OPEN-AIR SCHOOLS [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—Most open-air schools start as sanatoria. It is when children are ill that they are stripped, exposed to free air and sunshine, and allowed to return to nature. The high Alps in Switzerland, the forest schools in Germany, and most of our own open-air schools are for the ailing and delicate. Cure is a very costly business, but we undertake it. Still, it is very strange that we put the cart such a long way before the horse. Prevention is cure on the grand scale, wholesale cure in the world of Causes. And it would be more logical to start open- air nursery schools on the large scale, than to wait for the development of disease in older children who attend schools, and then attempt to deal with results, and symptoms—not causes.
In many areas 80 per cent., or four-fifths of the whole child population are rickety at the age of two. M.O.H.'s and Medical Officers of Local Authorities join issue and leave us in no doubt as to the facts. As for the scientists, Wickstead Armstrong, Major Leonard Darwin, and others assure us that such areas are peopled largely by the unfit. But who are the unfit ? Not the rickety, one hopes, otherwise there is only one-fifth of us, in poor areas, worth saving. To hold this view would be to condemn the British race out of hand— all but a remnant. Now this is not the day of remnants. (Even if four-fifths were put in the lethal chamber, the high- browed remnant might degenerate, and commit suicide.) On the whole, we had better assume that some of our rickety children are worth saving.
How are they to be saved ? How are we to be in a position to say even what their real fitness is, or is not ? In order to have reliable statistics on this point we must have something like fair and equal conditions and nurture for all children. Are we to wait till disease has done its work, beginning, as it 'does very often, with the higher and later evolved parts of the nervous system ? I submit that this is stupendous folly. It is no less folly because it has been practised for untold ages. If we want to keep the later gains of the race we must start early, and save many.
The Open-Air Nursery School can do this. That is why it is far more important than any other kind of open-air school. It prevents on a large scale the evils which every other form of school of this kind is attacking. The little child of two comes in, pale as a rule, sickly, feeble, and rickety. He reacts, it may be, so rapidly to the new conditions that in a few months or even weeks he is unrecognizable. Or he may react slowly but surely, and emerge as a vital and intelligent little person in the course of two or three years. The point is that we should give the child a chance on a large scale, before we pass judgment on his natural intelligence and fitness, as we now do in the case of millions of children.
Terror has paralysed us hitherto. There is nothing so costly and dangerous as fear. We pay inunense sums to-day in hospital charges, in sanatoria for older children, in doles and treatment- for the artificially 'unfit."
I don't deny that we have to face the truth that racial unfitness exists, and even, it- may be, increases—that there is a proportion of our race who should not be parents. But though one may handle this problem to-day in a makeshift Sway,-the truth is obscured for us by the immense number Who
cannot do their best, or be their best, and who may even appear to belong to a 'class with whom they have no real affinity.
There is a tide in the affairs of nations and children which taken at the flood leads on to new fortunes. - It is a tide; not a ripple or a wave. It may move silently, but its depth and swing makes debris of timid undertakings. I hope it has come now—this tide in the affairs of children—and that we shall take it at the flood, Government, Local AuthoritieS; parents and rate-payers. I hope we shall take it, and substi- tute open-air nursery schools for the " Infant Departments" of yesterday. I hope we shall all do this—not tinker with little new " classes " and the like.
It will not cost a great sum to take the brave course. I don't think it will cost an added sixpence in maintenance, though we shall have to find open-air sites. The full cost of a child in one Open-air Nursery school in 1926 was £11 15s.
If such schools are allowed to do their work there is no part of our educational system who will not feel the effect of this new surge of life from below !—I am, Sir, &c.,
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