Hygiene and Social Training

It is only necessary to walk through the slums of any one of our great industrial towns to realise what must be the foundation and beginning of any sane education for the children of these areas. Tenement houses of six rooms harbour as many as six families—twelve adults and nineteen children. ¹ There is one tap and one lavatory. There are streets of houses of two rooms—a bedroom and a scullery-kitchen—opening directly to a narrow alley-way, in which stand the dust-bins, full to over-flowing, and all the houses over-crowded with lounging, busy, infant or dying humanity. In room after room, the bed is the only flat space available as a dining table, and the children cannot go to sleep in it until the family has finished dining on it. Amongst the lumber and litter, the noise and filth, the endless jostle and fœtid air, the small child cannot learn to be clean, to be mannerly, to develop those habits on which his health and comfort will depend; and, uphill and unsatisfactory as the efforts of the school must be while such housing conditions continue, these efforts are of paramount importance in the Infants' Schools.