Labour and Childhood/The Child-Hand To-Day

by Margaret McMillan

CHAPTER V

THE CHILD-HAND TO-DAY

THE idea that manual work has a good effect on the whole body is certainly not new. Teachers saw the improvement long ago as a thing that could hardly be overlooked; and so when systems of work were drawn up for schools the delicate and defective children were not forgotten. There are special classes in woodwork arranged for these in various cities.

For years, then, before there was any talk of school doctors, teachers observed the good effect of some kinds of work; but they also noted the evil—the stunting effect of other kinds of labour.

For example, in Lancashire and Yorkshire there is still a large army of half-time and full-time children working in the mills. The conditions of factory life have been vastly improved in recent years, so from the point of view of sanitariness and humane treatment there is really nothing, as a rule, to complain of in the ordinary factory. Yet the teachers report that from the very first day that he enters the mill the half-timer begins to lose all interest in school-work. A subtle change comes over him which it is really very hard to define. One would say that the organism is disappointed. It was in full career, as it were, yesterday, making for a bright goal, and lo! suddenly it is stopped. This is not a fanciful rendering of the facts; it is a statement borne out by the position which the children hold in the school before and after the date of beginning the mill labour, as well as their general behaviour and appearance.

And the teachers reported this for years. They talked of it at their meetings; they wrote articles about it in their papers, and they carried on a very keen battle against child labour and half-time in the mills.

The teachers of evening schools, too, and those who interest themselves in young people, were not silent. The noisy behaviour of the lads and girls in their off time, the horse-play of trippers, and the shouting and singing in excursion trains, had something in them that spoke more of defiant sadness than of gaiety.

Great sociologists joined the teachers who worked and wondered at the adolescent. They had seen the trippers; but they had known some of them in childhood, when they had been promising. Why were they so very disappointing in youth? And why did they lose ambition, hope, energy, power of attention, as they grew older? Charles Booth, in his Life and Labour in London, remarks that many bright boys of thirteen or fourteen who earn four or five shillings per week as milk carriers seem to grow out of all ambition as the years pass, so that at the age of sixteen or seventeen they are content to go on earning what is then a mere pittance—the wage of little boys. Later, as he points out, many of these become casual labourers or drift into the sad army of the unemployed.

What does it mean?—this disappointment of the organism. The question has to be fairly asked at last—and an answer looked for. The restlessness of the child should not end like the restlessness of the young animal—that is to say, in mere lethargy. The movement of life in civilized human beings of normal type and unchecked energy, should swing upward as time goes on into a higher order of activity, into an activity that cannot be followed, measured, and analyzed, not because it is slower, but because it is incalculably more rapid than the careering of animals or the flowing of rivers.

When this forward movement is checked, the result is something that is not to be argued with. The adolescent in whom it takes place cannot find any antidote for it in what is said to him, as a rule. He is as helpless to use words as a cure as he would be to use a peroration to turn back a threatened attack of influenza. His symptoms are faults, but they are mere symptoms all the same. Dr. Kerr has shown how the very violence of his mode of enjoying himself is the result of an instinctive need to flush neglected brain areas. But as for finding anew the zest and ardour of mental life, how is that to be done when the very material out of which it is born has been lost?

The advent of the school doctor has made it possible to study the real problems involved in these successes and failures in a new way, and with fresh courage. Every one of them has its roots in the growing organism—and the task before the school doctor is to discern these, and to set them in the light. Just as the home and hospital doctor has to know something of the mechanisms involved in eating and drinking, in swallowing and digestion, so the school doctor has to study the brain, the organ of mind, at all stages. He has to try to understand the mechanism involved in learning to read and to write, to draw and to dig, to read and to sing, to think and to reason; and above all he has to probe deep and even deeper into the secrets of progress and arrest.

Séguin, through his "defective" scholars, offered the first striking illustration that the brain is a transforming centre, that energy is not merely received there and travels there, but is changed as it travels. At different stations of this great "transformer" different degrees and forms of energy are worked up. At the outermost parts of the nervous systems some vibrations are quickly dispersed, and die away without waking any consciousness. Yet from first to last the nervous system is a conductor, a condenser, a transformer, and a detector. All the sensibility of the body is drained by it from the very outposts and is conducted along the nerve fibre as the electric fluid is conducted along the wires.

From fibre to fibre, as Luys has shown, from sensitive element to sensitive element our whole organism is sensitive, and the sum of feeling, rich or poor, that makes a sentient person, is conducted as a series of isolated currents into the general receiving centre of the Brain. There, what has been carried is fused, changed, transformed, and in that transformation everything is represented. There is a strange tenacity of the new life as regards all it has received or conquered. The brain at almost any period can store up impressions, as some kinds of metallic plates store solar rays, but in childhood the hold on these is all the surer because they are swung, as it were, into the general and rapid movement of a growing, energizing organ. If the material is stinted then, and if movement and experience are confined to one part of the organism, we have reason to think the mischief wrought will be final. We have reason to think this, not only from the teaching of brain specialists, but also from the experience of teachers as well.

