That Last Waif; or, Social QuarantineFletcher, Horace
History
That Last Waif; or, Social Quarantine
Fletcher, Horace
Child welfare
For instance, the children of your neighbours are likely to be the
playmates of your own children, and the children of degenerate parents
in the slum district of your city will possibly be the fellow-citizen
partners of your own family. Again, when it is known that right or
wrong nutrition of the body is the most important agent in forming
character, in establishing predisposition to temperance or
intemperance of living, including the desire for intoxicating
stimulants, it is revealed to one that right nutrition of the
community as a whole is an important factor in his own environment, as
is self-care in the case of his own nourishment.
The moment a student of every-day philosophy starts the study of
problems from the A.B.C. beginning of things, and to shape his study
according to an A.B.C. sequence, each cause of inharmony is at once
traced back to its first expression in himself and then to causes
influenced by his environments.
If we find that the largest influences for good or bad originate with
the right or wrong instruction of children during the home training or
kindergarten period of their development, and that a dollar expended
for education at that time is worth more for good than whole bancs of
courts and whole armies of police to correct the effect of bad
training and bad character later in life, it is quite logical to help
promote the spread of the kindergarten or the kindergarten idea to
include all of the children born into the world, and to furnish
mothers and kindergarten teachers with knowledge relative to the right
nutrition of their wards which they can themselves understand and can
teach effectively to children.
If we also find that the influence of the kindergarten upon the
parents of the infants is more potent than any other which can be
brought to bear upon them, we see clearly that the way to secure the
widest reform in the most thorough manner is to concentrate attention
upon the kindergarten phase of education, advocate its extension to
include even the last one of the children, beginning with the most
needy first, and extending the care outward from the centre of worst
neglect to finally reach the whole.
Experience in child saving so-called, and in child education on the
kindergarten principle, has taught the cheapest and the most
profitable way to insure an environment of good neighbours and
profit-earning citizens; and investigation into the problem of human
alimentation shows that a knowledge of the elements of an economic
nutrition is the first essential of a family or school training; and
also that this is most impressive when taught during the first ten
years of life.
One cannot completely succeed in the study of menticulture from its
A.B.C. beginning and in A.B.C. sequence without appreciation of the
interrelation of the physical and the mental, the personal and the
social, in attaining a complete mastery of the subject.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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