Children and animals have always seemed a natural and whole some combination. One hates to think of a childhood without pets. Yet that is the sort of barren childhood which the vast majority of our city children nowadays are spending. There is no place for these little dumb friends in the crowded homes, the crowded streets and the crowded days of our modern city life.
As in so many other ways, if old privileges are to be kept for children under new conditions, the school must be the means of bringing this about. If modern city children are to know the joy, the beauty, the significance of animals, it is necessary that they be included in the children's school home. The description in a book is but a tame, a pathetic substitute for the live creature. A chip munk was taken as a visitor to a New York East Side class. Those twelve-year-old children thought the little striped creature was a tiger! They had studied a tiger in a book.
To use animals in a school room along with other lessons is quite in keeping with the general loosening up of school practices. It is one more way of letting a child learn through his natural curiosity and pleasure. But, like other expansions within a class room, it involves adaptations. It raises practical problems which need practical answers. Perhaps the answers contained in the following paper may show teachers how to open the doors of their class rooms to admit the historic friends of children — the animals.
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