During the past year Dr. Thomas, an assistant school doctor of the London Education Committee, has made an attempt to find out the real effect of overwork plus hand lethargy on the wage-earning children of London.

He began by making an examination of some thousands of children (unemployed children, that is non-wage-earning, and attending school regularly) so as to get figures which would serve as a standard of comparison when he began to examine wage-earning children of the same age. To be sure neither section of children, wage-earning, nor non-wage-earning can be said to have much or varied free hand labour, for even in schools the hand is still apt to be rather severely snubbed. But in most schools, and certainly in those that have manual centres, the hand has more exercise than has that of the message boy.^[1] And the majority (though not all) of London children who earn wages are messengers of some kind, and earn their money by going errands.

Dr. Thomas divides the wage-earning boys of London into four classes viz. newsboys, milkboys, boys employed by shopkeepers and small tradesmen, and barbers' boys. Four hundred boys were selected by the teachers in fourteen boys' schools widely scattered over London. Each boy was examined and notes taken on the state of his health —that is, of the existence, not of stupidity in the first place, but of anæmia, severe nerve signs, deformities, and severe heart signs.

In so far as the general health of the average non-wage-earning child is compared with the wageearner, the percentage is as follows:

Hours worked weekly.	Number of Boys.	Fatigue.	Anæmia.	Severe Nerve Signs.	Deformities.	Severe Heart Signs.
All schoolboys of districts (workers and non-workers)	3,700	—	25	24	8	8
Working 20 or less hours	163	50	34	28	15	11
Working 20-30 hours	86	81	47	44	21	15
Working over 30 hours	95	83	45	50	22	20

These figures show the rapid deterioration of health that follow hard and monotonous labour in childhood. But as we are now concerned more especially with one effect of this labour—to wit, the mental effect of it—we will not linger over the general question. The interesting point in the Report to us at present is what follows.

"It may be suggested that these children are, to begin with, of an inferior type mentally and physically. But it was found that in two schools where the physique of the boys had been accurately noted, the children who went to do this kind of work were as follows:

	Numbers.	Considerably above average physique.	Below average.
Workers at School 1	29	18	7
„   School 2	40	23	11
	69	41	18

Thus though only 26 per cent were below the average physique, of these below the average more than half were exceptionally brilliant mentally, although 17 per cent of all were mentally below the average." "These results show," continues Dr. Thomas, "that this out of school work is a wanton dissipation of the children's powers, the chief national capital, and that the evil effect falls on the best of the children." It is seen to be a waste because the school work of the wage-earner deteriorates at once. It is so in London. It is so in Yorkshire. The bright eager boy who wanted to earn the rent and could learn fast becomes stupid and indifferent. Out of 330 wage-earning boys Dr. Thomas found that 86 were one standard, 83 two standards, 37 three standards, and 3 four standards behind that corresponding to their age.

Yet the conditions of life were not rendered worse, but as a rule better, for these children when they started work. To begin with, they had probably better food. Then in most cases they were out more than before in the open air, and this tells favourably in one way on the newsboys. But even then it does not prevent the physique as a whole from declining steadily. The boy is a walker, a runner, a carrier. To walk, to run, to carry as free exercise is good—but as work it spells mere blight and loss. It was, by the aid, not of feet but of hands, that human life was grasped; the slowly opened hand made the invisible path. It forged far ahead, and pierced the narrow horizon of the brute. And the organism, in a sense, knows when the upward movement is checked, when the future that was won is lost. No spring will revive the ambition of the finished hooligan. It seems that Nature has fixed the seasons of human growth as she has fixed the seasons of animal growth, that it takes longer to become a man than a beast, and longer to become a civilized man than a savage (besides which the savage has more time freely given him).^[2] It is possible in a garden to get to know what to expect at different seasons. So it is possible in the school garden to get some notion of the kind of thing to expect at any period, to know, for example, when the dexterity should appear that will one day become intelligence, and when to look for that kind of practical gift that will by-and-bye flower—it may be in late days—into a power of abstraction. It must be possible to gain this kind of insight, or why should the kindergarten have come at all?

And it must be possible to see at last why some human plants will never flower at all—why the movement of life does not swing upward, but decline early, or refuse to mount; to see why a message boy is content to be a casual or a loafer at last, and to have no part in the stirring changes of the world-garden.

All the while the human race is forging ahead—or rather, the happier members of it are forging ahead. There is no mistaking the fact of projection carrying them on, freeing them for new effort, and the prophecy of unknown and undreamed-of secrets of the organism itself shadowed forth in our projected cable telephones and wireless telegraphy. In this whirlwind we call science, the favoured few are borne forward, but in the stress of industrial life some of the fittest are destroyed and flung aside.

1. It has more varied exercises too than has the hand of the child who enters a mill. For though a doffer or factory child does use his hand all day long, it is but a very small group of muscles that is brought into activity.
2. Thus the boys of New Guinea, for example, are not hindered from making things. They rig up tents, build rude boats, make sails and bows and arrows, and are as active in wood and wild as was Robinson Crusoe.