Margaret McMillan

“ 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!" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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, "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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.) ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”