View report page

72
The establishment of a cleansing station is not going to solve
the difficulty, and it is only a platitude to say that the home conditions
are not normal and must be remedied. Of course, the
home conditions are abnormal, or the children would not be sent
to school in a dirty state.
We are sometimes apt to think that social misery and insanitary
conditions are dependent solely upon housing conditions.
It is true that measures which result in remedying insanitary conditions
are associated with, and united to, other factors, such as
ignorance, privation, intemperance, suffering, &c., and each one of
these factors is in itself complex. Privation involves the operation
of several influences, to each of which it is difficult to apportion
its true weight; among these influences are loss of employment, and
a large family to provide for, but these are also due to an underlying
and a deeper cause.
There are exceptions to every rule, but usually the more
feckless the parents, the larger the family. The parents give very
little thought to anything, and consequently never think how a
large family can be provided for. They started their married life
in a very small house or more frequently a small flat or tenement,
and cannot afford to remove to a larger flat ot house. Overcrowding
results, and most of the infested cases with which we have to
deal are associated with overcrowding.
Among other sinister effects of overcrowding is the lowering
of the standard of cleanliness and decency in the occupants of the
house. This effect is so potent that even after the overcrowding
has been abated, the difficulty of uncleanliness persists. The
occupants of an overcrowded house, have been so used to a low
standard of living, that even when the housing condition has been
ameliorated, the children still remain unclean.
This is probably the cause of the large propertion of unclean
children from the Council houses, and who attend the John Perryn
School.
At recent meetings of the School Management Committee
this significant fact has been commented upon. The members haverightly
expressed the opinion that the material conditions which
obtain in the Council houses should render uncleanliness impossible.
The Housing Committee, in selecting tenants for the Council
houses, paid regard to the conditions under which the applicants
had to live, and selected those who lived under the worst housing
conditions. In many instances it was impossible for the tenants
to live cleanly and decently. The Housing Committee offered them
better conditions, and the people moved into bet:er houses but
retained their previous standards of cleanliness.