The Kindergarten Children Learn the Reality of the Things They Sing About
The beautiful country places presented to the settlement for vacation purposes, and the comparative readiness with which money for equipment and maintenance for non-paying guests has been given, indicates the favor with which this development of neighborhood work is regarded. Opportunities for confidence and mutual understanding, not always possible in the formal relationships of clubs and classes, are afforded by the intimacy of country-house parties. The possibility of giving direction at critical periods of character-formation, particularly during adolescence, and of discovering clews to deep-lying causes of disturbance, makes the country life a valuable extension of the organized social work of the settlement. “Riverholm,” overhanging the Hudson; “Camp Henry,” on a beautiful lake; the “House in the Woods,” “Echo Hill Farm,” and a commodious house in New Jersey, lent by friends during the summer months, give us the means whereby some of the plans we cherish may be carried out.
“House in the Woods.”
It would be inconsistent with settlement theories if these country places did not express refinement and beauty,—the beauty that belongs to simplicity,—not only in the buildings, but also in the service and housekeeping. It has seemed to us, therefore, worth the additional expenditure of effort to have small, distinct household units wherever practicable. People who live in crowded homes, walk on crowded streets, ride on crowded cars, and as children attend crowded classrooms, must inevitably acquire distorted views of life; and the settlement is reluctant to add to these the experience of crowded country life. Valuable training in housekeeping is possible in a household even of from fifteen to twenty-five persons,—a small unit according to New York standards,—and tactful direction can often be given toward acquiring those manners generally recognized as “good.” Many of the children who come to us know only foreign customs and foreign table-manners; and the extreme difficulty of maintaining orderly home life in the tenement makes it important to supplement the home-training or to supply what it can never give. Indeed, we recognize in this desire to protect our children from being marked as peculiar or alien because of non-essential differences the same reason that urges the careful mother to insist on “manners,” that her children may not be discredited when they mingle with the fastidious.
The ideal of limitation as to numbers cannot always be carried out, and naturally it does not apply to the camp, where a freer and less conventional life attracts and satisfies boys and young men.
The older members of the settlement, who are earning money, use the camp and country places as clubs, paying for the privilege and conforming to the regulations which they have had a share in establishing.
