The children were quick to recognize the ability of others, in such expressions as:
“The dresses they had were elegant, and everything they did was grand. Not one boy or girl made a mistake. It was perfect.”
One twelve-year-old reports:
“There was a booth where the children of the Industrial School had the things they sewed. There were dresses and sacks and not a girl over 13 years made them. It goes to show what some girls can do.”
The most impressive single exhibit seems to have been that of the tidy and untidy home, which received 8 per cent of the 3,123 references. The moving picture show and the library received 6 per cent each, and the dairy, playground, and market 3 per cent.
The moving pictures appealed strongly to children in the fourth, fifth and sixth grades; they are mentioned only half as frequently by those in the seventh and eighth. The other exhibit features received practically the same amount of attention from children in all different grades.
Many children devoted two pages or more to a description of the bedrooms and kitchens in the tidy and untidy home. Here is an account given by a ten-year-old girl in the fourth grade:
“Then in a corner opposite that it showed how dirty people keep their houses. The bedroom had dirty old clothes on the bed which was half made. The kitchen was all dirty and dusty, and there was a can of tomato emptied out in the dishpan with wet dripping greasy rags right above them and dripping into them. And the table cloth was all dirty and mussed up, and there was some sour sauerkraut and cabbage mixed together and cooked an hour or two too long. The coffee was the strongest I have ever seen in my life, and I don’t believe I shall ever see any more as strong as that as long as I live, and there was not any milk for it, and the pickles were mouldy enough to kill any child, and the sausage was terrible.”
The same child goes on to describe the clean and dirty dairy.
“It showed how your milkman’s dairy should be, and how dirty some of them were. The dirty dairy was all full of cobwebs and there was straw and mud in the pails and a cat was lapping the milk right out of the pails and the cows were all muddy and dirty. But the clean dairy was lovely and the barn was all pure white and the cows were the cleanest I have ever seen and the milk was all rich and creamy and clean because the pail was all covered over on the top and the yard was all covered with green grass and it all was just as clean and neat as it could be.”