There is not as yet any uniform and generally accepted system for the feeding of school children; we find such feeding only in isolated schools, and meals are provided for necessitous children only. The actual results of the institution have been admirable. In England, a law providing for the feeding of school children was passed in the year 1906. But this did not introduce a general national system of school feeding; the law was permissive merely, empowering the poor-law authorities and education authorities to organise private benevolence for this purpose, and, in the event of this latter proving insufficient, allowing a limited expenditure of public funds. The tendency of evolution is unquestionably in the direction of the introduction of gratuitous and general school feeding. But in the future, when the upbringing of children will be altogether better than it is to-day, this institution will be unknown.
Care of Young Persons after they leave School.—The necessity and importance of supervising young persons after they leave school are obvious from the fact that the period of the puberal development, the period immediately after leaving the public elementary school, and after passing from the family life to a life of freedom, is the most dangerous of all periods in the life of children of the poorer classes. The means to be employed for this purpose are the following:—
(a) The institution of special homes for young persons, where those with no regular homes of their own can board and lodge. Connected with these it is well that there should be employment bureaux and lists of recommended dwellings.
(b) The institution of places for the occupation and amusement of apprentices and young workpeople of both sexes during their hours of freedom.
(c) The arrangement of occupation for Sundays, amusing as well as instructive.
(d) The organisation of the young. There are associations for young people connected with the various religious bodies, also political associations, and others without either religious or political tendency; in addition, there are apprentices’ clubs. Within the ranks of the socialists we find two opposing tendencies. Some wish to found special socialist organisations for young people; others contend that better work can be done within the limits of existing organisations. The attempt is made to associate these movements with the continuation schools; that is, an attempt is made to secure that every large continuation school should have attached to it a young persons’ home or institute.
(e) Advice as to the choice of a profession, in newspapers, pamphlets, and books.
(f) The conduct of a campaign against harmful books and pictures. This campaign has of late years aroused interest and obtained support in wide circles. Of especial importance is the campaign against filthy and obscene literature, for such literature has of late years gained an extraordinarily wide diffusion, and effects the deliberate corruption of children. It stimulates their imagination unnaturally and leads it into false paths; it destroys their sense of truth and reality. The children’s taste is perverted; they no longer find pleasure in good literature, become inattentive in class, and out of school hours rough and brutal. In so far as children buy obscene books and pictures they waste their money. The most important measures in the conduct of this campaign are: 1. Criminal prosecutions; 2. The diffusion of really good books for young people; 3. The enlightenment of children and their parents concerning the worthless and injurious character of the bad literature; 4. The reasonable regulation of the pupils’ activity out of schools hours, whereby the youthful impulse to adventure may be directed in the right channels.
(g) The most important of all means of caring for young persons after they leave school, and one which supports and reinforces all the others we have enumerated, is the continuation school. 1. Owing to the defective character of public elementary education, it is necessary that it should be supplemented by continuing the child’s education when it has passed the age of obligatory school attendance. 2. Before the child enters a free life, what it has learned at school, much of which will already have been forgotten, requires to be retaught; and this is all the more necessary in view of the fact that at the elementary school, where the child was still very young and lacked the faculty of full comprehension of many ideas, it could not receive true instruction and enlightenment. 3. The period of the passage from the family life and from the elementary school into a life of freedom must not come too early, and requires to be a period of transition, or the child is very apt to fall into poverty or crime. 4. Since apprenticeship is tending to pass away, it is necessary that children should be taught the elements of a handicraft at school. Wage-earning women have, as a rule, had neither apprenticeship nor technical training, so that they become unskilled workers, and receive even smaller wages than unskilled male labourers. 5. The training of working-class girls in domestic economy is extremely defective. Since these girls have to work for wages while still very young, they have neither time nor desire, nor even opportunity, to study cooking and housekeeping; in a working-class family possibilities for the study of domestic economy are of necessity extremely limited, because so much of what is bought is already prepared, and what is done at home is of an extremely simple character. The working-class mother, engaged throughout the day in arduous wage-labour, has neither time nor capacity for the instruction of her daughter, so that the girl becomes habituated to idleness. A special training both for wage-labour and for domestic economy is requisite for girls, and especially for those of the proletariat.