CIVICS

CIVICSTHE CHILD WELFARE EXHIBIT THROUGHTHE CHILDREN’S EYESMAY AYRES

MAY AYRES

Thisspring, ten-year-old Ralph in one of the Rochester public schools wrote a letter to his teacher:

“Do you know what the Child’s Welfare Exhibit is for? Well, if you do not know what it is for, I will tell you. It is for the child to know better and try and keep the house clean, for a dirty house is a terrible house to live in. And most every disease comes from a dirty house—especially tuberculosis. Because we found out over at the armory that when you get tuberculosis it keeps eating at your lungs, and only fresh air will kill tuberculosis.”

Ralph had been to the Child Welfare Exhibit and come away with one important truth thoroughly impressed upon him. The exhibit was held during the second week in April. Everyone helped, and as their part the public and parochial schools offered their children as living demonstrations of Rochester school work. There were dances, drills, and games every afternoon and evening. Children sang together, and other children formed small classes of sewing, carpentry, electric wiring, cooking, rug weaving, drawing, etc., and worked steadily under the direction of teachers. The school children of Rochester were constantly in touch with the exhibit; they were given special holidays in which to see it; and their interest was keen. The following week those in the upper grades were asked to write letters telling about what they remembered.

Some 553 of these letters were examined for the purpose of ascertaining first, the most effective form of presentation for exhibit material, and second, the degree to which children understand and remember the lessons which different exhibits are designed to teach. In making the tabulation, only those letters were used which were written by the children themselves, without outside help. Several had to be discarded because they showed evidences of suggestions and corrections from the teacher. Every reference to an exhibit feature was counted, even where the child spoke of the same thing more than once.

The most popular feature among the children were the entertainments each afternoon and evening. These consisted of dances, drills, games, and chorus singing by the children themselves. Sarah, of the eighth grade, writes:

“Of all the good sights that I have seen and heard, I truly think the exhibit was one of the best. The one particular thing that interested me so much was the dancing which I don’t think could have been any better,”

while Charlotte ungrammatically adds,

“I think it was a splendid idea to have these entertainments, and I am sure it done the people good.”

The school children not only joined in dances and drills, but with the help of their teachers formed classes which worked and recited as living exhibits. All the children found the classes interesting. Says little Michael Ettiopia:

“I saw manual training. They were making desks to sell them. Many people bought them for their children to get learned to write and read. I saw some girls they were making candy, and I asked if they would sell the candy. They said ‘No, little boy, we don’t sell candy.’ So the people could see how to make candy.”

Particular attention was paid to the work of the boys from the “Shop School.” There was a class in electric wiring where the children loved to watch the work. Here is a paragraph from nine-year-old Raymond’s description:

“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 received6 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.”

Twelve-year-old Meta draws a lesson from the homes and the dairy. She says:

“The Child Welfare Exhibit is to show the fathers and mothers how to bring up their boys and girls so that they will make good citizens. If the citizens of a city or town are good citizens, the town will be a good city or town. You would hardly think a dirty house would have anything to do with the future citizens, but it has. If a boy or girl has a dirty home he also will be dirty not only in body but in mind also. (Dirty in mind means a mind with which you cannot think clear.) ... You must also have good food because if your food is food which does not nourish you right, your mind will not be good.”

The clean and dirty markets held a peculiar fascination for the children, and there are vivid accounts of the cat that was “walking over the meat and licking the meat” and the “cow’s head with a disease that made it all lumpy, lying in the corner, with the blood dripping out.” As Helen remarks:

“In the good store the store keeper was dressed in white, the food all looked clean and in a nice glass case. In the bad store the cat was on the counter and the celery and lettuce was all dried up, and the rest is too disgusting to tell about.”

Finally, we have this manly confession from an eleven-year-old boy:

“I think the child welfare exhibit was a very nice thing, for it teaches you something, at least it did me. The things that taught me the most was about the good and bad rooms, for I have a bad room; and so did the good and bad stores do me good.”

All the children saw the moving-picture show, which they take care to tell us was a free show. The film dealing with the care of the teeth, that telling the story of a boy’s camp, one vaguely described as “he knocked his wife down and he knocked his children down, and they all fought,” and the clean milk film received the most attention.

In the center of the armory a small playground was erected, and there the older children took their little brothers and sisters. One of them writes:

“One of the days when I was there a little girl was crying as though her heart was broken, because she had to go home, and her mother had to promise her she would bring her up there the next day, so she would stop her crying because she wanted to stay and play in the playground.”

The library proved a great attraction to the children. One after another tells of “reading most of the afternoon, and when I got out it was most night,” or of starting a book “which I came back the next afternoon to finish. It was a book of engineers.” The general feeling of the children is expressed by Sarah Sedita when she says:

“While looking around I could not express my joy, when I went to see the library department and saw on a sign what is to be in Rochester, which was no other than this—that there is to be a public library and fifty other branches of it at different places in the city. Although I have read ever so many books, I could not help then to be overjoyed.”

