Helping School Children
REVIEWS AND CRITICISM 199
- Author:
Elsa Denison. New York and London: Harper
and Brothers, 1912. Pp. xxi-j-352. lllus.
It is not often that a book upon questions of social interest is still worth reviewing a year after publication. The more “timely” the work, the more quickly does it lose importance, as a general rule. Miss Denison’s volume is the happy exception. After having been put to the tests which arise almost daily in an office like that of The Psychological Clinic, “Helping School Children” holds its own as the most useful of all references on the socialization of the schools. It is even probable that five years hence its value will be fully as great as now.
At first sight it is evident that “Helping School Children” is a discussion of the ways in which the schools are receiving outside aid. The further one reads on, however, the more one is struck with the sense that it is the children who are doing the helping, and it is their parents, neighbors, town officials, and cooperating organizations who are being helped to a fuller social consciousness, to a keener interest in good government and the common welfare. For wherever citizens have been stirred by their own impulses or by the tireless Bureau of Municipal Research to take an active part in helping the schools, there the children have more than repaid the community for efforts made in their behalf. The campaign for health in the schools, for example, has in some measure brought health to the family of every school child. The movement for beautifying school-grounds has extended to the cleaning up by children of back yards and vacant lots, until the aspect of whole cities has been changed for the better. The feeding of school children at the noon recess, and the teaching of cooking in the schools, has gone far to help mothers in preparing cheap, wholesome, and appetizing food. And perhaps best of all, the opening of schoolhouses in the evenings for informal gatherings of parents to see exhibitions of their children’s work, has done more than anything else to promote neighborliness and a spirit of cooperation.
Just how these changes take place here, there, and out yonder, is shown by Miss Denison in explicit detail. She generously lets us into the secret, and tells us how she went about making her book, what inquiries she made, and how she followed them up. About the immense labor of sorting and compiling the collected material she is modestly silent. It would be vastly difficult to name anything which. Miss Denison has left out which could have made her work of greater use, and it would be equally difficult within the limits of a brief review to give any idea of how much she has included. The index of topics alone covers six pages, of places mentioned four pages and of persons and organizations five pages. A. T.
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