And, as to the expense, it seems so little that it will scarcely be believed in the light of the cost of the higher branches of education.
Kindergartens have been conducted in Chicago by mission bodies at a cost of forty-five cents per pupil per month, including whatever nourishment was necessary to supplement that which the children received at home, and exclusive of the pennies brought by them. The room used cost little or nothing, for the school was established in the depths of one of the lowest slums of the city and wooden horses and boards served for seats and tables.
This suited the children of the slum better than the elegance of a modern school building, and it taught the fact that character and good habits are as essential in mean, as in the most expensive and luxurious surroundings.
It is a question, worthy of careful consideration, whether the effect of the teaching is not better by beginning with a school equipment in keeping with the home surroundings of waifs, adding, of course, the essential element of cleanliness, and graduating to better things as the instruction progresses, and whether this is not better for the children than initial installation in the best of quarters. Character should not be associated with elegance in the minds of children.
The matter of housing and equipment is mentioned because it is an important item of cost. The school taken as an example was presided over by one of the present distinguished heads of the kindergarten training school movement. She began with eighteen attendants, secured one hundred and twenty in a few months, and then turned away hundreds of applicants because there was not room for more.
And this mission of rescue from criminal tendencies and habits cost not more than forty-five cents per child per month, including the humble salary of the young teacher, who has now risen to a high place in her chosen calling.[3]
The children of Rotterdam cost the municipality an average of eighteen cents per week each, and much of this is returned by parents as a voluntary offering in return for the nourishment supplied to their children.
This insignificant cost is all that stands between a perfect social quarantine and the present neglect. Much more can be spent, and eventually must be spent, on manual-training schools and parental farms by which to test the preferences of children to see what sort of useful occupation they would rather follow than not, and which they will pursue with the same delight that children work with at play; but in the mere matter of rescue from sulphurous conditions of moral asphyxiation and placing children where good suggestions can be had and good habits learned, three cents per month, collected from every citizen of Chicago, would supply kindergarten facilities, such as described above, to more than one hundred and thirty thousand children.
Groups of five neglected waifs have been taken to the homes of large-hearted women and taught after the manner of the kindergarten until a school has been provided, and then the groups have been assembled at the school, but this method is open to the objection stated above, that it associates character and cleanliness with elegance in the minds of the children thus taught. Better take suggestions of good character and tidiness into the slums to enlighten and purify them also.
The contrasts and inconsistency shown by this illustration are striking in their importance. Instead of a cost of forty cents per month to every American citizen to free Cuba from the oppression and neglect of the Spaniards, a cost of three cents per month to every citizen of Chicago, where extreme conditions of need prevail, would supply protection for all of the children in need and close up a gap in social quarantine through which a stream of evils is constantly entering.