Again, home-making must be made interesting. The man regards his business as a pleasure. He plays it as he plays a game, and he plays to win. And so housekeeping has become a “game, not a duty.” In a natural, enjoyable way our girls should be taught to play the game of household administration. Home duties are not mere duties any longer; the old way of “doing up the housework” made every act an end in itself. Now every act is simply a means to an end; every move is important,—the way the dishes are washed, the beds made, the cooking done, may win or lose the game. In the child’s mind must be a perfect plan; to work out that plan correctly will bring health, order and happiness as the prize.
The world must stop trying to make progress by walking backward. We must make room for a vaster scheme of household economics than the last generation ever dreamed of. The home must be made to catch up with the factory, the store and the office, and we know that in comparison with these industries home-making has lagged behind. Now—suddenly—we realize that feeble-minded children are becoming more numerous, that malnutrition in school children is becoming so great that the highest standard of study is impossible and that street life is taking the place of home life. We wake up and ask what we can do to make the home-maker realize that she is responsible for these things.
But is she?
Educators who admit that life and health are absolutely dependent on the home have failed to find room in the educational scheme to provide this home knowledge. There were in the elementary schools in New York city last year 388,000 girls. Only 43,500 of them were in cooking classes. That means that 344,500 girls in this one year never had a suggestion given them that home-making was a profession worth studying. Only seventh and eighth grade girls are permitted to have cooking lessons, and that means that during the entire grammar school course a few fortunate girls received nine full days of domestic science instruction. I say a few, for out of 560 elementary schools only 170 are equipped for cooking; and for these 170 schools, there are only 135 domestic science teachers—some cooking rooms are closed altogether and others running on half time. A girl is fortunate if she happens not to be in one of the 390 schools where no instruction in domestic science is given, and still more fortunate if she stays in one of the few selected schools until she reaches the seventh grade. There she first learns that home-making is worth studying. But 20,000 left school last year before this grade was reached.
Our public school children may be cash girls, or sales women, or factory hands. These things may or may not be; but one thing is certain, and that is that every girl must live in a home and take her part in home responsibilities.
A MODEL FLAT
The little children of the neighborhood come in to play before lesson time.
The New York board of education would be the first to admit that it is the home more than anything else that gives, to children health or feebleness, life or death, happiness or wretchedness and yet they and we calmly let this neglect go on.
The school lunch committee made an investigation a short time ago to ascertain whether malnutrition was as great an evil as we feared. Two thousand and fifty-one children were thoroughly examined. Half of these from an Irish neighborhood, half from an Italian. They were selected at random from the four lower grades. Two hundred and eighty-three or 13 per cent were found to be suffering from pronounced malnutrition. Their homes were visited. With the exception of eighteen tea and coffee was a part of the daily diet. Sixty families had no prepared luncheon or dinner at home. One hundred and fifty-seven were supplying the wrong or insufficient food and it was found to be more ignorance than poverty that was the cause of this condition.
If we take 13 per cent of 388,000 children we have 29,846 poorly nourished girls who are not even taught that the heavy, dull, sick feeling is due to the wrong kind of food. How can we place other knowledge ahead of this? When we watch this large, half fed army of children marching on to take up a woman’s battle with life it does seem as if we had been asleep to our responsibilities.