The settlement children are given instruction in the selection of books before they are old enough to take out their cards in the public libraries. Once a week, on Friday afternoon, when there are no lessons to be prepared, our study-room is reserved for these smallest readers. The books are selected with reference to their tastes and attainments, and fairy tales are on the shelves in great numbers. Of course, no settlement could entirely satisfy the insatiable desire for these.
One day when the room was being used for study purposes a wee neighbor sauntered in and said to the custodian, “Please, I’d like a fairy tale.” Although reminded that these books were not given out excepting on the special day, the child lingered. She saw a boy’s request for “The Life of Alexander Hamilton” and a girl’s wish for “The Life of Joan of Arc” complied with. Evidently there was a way to get one’s heart’s desire. The child went out, reappeared in a few moments, and with an air of confidence again addressed the librarian, this time with, “Please, I’d like the life of a giant.”
It is easy to excite sympathy in our neighborhood for people deprived of books and learning. One year I accompanied a party of Northern people to the Southern Educational Conference. We were all much stirred by the appeal of an itinerant Southern minister who told how the poor white natives traveled miles over the mountains to hear books read. He pictured vividly the deprivation of his neighbors, who had no access to libraries of any kind. When I returned to the settlement and related the story to the young people in the clubs, without suggestion on my part they eagerly voted to send the minister books to form a library; and for two years or more, until the Southerner wrote that he had sufficient for his purpose, the clubs purchased from their several funds one book each month, suited to different ages and tastes, according to their own excellent discrimination.
The first public school established in New York City (Number 1) is on Henry Street. Number 2 is a short distance from it, on the same street, and Number 147 is at our corner. Between their sites are several semi-public and private educational institutions, and from School No. 1 to School No. 147 the distance is not more than three-quarters of a mile.
It is not unnatural, therefore, that the school should loom large in our consciousness of the life of the child. The settlement at no time would, even if it could, usurp the place of school or home. It seeks to work with both or to supplement either. The fact that it is flexible and is not committed to any fixed programme gives opportunity for experimentation not possible in a rigid system, and the results of these experiments must have affected school methods, at least in New York City.
Intelligent social workers seize opportunities for observation, and almost unconsciously develop methods to meet needs. They see conditions as they are, and become critical of systems as they act and react upon the child or fail to reach him at all. They reverse the method of the school teacher, who approaches the child with preconceived theories and a determination to work them out. Where the school fails, it appears to the social workers to do so because it makes education a thing apart,—because it separates its work from all that makes up the child’s life outside the classroom. Great emphasis is now laid upon the oversight of the physical condition of children from the time of their birth through school life; but the suggestion of this extension of socialized parental control did not emanate from those within the school system.
Cooking has been taught in the public schools for many years, and the instruction is of great value to those who are admitted to the classes; but appropriations have never been sufficient to meet all the requirements, and the teaching is given in grades already depleted by the girls who have gone to work, and who will perhaps never again have leisure or inclination to learn how to prepare meals for husband and children,—the most important business in life for most women.