Riches and Poverty (1910)

by L. G. Chiozza Money

Those who have grasped the importance of the utterance of Dr D. J. Cunningham, quoted in the last chapter, will heartily agree with Sir Shirley Murphy, L.C.C. Medical Officer of Health, that "the child has got to be fed." The chief deterrent to many is fear that parents will be demoralized by free meals at the schools. It must be realized by those who entertain this fear that the parents are often already thoroughly demoralized, and that their demoralization in the great majority of cases has resulted from the conditions imposed upon them from their birth by our social system. They are what they are because of circumstances over which their control was nominal. The reader, or myself, if transplanted to Lambeth at a few months old, and nurtured as they were nurtured, would at this moment be what they are. "There, but for the Grace of God, goes myself," is the reflection which every man should make when he contemplates the waste products of the civilization of which he himself is a favoured part. That truth realized by any man, it is never again possible for him, if he has more than the average share of the nation's income, to grudge a part of the amount by which his income exceeds the average to raise to a higher level the children of those whose lives have been a crying injustice from their cradles—of those who have, with all their faults, done more than their share of the hard labour of the world.

In 1906 the Education (Provision of Meals) Act enacted that a local education authority "may take such steps as they think fit for the provision of meals for children in attendance at any public elementary school in their area" to the extent of a halfpenny rate and no more. So, with extreme timidity, the legislative machine advances.

Games, physical drill, gardening and swimming, should be taught to every child, under proper medical control. I assume the existence of playgrounds in some ample shape—each school having its indoor and outdoor places of recreation and its school garden. A great object is to keep the child from the street. For the same reason, the school grounds should be open on summer evenings and during all vacations. It is a simple matter to make the vacations a time of real holiday for every child—filled with lively interest and healthful sport. With the physical exercises and teaching of games and, indeed, with all other departments of school life should be associated what Rousseau considered to be the chief moral principle that a child should learn—to do harm to no one. That carries with it the teaching of "manners" in their best sense. Nor should graces of person be neglected. The boy should not be allowed to slouch about with his hands in his pockets. If he does, he is only too likely to slouch into casual labour hereafter.

Clean, neatly clad, healthy, well-nourished, upright, self-respecting and therefore respectful of others, feeling its strength in every limb, well-mannered, capable of lucid expression—is it beyond our powers to make the average child all this? Not if these things are as well worth consideration as the resistance of an armour-plate, the trajectory of a rifle-bullet, or the virtues of a smokeless powder. Not if the proper study of mankind is man.

Having made provision for the body, we may now turn to the mind. I have referred to the child's power of expression, and I think that the average elementary scholar's incapacity to think clearly or to express its ideas with lucidity show how much we have missed the way in our educational methods. We have forgotten that to "educate" is literally to "lead out." The two guiding principles or characteristics of the German school curriculum as described by Mr George Andrew are: (1) The principle of "Anschauung" (observation, intuition, concrete), and (2) The development of oral expression.

"Anschauung" literally means "looking at" and as an educational principle it means observation of the concrete as paving the way to the abstract. The child begins school with the supply of words and conceptions which it has gained from infancy in its own house. These have to be corrected and completed; the child's concepts are enriched by fresh observations and by gradual steps it is advanced from the familiar to the strange, from the known to the unknown. In the youngest classes the instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, drawing, nature study, is all in varying degrees based on "Anschauung," and later the same principle of observation is to be traced in the teaching of such subjects as geometry, geography, and history, where models, pictures, maps, and plans are continually resorted to in order to deepen and vivify the ideas gained from the printed page. Mr Andrew thus contrasts infant teaching in Scotland with that in Berlin:

"In Scotland, infant classes generally begin with the alphabet and the elementary reading-book, the object-lesson being something of an "extra," in which much useful and stodgy information is often imparted to the youthful mind—not always on subjects within its range of actual experience—and then retracted under an incessant fire of jerky interrogatories.

"The Berlin child begins in a different way. With him the "observation lesson" is the starting-point. It is maintained that the child in his natural intercourse at home with his parents, brothers and sisters, and playmates, has equipped himself with a certain rudimentary supply of words and ideas, which concern themselves mainly with objects that have fallen within his own range of vision. He has learned to speak in a language, the purity or corruptness of which will largely depend on his environment. It is on these two lines, his rudimentary knowledge of simple objects and his power of simple speech, that his first school instruction proceeds, individual words and their constituent sounds with (the corresponding letter names) being reached by a gradual analytical process. In the "observation lesson" such objects as are in the schoolroom, or again, the child's body and limbs, his food, his clothes, his home, his street, etc., anything, in fact, which he can see, or has seen, are made use of. But even in this early "observation lesson" one cannot fail to note how the foundations are laid for developing oral expression—for teaching the child Sprachfertigkeit. Just as the child comes to school with his rudimentary ideas, and has these gradually corrected and extended by "observation," so also in this lesson the power of speech he brings with him is taken up and developed from the beginning. He is asked to describe what is placed before his eyes; he is made—and this is naturally the first difficulty—to speak in a distinctly loud tone of voice; and he is made to answer in a sentence or sentences. For example, the teacher's watch was taken as the subject of an "observation lesson" in a class of pupils newly come to school. One heard such little sentences as "This is a watch"; "from the watch hangs a chain"; "on the face of the watch are figures," etc. Every now and then some child is made to recapitulate the whole account, e.g. to repeat the above three sentences—a process to which great importance is attached."

Thus from the beginning the child is taught to observe and to express lucidly what it has observed, and this excellent principle—this real "education"—is followed throughout its school life. As a result the children become self-reliant in utterance, able to think clearly and to express their ideas orally or in writing in logical order and appropriate language. Thus, whatever the influence of the home the child gains a proper use of its mother-tongue. In our own country the vocabulary of the home remains the vocabulary of the child, and I know of nothing more painful than to listen to the talk of our "educated" elementary school children in poor neighbourhoods.

There is no subject in the curriculum to which the principles of observation and development of expression are not applied with success. Thus, arithmetic is not taught by rule-of-thumb, as is too often the case in our schools, but from the beginning the child is led to "count with understanding." The child does not merely learn a series of mechanical rules. He understands the process he employs and can give a lucid account of his knowledge. It is perhaps hardly necessary to add that he studies the metric system, and becomes familiar with the arithmetic of business operations.