This Side the Trenches/Chapter 4
This war is being fought for the children of the world. The men who are now in the trenches will reap few of the benefits that will come from the conclusion of a permanent peace. The nations that are losing their best manhood, that are spending billions of dollars, that are undergoing countless privations will derive little immediate material gain from all their sacrifices. Small in comparison with the investment will be the present profit of the United States at the conclusion of its great venture.
The thought of everybody, from the least important soldier or sailor to President Wilson himself, has been the generations of the future. It is that the people of the United States and of the world of tomorrow may be a better people, that the people of the United States and of the world of today are at war with autocracy.
But the people of tomorrow are the children of today. They are the boys and girls who were born last year, the boys and girls who are in kindergarten now, who are in grammar school, in high school, who are working in their first jobs. That these children may have greater opportunity, the men on the battlefront are risking their lives. Is it not important, then, that the boys and girls of the United States should be fitted to make the most of the opportunities that the world of tomorrow holds for them? And of all children, should not the sons and daughters of the soldiers and sailors be given the benefit of the best preparation available?
It is infinitely harder for children to develop properly in a time of war than it is in a time of peace. In Great Britain, for example, there has been a great increase in juvenile delinquency. The number of children arrested and brought before the courts for breaking the law is larger by forty per cent. than before the war. This is partly because of the absence of the fathers from home, partly because in the first throes of mobilization many of the schools were closed, the buildings being used by the military, and partly because boys and girls by the thousands went to work in munitions factories and other war enterprises at an age when they ought still to have been living a sheltered life.
The lesson which this should teach the people of the United States is that children must continue in school as long as possible. Moreover, according to a study made by the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, ninety-eight per cent. of the boys and girls in that state who go to work between the ages of fourteen and fifteen engage in unskilled or low grade industries. Thus they have little opportunity for training or advancement. This is corroborated by a report issued by the United States Bureau of Education which shows that a high school graduate earns on the average $1,000 a year as against $500 earned by a poorly educated workman. The National Child Labor Committee has published statistics indicating that a trained worker, eighteen years of age, earns ten dollars a week as compared with seven dollars a week received by an untrained worker of the same age. At twenty-five years the difference is much greater—being thirty-one dollars weekly for the trained worker as against fourteen dollars for the untrained worker.
Despite this and similar evidence of how education pays, many parents are tempted to allow their children to stop school even when the money which might be added to the family income in this way is not needed. A girl was kept at home to do housework in order that her mother, whose husband had gone to war, might add to the family income by taking a job. The Home Service worker learned that there was an older daughter, twenty years old, who, because she had been lazy, had been earning only four dollars a week in a factory. When, through a talk with the Red Cross worker, the young woman realized that her lack of industry had caused her mother to take her younger sister from school, she became more zealous and is now receiving triple her former wage. The little girl is continuing her education.
Sometimes a child wants to stop going to school because he has fallen behind in his classes. For the help of such children there are attached to many Home Service Sections men and women who act as tutors and who help these children with their lessons. Often backwardness in studies is caused by ill-health or by some physical defect. A Home Service worker noticed a strained look upon the face of a boy who had stopped going to school because he had been at the foot of his class. It occurred to her to ask the mother whether the child had ever had measles. When she learned that he had had this disease she took him to a doctor and discovered that, as frequently happens after measles, his eyes had become so weak that they required glasses. Now that the boy is no longer suffering from defective vision he is making excellent marks in school.
Frequently a child does not advance in his studies because they do not interest him. The daughter of a soldier failed to do well at a trade school where she was taking lessons in sewing. The Home Service worker found the girl one afternoon leading her brothers and sisters in calisthenics. Finding that the child's interests were in this direction she persuaded the mother to allow her daughter to enter a physical culture school where she is now fitting herself to be a gymnasium instructor.
When the time comes for the boy to start work it means much to his success in life that he enter an occupation which offers him a future and one in which he is fitted by inclination and ability to engage. In the larger cities there are men ahd women who specialize in giving advice to young people about the kind of employment they ought to seek. This is called vocational guidance. It depends largely upon a knowledge of the ability, education, and inclination of the child, and about the occupations which are open to him. When specialists in vocational guidance are available, Home Service obtains their help for the boys and girls of soldiers and sailors. In towns where they are not to be found, such advice is supplied as effectively as possible by the Home Service workers themselves.
Equally important with education is health. The Red Cross not only obtains treatment for the families of soldiers and sailors when there is sickness, but it also uses every opportunity to help them to improve their physical condition.
Many people from birth to old age are content with being only half well because they have never known anything better. The eleven-year-old brother of a man in the service had walked on crutches all his life until one morning in the spring of 1917 he broke them. The family did not have enough money to replace them and asked the Red Cross for assistance. The Home Service worker took the boy to a physician. The doctor recommended an operation, which was performed, and now the little fellow is able to run about like other children and needs no crutches.
