GARDEN SCHOOLS

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 117, 13 November 1926, Page 20

GARDEN SCHOOLS

SUN AND AIR FOR- SICE

CHILDREN.

England has gathered together 130 little boys and girls whose bodies havo for years, lacked the essentials of health and placed them in a garden school, designed to restore them to robustness, . states, tho New York "Times." Many English mothers, fearful lest the lives of their babies bo snuffed out, during the World War took refuge in dark cellars, where sunlight; and winds, never penetrated. The children, thus handicapped, developed bodies starved, and diseased.

The garden in which this school has teen established' is that of Sfowey House, South Side, Clapham Common—the only school in Britain where sun cures are effected. Here the greatest of all healers, sun and air, join forces; with, the teachers. Body and brain are being given a chance.. Each child has a desk and a chair. The lessons go on as quietly and.efficiently as if this wore an everyday schoolroom where healthy children wrestle with tho intricacies of fractions,or the teasing boundary lines of strange countries in .'their geographies. ■" '■••' ■'.'-' ■''..; ■•.:"■■ The boys wear slips of orange cloth. That is all. The rays of the sun bathe their • chests . and backs and legs and arms. It is proving a splendid bath." Give these children a string of feathers from head to heel, and they might be Indian lads playing at Indian games, for their little bodies have become brown as berries.

BoMta'd/a' wall "of foliage the' girls have a: solarium .all'their own.1, ■ They wear the^. tiniest sort of skirt, made of some.light, material:'-:. A small" white hat, to protect th'Cir ■ necks- from the sun, completes the costume. • Should they pick necklaces of flowers and string them, over their bronzed bodies and charit:a plaintive melody, they might be, for" all the world, little Kanaka girls in Honolulu.

Among the children little cliques are* formed: They have their self-chosen leaders' and their, favourite diversous. Gardening is popular. Nearly all have become weather 5 observers and. can read correctly the sunshine recorder, the barometer, and the sundial.

"Prom a medical standpoint," says the headmaster, "this ■ treatment has proved .successful. Listless and languid when the classes started,, the children • are now alert and bubbling over with good spirits. Examination results, too, show a cor-' responding mental' development. We shall continue the treatment until November when I anticipate that 60 per cent, of the children will be- well enough to return to the ordinary schools. Our experiment "is being watched by educationalists and doctors not only in England v but all over the Continent.''