The teachers were requested to examine every child privately, and to
report the number of children having had no breakfast that morning and
the number having had inadequate breakfasts. Some of the teachers
absolutely refused to ask the children “such questions,” and two or
three sent in obstinately stupid reports such as “nobody underfed but
the teacher.” Reports were received from 19 classes with an actual
attendance of 865 children, of which number 104 were reported as having
had no breakfast and 54 as having had too little. Not all the reports
were of equal value, I afterward found, some of the teachers having
ignored the rule and regarded coffee and bread as sufficient. In one
case there were three children who declared that they had only cold
coffee without any food. They should have been reported as
breakfastless, but in fact they were not reported in either column. So
that it is probable that in this case also the figures given are an
understatement of actual conditions. In one class of 43 children 13 were
reported as having had no breakfast and 12 as having had insufficient,
and when the report was sent back with instructions that the teacher try
to find out _why_ the 13 children had no breakfast, it was returned with
the postscript in the teacher’s handwriting, “There was no food for them
to eat.” In another class out of 65 children no less than 30 were
reported as having had no breakfast, but of these 12 had had either tea
or coffee. As they did not have food of any kind other than the tea or
coffee, the teacher reported them as breakfastless. Making all
allowances for discrepancies and differences of value in the teachers’
reports, it is surely most serious that no less than 17.81 per cent of
the children examined should be reported as either breakfastless or very
inadequately fed that day. It should be said that this inquiry took
place in the winter, the season when there is most unemployment among
unskilled laborers, and it is not probable that the same amount of
poverty would be found all the year round.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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