"She plays too hard," the mother of a girl who constantly complained of tired feet told the Home Service worker. The young woman from the Red Cross, however, took the child to a specialist in diseases of the joints and discovered that a certain kind of shoe would correct the trouble. This shoe was obtained and now the child plays all day without becoming tired.
The Home Service worker makes constant use of physicians and nurses. When, for example, she thinks that any member of a family may have tuberculosis she immediately arranges for an examination by a doctor or at a tuberculosis dispensary if there is one in town. She helps the patient to obtain admission to a sanatorium, or, if that is not possible, she tries to arrange to have a nurse visit the home regularly and supervise the treatment for this disease—a treatment which, as everybody knows, consists of rest, fresh air, good food, and, for the protection of others, the careful destruction of all discharges from the patient's nose and throat. It is through these discharges that the disease is chiefly spread.
The moral welfare of the children is often as much a concern of the Red Cross as their physical welfare. The wife of a sailor asked a Home Service worker for advice about the management of her three sons. They were under fifteen years of age, and, in the absence of their father, had become most unruly. The Home Service worker who was the mother of boys herself gave the perplexed woman some practical advice about discipline. Then she told the boys that she would have to send their mother away for a rest. The thought of separation, and the idea that this separation was necessary largely because of their behavior, had an immediate influence upon the children. They promised to be more considerate of their mother, and in the end, the whole family was sent away for a vacation by the Red Cross. When the mother and the boys returned, the Home Service worker planned various expeditions and excursions which used up some of the children's energy. Her advice to the mother has been so helpful that now the children have become an aid and a comfort instead of a hindrance and a perplexity.
Recreation is almost as important to children as food. It can be made a means of education and a moral safeguard. Yet there are thousands of boys and girls in the United States who have never known any other playground than the street in front of their homes; who have never been on picnics; who have never been able to play games without interruption by the policeman or passing automobiles and wagons. There are families whose members have never attended an entertainment or a concert. The incomes of thousands of households are so small that they cannot afford to go to a moving picture show. Five cents for the movies means five cents less for bread. Many families, indeed, stay away from church for the lack of a nickel to put into the collection box, or from inability to make a subscription, if hey were to become members.
The oldest son of a widow, whose life had been lived in just this meagre way, enlisted. The family now was obliged to economize still more. There was nothing left after the meals and the rent were paid for, and the mother became sickly more through weariness of the monotony of the struggle to make ends meet, than through actual lack of food or clothing. One of the first things that the Red Cross did after making the acquaintance of this woman was to arrange to have the oldest of her three children take her to a moving picture show and treat her to ice cream afterwards. The experience was so unusual that the woman and her son talked about it for days. The Red Cross now sees to it that this family has some kind of recreation every few weeks. There has, as a result, been a remarkable improvement in the health of the household.
Where do the children play? what friends have they? These are questions which the Home Service worker frequently asks of the mother. Whenever opportunity offers she encourages the children to become Boy Scouts or Camp Fire Girls and to join the Junior Red Cross and such organizations as the agricultural and home-making clubs conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture. She interests the older girls in entering sewing and reading circles and the boys in becoming members of debating societies and athletic clubs.
Through the church, the Red Cross worker strives to enrich the spiritual life of the family. The Home Service worker soon, of course, learns to what denomination the members of the household belong, and then if they have not been active in attendance at services she urges them to renew their connections with the church; she sees that the children are invited to attend the Sunday school, or to join church societies and clubs. Here the ideal of the Red Cross is that of a social worker now connected with a Home Service Section, who wrote to a woman grown careless about attendance at church, "whatever one's religion is one ought to observe it." The woman was a Catholic; the social worker was in the service of a non-sectarian organization and was herself a Protestant. She recognized, as all true Home Service workers do, how important it is that no opportunity for the development of spiritual life be lost.
The ideal of Home Service is, therefore, to open to families ways of physical, mental, and spiritual development. Its desire for the children of these families is that they be enabled to follow the example of a certain Boy who lived two thousand years ago and of whom it is said that He increased "in wisdom, and in stature, and in favor with God and man."
Review of Chapter IV
1. Whose will be the greatest benefit from the war?
2. What evidence can you cite to show that war times may bring handicaps to children?
3. What facts indicate that to take children from school in order that they may work is poor economy?
4. Give two reasons why children sometimes want to stop school.
5. Give an illustration showing how Home Service works to keep children in school.
6. Why does the Red Cross seek to improve the physical condition of children?
7. (a) What is the treatment for tuberculosis? (b) How is this disease chiefly spread?
8. (a) Have all children equal opportunity for recreation? (b) Do you know of children in your town who have no place to play? (c) Why is recreation a necessity?
9. What kinds of recreation, aside from physical exercises, help to develop children?
10. (a) How does Home Service try to advance the spiritual life of the family? (b) What is its attitude toward religious observance?