Stories from Everybody's Magazine Part 29

"Public instruction in preventive medicine must be provided for all children and the hygienic method of living must be taught in all schools. . . . To make this new knowledge and skill a universal subject of instruction in our schools, colleges, and universities is by no means impossible--indeed, it would not even be difficult, for it is a subject full of natural history as well as social interest. . . . American schools of every sort ought to provide systematic instruction on public and private hygiene, diet, s.e.x hygiene, and the prevention of disease and premature death, not only because these subjects profoundly affect human affections and public happiness, but because they are of high economic importance."

A large part of Home Economics is simply Living Conditions. It is simply the lessons of Bacteriology, Chemistry, Physiology, and Sociology about the common facts of daily physical and social existence.

It may very well be, therefore, that what Mr. Eliot had in mind will not only come to pa.s.s but will even exceed his expectations.

It may very well be that the educational policy of the future was correctly search-lighted by Miss Henrietta I. Goodrich (who used to direct the Boston School of Housekeeping before it was merged into Simmons College) when she said:

"We need to have courage to break the present courses in household arts and domestic science into their component parts and begin again on the much broader basis of a study of living conditions. Our plea would be this: that instruction in the facts of daily living be incorporated in the state's educational system from the primary grades through the graduate departments of the universities, with a rank equal to that of any subject that is taught, AS REQUIRED WORK FOR BOTH BOYS AND GIRLS."

We revert now finally to the "manual arts" which a full course in Home Economics adds to an "academic" education. In this matter, just as in the matter of Money Sense in Expenditure and in the matter of Right Living, we observe that the ultimate issue of the movement is not so much a specialized education for women as a practical efficiency in the common things of life for men and women both.

A reasonable proficiency in manual arts will some day be the heritage of all educated people. Mr. Eliot, in his "Survey of the Needs of Education," speaks appreciatingly of his father's having caused him to learn carpentry and wood-turning. He goes on to say:

"This I hold to be the great need of education in the United States--the devoting of a much larger proportion of the total school time to the training of the eye, ear, and hand."

It follows, then, that cooking and sewing for girls in the elementary schools must be made just as rigorous a discipline for eye and hand as wood-working is for boys. It even follows that boys and girls will often get their manual training together.

It will not be a case of "household drudgery" for the girls while the boys are studying civics.

Somewhere in this article (and as close to this paragraph as we can get the Art Director to put it) the reader will find a picture of the "living room" of the "model" house of the Was.h.i.+ngton-Allston Elementary School in Boston. The boys and girls of graduating grade in that school give four hours a week to matters connected with the welfare of that house. They have furnished it throughout with their own handiwork, the girls making pillow-cases, wall-coverings, window-curtains, etc., and the boys making chairs, tables, cupboards, etc. Succeeding cla.s.ses will furnish it again. THE REASON WHY MR. CRAWFORD, THE MASTER OF THE SCHOOL, CHOSE TO HAVE A HOUSE FOR A MANUAL TRAINING LABORATORY WAS SIMPLY THAT A HOUSE OFFERS AMPLER OPPORTUNITIES THAN ANY OTHER KIND OF PLACE FOR INSTRUCTION IN THE PRACTICAL EFFICIENCIES OF DAILY LIVING FOR BOTH s.e.xES.

The system will be complete when the girls get a bigger training in design by making more of the chairs, and when the boys get a bigger training in diet by doing more of the cooking.

IV

LAST month's article ended with the inquiry whether the new education for homemaking would clash seriously with the modern young woman's necessary education for money-earning. We conclude that it will not.

Such developments as the long, specialized, four-year course in Household Economics at Simmons College in Boston are not here in point. That Simmons course is more than an education for home-making. It is an education for earning money by teaching home-making or by becoming (among other things) a diet.i.tian in a hospital, or a manager of a lunch-room, or an interior decorator.

Our subject is not Home Economics as a money-earning occupation for a few women, but Home Economics as part of the education of all women.

In that aspect it does not seem likely to result in any "special feminine education" of such bulk as to withdraw women, in any serious degree, from the general education of the race. This is undeniably true, provided our observations have been correct that----

1. Home Economics is at heart Consumption, and must be so because the home woman is more and more purely a consumer.

2. Consumption is the broadest of generalities, requiring the broadest of liberal educations.

3. So far as manual arts are concerned, the "non-academic"

cookery of the girl is balanced by the "non-academic" carpentry of the boy.

4. Right Living and Wise Spending will, to a great extent, get diffused throughout the whole educational system for boys and girls, men and women, alike.

If there remains (and there does remain) certain further specialization which the average girl needs in order to be a good wife, mother, and home-maker, she will get it in "finis.h.i.+ng courses" furnished at the various levels of the educational system, when she leaves school, or else (better still) she will get it in "continuation schools" for adults to which she may resort when she is actually going to be a wife, mother, or home-maker.

Why learn really technical specialized things years and years before they are needed? Why learn them at a time when it is not certain that they will be needed at all?

The modern postponement of marriage is here a controlling element.

The fact that in Boston, among women from thirty to thirty-four years of age, 297 out of every 1,000 (more than a quarter) are still unmarried is usually put down to a scarcity of men. That scarcity is exaggerated.

Observe the comparative numbers of unmarried women and of unmarried men in that age-period in Boston:

Unmarried Women 8,081 Unmarried Men 10,651.

Observe further:

The total number of men of all conjugal conditions in the age-period in question is 28,603.

A little work with pencil and paper will now still further weaken the scarcity theory by revealing the fact that in Boston, among men from thirty to thirty-four years of age, 372 out of every 1,000 are still single.

Social conditions in rural communities tend to approach those of urban communities. Social conditions in the West tend to approach those in the East. Boston is not eccentric. It is only ahead.

"Continuation School" instruction in Home Economics for engaged and married women is a form of education beginning to appear in every part of the world.

But it lies beyond the woman's period of money-earning. How long is that period? And what are the social and racial consequences of the fact that (speaking generally) the more highly prepared modern men and women are to transmit intelligence to posterity, the more steadily do they tend to give their most vigorous years to singleness?

----I'LL NIVER GO HOME AGAIN!

By ARTHUR STRINGER

I'll niver go home again, Home to the ould sad hills, Home through the ould soft rain, Where the curlew calls and thrills!

For I thought to find the ould wee house, Wid the moss along the wall!

And I thought to hear the crackle-grouse, And the brae-birds call!

And I sez, I'll find the glad wee burn, And the bracken in the glen, And the fairy-thorn beyont the turn, And the same ould men!

But the ways I'd loved and walked, avick, Were no more home to me, Wid their sthreets and turns av starin' brick, And no ould face to see!

And the ould glad ways I'd helt in mind, Loike the home av Moira Bawn, And the ould green turns I'd dreamt to find, They all were lost and gone!

And the bairns that romped by Tullagh Burn Whin they saw me sthopped their play-- Through a mist av tears I tried to turn And ghost-like creep away!

And I'll niver go home again!

Home to the ould lost years, Home where the soft warm rain Drifts loike the drip av tears!

Vol. XXIII October 1910 No. 4

THE WOMEN OF TO-MORROW {page 486-496 part 3.}

By

WILLIAM HARD