LONDON’S FUTURE HOUSEWIVES AND THEIR TEACHERS.
A HOUSEWIFERY CLASS AT BATTERSEA POLYTECHNIC.
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If one stands at the entrance of a large Board school either at dinner or tea-time and watches the pupils trooping out, one often wonders what will become of all these lively children in a few years’ time, what they will make of their lives, and how enough work is to be found for them all. Has it ever struck any of my readers that, whatever the boys may do in the way of work, sooner or later that of the girls is certain? They are going to be the wives or housekeepers of these or other boys. They will be dressmakers, tailoresses, servants, factory girls or what not for a time, but their final business will be housekeeping, and housekeeping too on small means, so that a great deal of skill, care and knowledge will be needed if they are to do it well.
How are the girls to be trained for this very important work of theirs? Their school life is very short; the time they will have to spare after leaving school will be very little, their leisure hours in the evening being wanted for rest and recreation as well as for learning; it will be small wonder if many of them marry without any knowledge of household management and if the comfort and happiness of their home is ruined in consequence.
The question is so serious that people interested in education have given it a great deal of thought. There is little doubt that, if it were possible, the best plan would be to give a year’s training in housekeeping to every girl when she leaves school; but alas! since most girls from elementary schools are obliged to earn money as early as possible, this plan cannot be carried out. The only thing that can be done by the managers of elementary schools is to proceed on the principle that “half a loaf is better than no bread,” to give the girls, while still at school, weekly lessons for a certain number of weeks each year, in cookery and laundry-work, and sometimes in housewifery generally, and to encourage them to attend evening classes after they have left school. A great deal of good has been done in this way, but the children are so young and the lessons necessarily so few, so far between and so fragmentary, that the result is very far from being all that could be wished.
Seeing this, the Technical Education Board of the London County Council five years ago began to establish, one after another, Schools of Domestic Economy to which girls should go for five months at a time after leaving the ordinary schools, and where they should be occupied for the whole school hours five days a week in household work, thus giving them an opportunity of really understanding their future duties as housewives. The question of enabling poor people to afford this five months’ extra teaching for their girls was a difficult one to meet, but as far as it could be done it has been done by giving free scholarships at these schools and by providing the scholars with their dinner and tea free of cost, and providing also the material required by each girl for making herself a dress, an apron and some under-garment during her time at the school. With only two exceptions, these schools, which are nine in number, are held in the polytechnics or in technical institutes, a capital arrangement whereby the rooms needed for evening classes for adults are used also during the day-time.
Let us look in at one of the schools and see of what a day’s work consists. We will choose the school at the Battersea Polytechnic, because a Training School for Teachers is held there as well as a school for girls, and we shall have a double interest in the work. The Polytechnic is a great building standing back from Battersea Park Road, and at about nine o’clock in the morning we shall find a stream of teachers and pupils hurrying into it, masters and mistresses of the Science School, the Domestic Economy School, and the Training School for Teachers of Domestic Economy; boys and girls of the Science School; girls and women students of the two Domestic Economy Schools; and a few minutes later we shall find these all gathered in a large hall for “call over” and prayers, and then filing off to their separate departments.