Page:This side the trenches, with the American Red cross (IA thissidetrenches00desc).pdf/33

 untrained worker of the same age. At twenty-five years the difference is much greater—being thirty-one dollars weekly for the trained worker as against fourteen dollars for the untrained worker.

Despite this and similar evidence of how education pays, many parents are tempted to allow their children to stop school even when the money which might be added to the family income in this way is not needed. A girl was kept at home to do housework in order that her mother, whose husband had gone to war, might add to the family income by taking a job. The Home Service worker learned that there was an older daughter, twenty years old, who, because she had been lazy, had been earning only four dollars a week in a factory. When, through a talk with the Red Cross worker, the young woman realized that her lack of industry had caused her mother to take her younger sister from school, she became more zealous and is now receiving triple her former wage. The little girl is continuing her education.

Sometimes a child wants to stop going to school because he has fallen behind in his classes. For the help of such children there are attached to many Home Service Sections men and women who act as tutors and who help these children with their lessons. Often backwardness in studies is caused by ill-health or by some physical defect. A Home Service worker noticed a strained look upon the face of a boy who had stopped going to school because he had been at the foot of his class. It occurred to her to ask the mother whether the child had ever had measles. When she learned that he had had this disease she took him to a doctor and dis-