The children who show talent and those whose immaturity or poverty of intellect makes their early venture into the world more pitiful, have equal claim upon these scholarships.
Pippa was one of the latter. She was scorned at home for obvious slowness of wit and “bad eyes”; her mother deplored the fact that there was nothing for her to do but “getta married.” Pippa’s club leader’s reports were equally discouraging, save for the fact that she had shown some dexterity in the sewing class. At the time when she would have begun her patrol of the streets, looking for signs of “Girls Wanted,” the offer of a scholarship prevailed with the mother, and she was given one year’s further education in a trade school. After a conference between the teachers and her settlement friends, sample-mounting was decided upon as best suited to Pippa’s capacities. She has done well with the training, and is now looked up to as the one wage-earner in the family who is regularly employed.
One of the accompanying charts compares the wage-earning capacity of the boys and girls who have had the advantage of these scholarships with that of an equal number of untrained young people whose careers are known through their industrial placement by perhaps the most careful juvenile employment agency in the city.[6] The deductions that we made from the experience of the Henry Street children were corroborated by an inquiry made by one of our residents into the industrial history of one thousand children who had applied for working papers at the Department of Health. The employment-record chart was compiled from data obtained in that inquiry.
Comparative Weekly Wages of 72 Children Who Have Worked Four Years without Previous Training, from the Record of ⸺ Employment Bureau; and of Scholarship Children Who Have Had Two Years of Vocational Training.
Our connections in the city enable us occasionally to coax opportunities for those boys and girls for whom experience in the shop itself would seem best. Jimmy had lost a leg “hooking on the truck,” and his mother supposed that “such things happen when you have to lock them out all day.” In the whittling class the lad showed dexterity with the sloyd knife, and he was thereupon given special privileges in the carpentry and carving classes of the settlement. When he reached working age, one of our friends, a distinguished patron of a high-grade decorator, induced the latter to give the boy a chance. Misgivings as to the permanency of his tenure of the place were allayed when Jimmy, aglow with enthusiasm over his work, brought a beautifully carved mahogany box and told of the help the skilled men in the shop were giving him. On the whole, he concluded, “a fellow with one leg” had advantages over other cabinetmakers; “he could get into so many more tight places and corners than with two.”
The Typical Employment Record of One Child between the Ages of 14 and 16.