1. Provision for assembling material in food, household
management, including expenditures, and child care,
particularly, and adapting this material to the needs of the
members of the different foreign-born groups, by supplying
salaries for two persons experienced in teaching, who would
devote themselves to the preparation of classroom material,
leaflets, charts, etc.--$2,400
$4,800
2. The granting of stipends to graduate students who would
work at institutions approved by the committee and who would
do practice teaching with such groups. In the assignment
both of the stipends and of the institutional patronage, the
interests of both urban and rural women would be taken into
account by supplying scholarships for ten graduate students
to teach under supervision and to assemble material under
direction, these to be awarded by the committee with due
regard to needs of rural and urban women--$750
$7,500
3. Securing the services of several highly skilled
home-economics teachers, under whose supervision the
practice teaching, and the preparation of these students
would be carried on, and developing through advice teaching
centers for the use of such material wherever possible, by
supplying salaries for four persons to supervise and direct
teaching--$4,000
$16,000
4. Securing teachers who are experienced housewives, who
with short courses might assume certain teaching functions,
supplying stipends, $75 a month for four months ($300) for
fifty women who, selected under rules drawn up by the
committee, would take short training courses, to be
organized under the direction of individuals or departments
or institutions approved by the committee
$15,000
III. There would, of course, be necessary a director of the
work, who could be either one of the salaried teachers chosen
as leader or an executive secretary. In any case clerical
expenses and the costs of certain items incident to the
instruction would be required.
The experiment should be assured for a term of three years.
The problem can be dealt with adequately only by state-wide and
nation-wide agencies, and should as soon as possible be taken over by
nonsectarian educational agencies. But the public-school system is at
present wholly without the equipment necessary for the performance of
these functions. It is not only not national; it is in many states not
even state-wide in its supervision and standards. In Illinois, for
example, the school district is the unit, and until a board was
created in 1919 to deal with the problems of vocational training, the
control exercised by the state was negligible.
The situation in an Illinois mining town illustrates the waste
resulting from treating these questions as local questions. The town
referred to is a mining town, lying partly in one and partly in
another county. The only public school available is in one county, and
it is said to be overcrowded. The road from a settlement in the other
county to the school is said to be impassable all winter or in bad
weather. It leads over a mine switch that is dangerous as well.
The parents complained that the small children could not go so far,
that there were no play facilities, that the location was secluded, so
that it was dangerous for girls, that the term was too short, and that
the attendance of the children seems unimportant to the school
authorities. As the community was almost altogether Italian, the
parents would have preferred a woman teacher for the girls over ten or
twelve years of age. A more intelligent and a more incisive indictment
of an educational situation than this criticism expressed by the
Italian families in this remote mining community could hardly have
been drawn.
It is inevitable that similar dark spots should continue, so long as
no central agency is responsible for the maintenance of a minimum
opportunity everywhere. Of course it is not to be expected that those
jurisdictions that so neglect the children will care for the adult.
Many states have the central agency that could take over the work. And
there exist Federal agencies able with enlarged resources to adapt
their work to meet many of these needs. The United States Children's
Bureau has published bulletins in simple form containing such
information as every woman should have concerning the care of mothers
and young children. Only the lack of resources has kept that bureau
from undertaking to bring these facts to the knowledge of all mothers,
including the foreign born.[60]