way of new and untried experiment. The direction of these efforts is above all interesting. It seems to have some direct relation to the latest teaching of physio-psychology, yet without claiming such teaching as its stimulus or guide. Here, in the unconscious, lie its radical tendencies—its suggestion of new and bold flight in the future. For in thus dealing at last with the education of the lowly senses the Americans are beginning to develop in children a responsiveness that will make slum life and its horrors intolerable to all.
There may be still persons who will say that it is wrong to make any kind of life intolerable, and whose ideal of education is the fitting of children for any lot—however hard, bitter, and to healthy beings, unbearable. But the number of persons who hold such views must be growing smaller every day. For to most people it is getting clearer that the measure of responsiveness in any being is the measure of his power. "He that hath ears, let him hear." To those who can hear it is a friend who calls—to those who can receive, it is a friend who enters. "The whole universe," said Thoreau, "is on the side of the sensitive."
And we are all born sensitive—peasant's child as well as princeling, beggar and king, and out of this sensitiveness, which appears at first as mere weakness, all the higher kinds of energy are evolved. Sympathy, intellect, self-control, intuition, genius—all take their rise in it, draw their underground supplies from it. Thus it would seem that Carlyle is literally right when he says that the materials for human virtue, far from being rare, are "everywhere abundant as the light of the sun," since everywhere, in the rudest places, children are born, not hidebound, but with a delicate, receptive organ for covering. For a little while they can lose and yet recover their sensitiveness. Nature seems loath to let them finally be hardened—despoiled of their humanity. They gather, they even re-gather, "materials of virtue." For a little while. Then it is too late. "O woe and loss and scandal that they are so seldom elaborated and built into a result—that they lie unelaborated and stagnant in the souls of millions."
- ↑ More than 40 per cent of the blind lose their sight through neglect—neglect in the first week of life! This fact alone might impel us to look at first and simple causes. There are not wanting men who do this for us in so far as mere individuals working alone and without much support can do it. "Mr. Bishop Harman," says Dr. Kerr, "has paid attention to the bearing of cleanliness and social conditions on eye disease. In reporting on the condition of eyelids of over 1000 children at school, Mr. Harman has made a note of the condition of eyelids and of the hair. He points out that at the age when girls are left to themselves in the matter of cleanliness the state of the eyelids grows worse. That is to say, clean hair usually goes with healthy eyelids, and vice versa."
- ↑ Dr. Arkell, who examined school children in Liverpool, writes: "If I told one of these (of the poorest) to open its mouth it would take no notice until the request became a command, which sometimes had to be accompanied by a slight shake to draw the child's attention. Then the mouth would be slowly opened widely, but no effort would be made to close it again until the child was told to do so. As an experiment I left one child with its mouth wide open the whole time I examined it—about four minutes— and it never once shut it. Now that shows a condition something like what one gets with a pigeon that has had its higher brain centres removed, and is a very sad thing to see in a human being."