A number of young boys, none over 14, from Troy and Albany orphan asylums were taken in auto trucks 30 miles into the country to a currant-producing section, where they picked 5000 quarts of currants which had been donated to the county Red Cross organization. These currants were shipped in a refrigerator car 90 miles down the river to Yonkers, New York, where the girls made them into jelly and currant juice, the sugar being donated by a local refinery.
Possibly the largest service that boys can render will be the making of Red Cross splints. As has already been stated in another chapter the Canadian schoolboys are doing a great deal of this work in connection with their manual training. An article in a recent issue of the Manual Training Magazine describes in detail the work of the manual-training centers of British Columbia. These splints are made merely for first aid, and are used where it is not necessary that they conform exactly to the contour of the limbs or body. They are padded a little with cotton or cloth and fitted on the injured part of the soldier.
A general conception prevails that Red Cross work is limited to battle-field relief, but it must be remembered that this organization also carries on civilian relief. It is very likely, as time goes on, that the schools will come to realize that there is probably no better agency than the Red Cross with which they can associate themselves in allaying the suffering and relieving the distress in the community. It must be remembered that the Red Cross is splendidly organized, with its great central headquarters at Washington, its division headquarters in larger groups of states, and its local chapters in every county. There is no activity of the Red Cross which a child cannot duplicate in its own sphere of life, and the American school may well become a center of interest in Red Cross work in time of war. One of the departments already organized is that of Home Service, which exists to help families maintain their standards of living. School-service work under a Junior Red Cross has been organized in order to bring the schools into direct touch with the work. The schools can give lessons in first aid, elementary hygiene, and home care of the sick, in home dietetics, and in the preparation of surgical dressings. It can make the necessary supplies for local soldiers who are in mobilization camps. It can make supplies for the soldiers' families, especially during the winter months. It can raise money by means of entertainments of an educational nature, and here opportunities are often presented to correlate the work with history and English. In short, during the stress of war, with its rising cost of food, its industrial changes, its uncertainties in living conditions, with the home often handicapped by the withdrawal of the chief wage earner, there will be an excellent opportunity for the school to come in with its aid. The diet of the family, both in quality and variety, may be improved through the helpful advice of the teacher of home economics; children who are in need of medical care may be sent to the dispensary. The Home Service Department suggests that teachers may do helpful vocational-guidance work; for in the absence of father and older brothers many a boy and girl can be helped by a teacher's encouragement to go into occupations where there is a future, where skill can be acquired, and where there is a chance for advancement.
The following quotation from the London Times of some Red Cross work in France pointedly illustrates what home and school service in the Red Cross movement may mean in America.
The most detailed enumeration would hardly exhaust the activities of education in the common cause—voluntary contributions to the national funds deducted from the salaries of teachers; liberal subscriptions from pupils; participation in the collection of gold; the dispatch of packets to soldiers, and of books to the children of reconquered Alsace; help given to orphans whom a school or class has taken under its charge; manual labor on behalf of soldiers at the front, the wounded, the lame, and prisoners; material or moral assistance to refugees; a welcome given to all abandoned children, Belgian or French, in the families of masters or of friends of the school; correspondence with soldiers at the front, wounded, and prisoners; attendance at the funeral of soldiers who have died of their wounds; the public reception by schools, lycées, and universities of colleagues or old pupils wounded, promoted, or quoted in dispatches; befriending soldiers who have no family to look after them; the institution of workrooms for men and women who are out of work; participation in the celebration of Belgian Day, the Serbian Day, the French Day, the Day of the 75, the Day of the Orphans, and so on,—tasks which will have to be continued during the coming school year, because the need for them will still be present, and doubtless, for some of them at least, during the years immediately after the war, when the school will still have before it a splendid opportunity for social service.
Service recognizes no school grading. Girls of the lower grades are snipping waste pieces for fracture pillows and working with the older girls who are cutting hospital bed shirts, Troy, New York.
The new spirit of household arts in the schools is based upon the project plan and community service. War needs create new school practices. Troy (New York) girls at work on Red Cross supplies.