Near the library was a booth showing the guns, cards, jimmies, daggers, etc., taken away from small boys in the children’s court. There was also a lurid collection of dime novels from the same source. Of these Katherine writes:

“I was talking to Mr. Killip about the boys he had to handle, and he was telling how some of them acted. It was very interesting to see the things he had taken from boys under sixteen years—the revolvers, dice, knives, books, cartridges, andother things. Some little boys came along and saw the books and one said, ‘Didn’t I tell you those were good books? See, they got them here!’”

This booth and the explainers in charge—the explainers seem to have done effective work in the Rochester exhibit—impressed the boys very seriously. Moses states the case:

“When a child reads a novel he gets interested in them and likes to buy more of them. After a boy reads a great deal of these novels he gets so that he thinks he is the things that he is reading about. And soon after that he starts to murder.”

Tabulation was made showing the distribution of references among the four main types of exhibit material—entertainments, models, motion exhibits, and photographs, maps, diagrams, charts, etc. To reach conclusive results, it would be necessary to secure the exact number of exhibits shown in each of the four classes. We know, however, that there were more photographs, cartoons, charts, maps, etc., in the Rochester exhibit than numbers on the program, or different models, or motion exhibits. Donald tells us—“There was charts of the teeth, mind, nostrils, ears, throat, various organs, limbs, and feet.”

But most of the children who attended the exhibit have only a vague memory of the photographs which lined the walls, and every reference of this kind is capped by three references to the program numbers. Models and motion exhibits receive practically the same amount of attention in all the grades. The lower grades were more impressed by the entertainments than the higher, and the higher were more impressed by the photographs than the lower. The per cents for all the children run: entertainment 35, models 28, motion exhibits 26, and photos, maps, etc., 11.

There were 271 favorable comments and 44 unfavorable comments on the exhibit. The favorable run from one little girl’s reiterated exclamation of “Oh, it was grand!” to Ralph’s dignified statement:

“Thousands of people were taught by the clean and healthy attitude of the building a great number of things. It was probably the best move toward cleanness ever held in this city.”

With a few exceptions, the unfavorable comments have to do with the overcrowding, from which the children suffered greatly. As a natural result of such a throng, the halls became stuffy, and there seemed to be no adequate system of ventilation. One of the boys writes:

“There were imposing posters on the poor air system in the tenement houses, but right there, where thousands of people came daily, the air was so had that people who really wanted to see the things stayed away.”

A twelve-year-old girl makes this scathing comment:

“At different booths they had pictures showing how to prevent children from getting germs of disease. Then the mothers take their children to a place like that. Saturday night after I got in the Armory basement from dancing it was so full of dust I could hardly breathe. Then we went up stairs and mother said that the American mothers were going crazy. The Child’s Welfare Exhibit is very fine, but I think the Rochester mothers had better tone down and be more careful of where they take their children. For it was just full of germs down there, both up and down stairs.”

There were many general comments, and lessons drawn, such as “Many people will say ‘Oh, I can’t afford milk, it’s too expensive.’ But this is all foolish, as in the end milk is the cheapest and best of foods.” An eleven-year-old girl writes:

“The thing that took my interest was the different cares and diseases of the babies that they are apt to get when they are neglected. And it will help me very much during vacation, as I am going to take care of the baby.”

Finally comes this simple tribute to the success of the exhibit:

“When looking at the pictures of poor children and homes and the condition of the homes, it seems hardly possible that such conditions could exist in Rochester, but when you get out of doors again your eyes are opened and you see conditions that you never noticed before.”

The children speak frankly in their letters, often telling more about themselves than they realize. There is something pathetic in the following glimpse of home life which Maurice affords us:

“The good food and bad are almost what I take, but I don’t drink coffee any more, and will not take it. My brother used to have coffee every meal, but since my mother was there he drinks no coffee but all milk and bread. Bread is about the only good food there is, and I have had lately a good appetite for it.”

One feels a throb of sympathy for the boy who says:

“We need something to make us stronger mentally, and something to abolish the truant officer.”

Many of the children are quite sure that the exhibit was for the instruction of the “lower classes” only, and have a pleasant feeling of superiority as they speak of its influence. Says one with some indignation:

“The thing impressed me as if the Italians and Germans were having more done for them than the Americans and respectable people.”

And finally ends a mournful letter with the conclusion many other observers have reached before her:

“The impression of the whole exhibit on me was that it is slow work.”

It is of course impossible to draw any hard and fast rules as to the effect of exhibit material upon an adult audience from these letters of school children. Certain things, however, are of enough significance to warrant attention on the part of exhibitors. With the exception of the moving picture exhibit all these different features were about as interesting to the children in the seventh and eighth grades as to those in the fourth, fifth and sixth. Difference in age seems to have little to do with the strength of the impression received. The fact that children acted in the entertainments and motion exhibits probably accounts in part for their interest in these two forms of exhibit material, but it cannot account for the high per cent of attention paid to the tidy and untidy home, the moving pictures, the library, the clean and dirty dairy, or the clean and dirty market. Entertainments interested them most, models next, then motion exhibits, and photographs least of all. Difference in age becomes a factor when considering the type of material rather than the individual exhibit, and we find interest in entertainments lessening, and that in photographs and diagrams increasing towards the higher grades. Through all the grades, however, models and motion exhibits receive very nearly the same amount of attention, and together receive more than half of all the references made. Among adults, it seems safe to assume that the relative order of interest would be the same.

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