"The state begins too late when it permits the child to enter the public school only when it is six years of age. It is locking the stable door after the horse is stolen."
"Remember that from a single neglected child in a wealthy county in the State of New York there has come a notorious stock of criminals, vagabonds, and paupers, imperilling every dollar's worth of property and every individual in the community. Not less than twelve hundred persons have been traced as the lineage of six children who were born of this perverted and depraved woman, who was once a pure, sweet, dimpled little child, and who, with proper influences thrown about her at a tender age, might have given to the world twelve hundred progeny who would have blest their day and generation."—Sarah B. Cooper, before the National Conference of Charities and Correction.
QUARANTINE AGAINST IDLENESS
BY
CHOICE OF AN OCCUPATION
One of the important things to accomplish in the forming of character in children is to find out what useful occupation is, to each of them, recreation instead of dull work.
No individual of normal mental capacity is born without some useful equipment if opportunity be offered for its discovery and development. It is this which separates man from the rest of creation so distinctly that it seems almost to endow him with god-like attributes.
As children are tireless and persistent in play, even so will men be tireless and persistent in work if the particular useful occupation, that to them is recreative, can be selected by them.
The venerable historian and diplomat, Bancroft, while residing in Washington, and still assiduously pursuing his life-work when he was nearly ninety years of age, was interviewed by an eminent journalist of his acquaintance for the purpose of collecting biographical data. The interviewer expressed amazement at the evidences of hard work on the desk and scattered about the study of the historian, and inquired, "At your time of life do you not find your work something of a burden? Most men aim to retire long before they have reached your age."
Mr. Bancroft's face took on an amused expression and then a broad smile at the question as he replied, "Work is but a comparative term. I never work. That is, I never work in the sense that is usually meant by the use of the word. I was very fortunate in the choice of an occupation. A person is lucky who in his youth selects the occupation that can furnish him with recreation in his old age."
Jacque, the great animal painter of the last generation, once said to the writer, "I am beginning to suffer weakness in my eyes so that I cannot work more than half an hour at a time. I feel it with great sorrow, for I have yet so much that I want to do in this life."
These happen to be examples from men who had earned success and reaped great honor, but they are not unusual. There are many who never tire of helping nature to raise crops useful to man, others who never are weary of cultivating fine breeds of domestic animals, and yet others who are never quite happy when absent from the bench or the lathe.
The contention of pessimists, that there must always be some unskilled and needy units to perform the drudgery of society that would otherwise remain undone, is pernicious falsehood.
There always will be found some means of performing the drudgery of work even if the time should come when there are no longer any misfit occupations and consequent drudgery and discontent among men.
When there are no longer any machine men there will be automata of iron, steel or wood to take their place.
A few years ago a wave spread over the fashionable world whose mandate was that it was not respectable to engage in any useful occupation. Fortunately, that wave has passed on, to be remembered only as one of the curiosities of social evolution, as related to the progressive nations and races, so that now it is not quite respectable not to be useful to society in some active manner.
It is true that many men and women are as tireless as children in doing something under the name of "Sport" that they would not be hired to do under the name of "Work," but such are usually of the nouveau riche class who think to accentuate their new position in the stratum of fortune called "society" by a show of independence and leisure.
The real sentiment of the age, however, is that useful occupation is necessary to respectability, and the most important discovery for any age or for any individual is that true happiness can result only from—is the evidence and fruit of—conscious usefulness.
Nothing else is so important to character-formation as ample facilities for finding out the occupation that each child would rather engage in than do anything else or nothing. The range of the useful occupations is not so great but what preference tests can easily be secured in every community near at hand. Manual-training institutions furnish a very wide range of choice, and parental farms can be located near to urban communities for nature tests, while a taste for the sea will accompany a tendency to wander abroad and will draw as a magnet to the source of its fascination.[4]
There are millions of children born in the city whose yearnings may be for the farm, the sea, or the woods. The pessimistic cry of the present time is that country youth flock to the city and congest labor conditions there while the cultivation of the land is neglected. With a proper appreciation of the value of character-building or useful-habit-forming, and systematic provision of tests for preference of occupation, this unbalance of the proper division of labor need not obtain.
From our own observation and experience we know that there are more city children who would delight in country occupations, if they only had a chance to know something of the possibilities of pleasure in them, than there are country children who can find a preference for city limitations.
The parental farms already established prove this to be true, and a very important discovery in connection with them is that they can be made not only self-sustaining but profitable.
The expression, "Many a good sailor is spoiled by being shut up in a shop when he ought to be on the bridge, or aloft trimming sail," is true and might be changed to adapt itself to many misfit occupations. One thing is certain, and that is, if the occupation is not productive of happiness it is a misfit.
The development of the kindergarten and manual-training schools has revealed the possibilities of cultivating character and habit along the line of useful preference and has been even more important to the evolution of usefulness than has the harnessing of the forces of nature for the use of man in performing the drudgery of work. From a minor branch of education, the character-building and habit-forming schools that are developing out of the success of the kindergarten method will come to be recognized as the basis of government, in that they are the nurseries of good citizenship.
Reiteration of this statement cannot rightly be criticised, for it is the ever-recurring theme on which the development of social harmony is being built.
The restless energy of children often provokes the remark, "Oh! if the energy the little ones expend could only be gathered and stored for useful application, we grown folks might take it easy." True enough! and what we propose, as a means towards a quarantine that will prevent in some degree any misdirection of this God-given and irrepressible energy, can accomplish the wish. Many separate movements have been instituted to take children out of unwholesome surroundings and give them new views of life. The New York Life and The Daily News, of Chicago, have championed fresh air funds for the purpose of giving infants days or weeks of outing at lake or sea side, or on farms, and have built commodious pavilions for their comfort. The Rev. Doctor Gray of the Forward Movement takes many separate squads of little ones into the country each summer for a two weeks' season of camping, while the residents on the shores of beautiful Lake Geneva, Wis., take out over five hundred waifs—ninety at a time—from Chicago and give them a two weeks' summer vacation at the "Holiday Home," located in the midst of their villas.
In this year of 1898 provision has been made by the Board of Education of Chicago for a two months' school session during vacation, where the instruction chiefly includes courses of art and nature-study. Provision was made for two thousand children, but the applications numbered more than four thousand and the disappointment of the rejected ones was pitiful to see.[5] The parental farms established in Massachusetts and elsewhere throughout the land have done a wonderful work and show a crying need for many more of them.[6]
These are but a few of the experiments that are being made which lead to a recognition of the necessity of complete advantages that will effect a perfect social quarantine against the influence of evil suggestions by giving an ample supply of good ones. But the greatest good will come only when these institutions have become systematic instead of spasmodic; complete instead of partial. Then, and only then, will the progress of reform have been relieved of uncivilized obstruction.
Governor Pingree of Michigan and Mayor Jones of Toledo, Ohio, are making experiments in the same direction, but all such spontaneous effort on the part of individual altruists is pioneering and leads the way to systematic warfare, by peaceful means, against the forces of evil and neglect that beset infancy and childhood in their helplessness.
- [4]
- Vacant lots in cities can even be used for the purpose of nature study by planting potatoes in them, as demonstrated by the Governor of Michigan.
- [5]
- Note.—We have learned since the above has been in type that the fund supporting the Summer Vacation School was raised through the sale of little national flags, promoted by Miss Mary E. McDowell of the University of Chicago Settlement.
- [6]
- Note.—And now, August, 1898, Ex-President Cleveland, gives practical emphasis to his oft-repeated advice relative to the training of junior citizens, by the donation of a valuable farm in New Jersey for the uses of a farm-cottage-school for the waifs of Greater New York.
