Agricultural colonies; Poor -- Great Britain; Salvation Army; Unemployed -- Great Britain
The town-bred child is at a thousand disadvantages compared with his
cousin in the country. But every year there are more town-bred
children and fewer cousins in the country. To rear healthy children
you want first a home; secondly, milk; thirdly, fresh air;
and fourthly, exercise under the green trees and blue sky. All these
things every country labourer's child possesses, or used to possess.
For the shadow of the City life lies now upon the fields, and even in
the remotest rural district the labourer who tends the cows is often
denied the milk which his children need. The regular demand of the
great towns forestalls the claims of the labouring hind. Tea and slops
and beer take the place of milk, and the bone and sinew of the next
generation are sapped from the cradle. But the country child, if he
has nothing but skim milk, and only a little of that, has at least
plenty of exercise in the fresh air. He has healthy human relations
with his neighbours. He is looked after, and in some sort of fashion
brought into contact with the life of the hall, the vicarage, and the
farm. He lives a natural life amid the birds and trees and growing
crops and the animals of the fields. He is not a mere human ant,
crawling on the granite pavement of a great urban ants' nest, with an
unnaturally developed nervous system and a sickly constitution.
But, it will be said, the child of to-day has the inestimable advantage
of Education. No; he has not. Educated the children are not.
They are pressed through "standards," which exact a certain
acquaintance with A B C and pothooks and figures, but educated they are
not in the sense of the development of their latent capacities so as to
make them capable for the discharge of their duties in life.
The new generation can read, no doubt. Otherwise, where would be the
sale of "Sixteen String Jack," "Dick Turpin," and the like? But take
the girls. Who can pretend that the girls whom our schools are now
turning out are half as well educated for the work of life as their
grandmothers were at the same age? How many of all these mothers of
the future know how to bake a loaf or wash their clothes? Except
minding the baby--a task that cannot be evaded--what domestic
training have they received to qualify them for being in the future the
mothers of babies themselves?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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