CHILDREN AND CIVIC SERVICE
Two hundred clubs of children on the New York East Side cooperate with the street-cleaning department in keeping clean streets in their respective neighborhoods. They hand prepared cards furnished by the city to every one seen throwing rubbish in the street, which read as follows:
Give your banana-peels to a horse. Horses like them. Orange-peels, peanut-shells, newspapers and other rubbish must not be thrown in the street. Keep yours and throw them in the receptacle placed at street corners for that purpose. You should sprinkle your sidewalk before sweeping. Don’t raise the dust, as it breeds disease. It is against the law to throw rubbish from the windows to the street. Don’t put paper, rags and other rubbish either in the ash-can or garbage-can.
A badge is given to each child to wear on which is inscribed the motto: “We are for clean streets.” Thus thousands of children are learning to take pride in their city.
(364)
CHILDREN AND GARDENS
Professor Hanna, head of the Department of Natural History of the Board of Education, New York, divided an open lot into some three hundred little garden plots, took boys from the Bowery district, and girls as well. Each child spaded up its own ground, planted its seeds, pulled out the weeds, and watched the ruddy vegetables grow. A thousand questions arose to these city-born children. Given a black clod and a drop of rain-water, and a few seeds, how does the same clod make a beet red, and a carrot a golden hue? How could one clod condense the smells of a whole soap factory, into one little onion? How does a potato come to have starch in it? If one bunch of green weeds is worth ten cents for spinach, why doesn’t everybody in Wall Street go to farming? When some of the boys reached the Bowery Saturday night, the first question they asked their fathers was: “How much it would take to buy a ticket to Dakota.” Ah, Wordsworth, looking across the field, and writing, “My heart with rapture thrills and dances with the daffodils,” and Ruskin with his confession of what the fields and brooks did for his culture, throw a pathetic light on the lives of the little waifs of the tenement-house, starved for an outlook on the grass and the wave, and the shrub and the flower. Plainly the child has a right to its outlook upon the world of nature.—N. D. Hillis.
(365)
Children and Music—See [Music and Children].
Children and the Bible—See [Adapting the Bible].