Now we should consider the means of stimulating that choice. So far it has been chiefly exploitation for the personal gain of the manufacturer, who has persuaded the people to buy his product regardless of its economic or hygienic effect. Thrift has been undermined most subtly.
“That’s the secret of the whole situation we’re talking about; it’s easier to buy a new shirt than to take care of the one you’ve got.”[15]
All sense of values has been lost, so that with no sound basis choice is apt to be unwise, unsatisfactory, and is gradually dropped, while the individual drifts.
No more effective agent for the dissemination of knowledge was ever devised than the American Public School. If only it would live up to its opportunities, its teachers could bring to its millions of receptive minds the best practice in daily living (never mind the theory for the children), and through the children reach the home, where the infants may be saved from the risks that the elders have run.
To be effective, however, school conditions should be satisfactory, and teachers should be familiar with the best ways of living, or at least in active sympathy with the medical inspector and the school nurse.
No more revolting revelations have ever been made than those usually locked in the hearts of these faithful servants of the people. How they can have courage to go on in face of parental and community indifference is a marvel. We shall consider in the next chapter how the average parent is to be aroused.
But the leaders in educational and scientific thought—what of them? The school is the pride of the community and measures the progress of the community toward ideals. Alas, how is pride laid low in most public school buildings in the inability of most of the teachers to see the relations between mental stupidity and bad air.
The awakening has begun, however, and thousands of teachers have responded and are urging authorities to burn more coal, to employ more help, to keep the house clean, to make it more beautiful, to make the curriculum more helpful, to make provision for good food to be purchased, and the hundred ways in which the school may be the most powerful civilizing factor the nation has. But civilization must not spell disease and ruin.
The economic factor must not be lost sight of. To tell the boy and girl that they are as good as any does not give them the right to the most expensive food and clothing they see. How shall they choose wisely in the multitude of new things? They wish the best, naturally, and all America is honeycombed with the wrong idea that the best costs the most. An Alaska Indian came into the store in Juneau one day to buy some canned peas. The storekeeper said, “I am out of the brand you want.” “No peas?” asked the Indian. “No, only some small cans of French peas at forty cents a can. You don’t want those.” “Why not? Me want the best.”
The schools of domestic economy, the classes in all grade schools, will have to attack and conquer these prejudices as to values, or, rather, will need to substitute right estimates of value before our people will choose wisely in distributing their income, for that is what right living means. The division of the income according to the necessities of health and efficiency, not according to whim or selfish desire, is sometimes estimated as