The Survey, Volume 30, Number 24, Sep 13, 1913Various
History
The Survey, Volume 30, Number 24, Sep 13, 1913
Various
Charities -- Periodicals; Social problems -- Periodicals; United States -- Social conditions -- Periodicals
“There was a boy with a electric light on the front of a
box, to batteries in it, and a switch on the back. When I
saw this I said to him, ‘I wired up a electric light down
cellar and it turned on up by the cellar door.’ He said
‘Did you?’ and I said ‘Yes, sir.’”
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.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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