Still another service can be rendered by the cooking teachers, especially in our large cities and in our industrial villages. This service consists in giving meals to children who are in want. Of course at the present moment we see little need for this work, but the pinch of poverty has come upon England, France, and Germany, and our own land may not always be one of plenty. When the need arises, teachers should be prepared to furnish lunches to the children and possibly even breakfasts, to say nothing about suppers. The dislocation of many ordinary trades and lines of business, the taking from the home of the family's means of support, the increased cost of food and provisions, and the prevalence of sickness due to neglect may necessitate the feeding of children in school. In London the list of children to whom meals were given daily increased rapidly from something like 32,000 in July, 1914, up to 75,000 about the middle of September, 1914. Fortunately, however, as trade and industry became better adjusted there was a steady decline in the number of children that were fed, so that in May, 1917, there were only about 12,000—the children then on the list being mainly the children of widows who were forced to go out to work. The number of meals provided per week in the schools of England in July, 1915, was 200,000. In a year this number had dropped to 120,000.
Good posters have a great influence on civic life at any time. Now they are invaluable. War-service posters designed by Manual Training High School boys of Brooklyn, New York.
Girls at work; mothers watching. Why should not both work in a community kitchen equipped with evaporators, large containers, proper stoves, and utensils for doing a real piece of work?.
The drawing departments might well have their students design posters. Those designed by American illustrators for the first Liberty Loan were surprisingly ineffective. Only one stood out—that with the reproduction of the Statue of Liberty with the accompanying symbol and direct wording. Our enlistment posters have been crude, lacking in psychological appeal as well as in design. It is questionable whether recruiting is aided by a picture showing a naval officer lounging under a palm tree while in the distance a marine is seen standing amid bursting shells on a battleship. There has been and will be an opportunity for students to design posters for Red Cross work; for enlistment as farm cadets; for enrollment in a home-service unit for girls, in community canning clubs, in Boy Scout work, in school, home, and community gardening; for patriotic meetings and a score of other occasions. Good posters have an almost incalculable influence on civic life at any time. Within the last year there have been held in many cities various competitions in poster work of pupils with such subjects as "Red Cross," "Thrift," "Safety First," "Fire Prevention," "Pure Milk," and "Liberty Loan."
There is plenty of work for the manual-training teacher. Mention has already been made of garden work, not so much in school gardens, however, as in community gardens, for, like the canning-club work, here is a splendid opportunity to bring adults and children together. In a number of small cities in the country where tillable land could be obtained, the manual-training teachers directed a community-garden project. The boys built the tool house; the Boy Scouts took turns in acting as watchmen; plots were laid out on a family or individual basis; seed was purchased in bulk and distributed at cost; experts, hired by the day, plowed and harrowed the ground; stakes marking the plots were made in the school; and the manual-training instructors, or, as they were termed, the garden directors, spent their summer vacation in a useful service.
The manual-training teacher may help the Red Cross chapter in packing supplies into the boxes which his boys have made. He can be planning the hospital furniture which he may be called upon to make, as in France, where the boys built furniture for improvised hospitals and installed electric lights. He can be thinking how he shall, if required, make hospital-bed racks, cots, tables, and simple reclining chairs. Perhaps he may have to supervise, as have the manual-training teachers in England, the making of hand-grenade bags, chaff bags, dummy cartridges for the training of troops, or sand bags. In a single secondary school in Bradford, England, more than 1200 articles—including splints, crutches, bed-boards and rests, screens, rollers, trays, etc.—have been made in the manual-training department in one year. Perhaps in the early spring latrines can be designed and built for the farm cadets, as was done in the Newton (Massachusetts) school, or shacks for troops, as was done at Plattsburg, New York, by the boys from the Stuyvesant High School, New York City. The teacher may have his part to play in giving vocational training to maimed soldiers (see chapter on "Reëducation of the Disabled"), as all of the instructors in manual-training schools of the Dominion of Canada are now doing.
A manual-training teacher in Nashville, Tennessee, Mr. John M. Foster, has his boys make jigsaw puzzles, checkerboards, and bandage winders for the use of our soldiers in France. During the summer of 1917 he organized a boys' auxiliary of the Red Cross, and the group made packing cases according to official specifications. The organization included a shop foreman, a timekeeper, and a stock man. Lumber and other materials were contributed by local dealers.