Difficult Children A War‐Time Experiment

Extract

Among the more valuable by-products of the recent war was the work which was done in the residential treatment of difficult children. Unostentatiously and quietly carried on, knowledge of this work, as a whole, might never have reached the general public if the Ministry of Health had not published, a year or so ago, a most interesting and informative pamphlet about it. It is with one small piece of this work—Barns Hostel School—that this paper is concerned.

A passing reference to Barns, in a recent Brackfriars, suggested that the school was started by the Q Camps Committee, which had been responsible for Hawkspur Camp. This is an excusable error, but may perhaps take this opportunity to make it clear that the Q Camps Committee is entirely unconnected with Barns House, and has no connection with the Society of Friends; the Q does not stand for Quaker.

The work at Barns Hostel School, however, was initiated by the Society of Friends, and attempted to express Friends’ principles. As Friends have never committed themselves to a credal statement it is not easy to say, shortly and clearly, what those principles are; but at any rate they are likely to be in the nature of corollaries to the one belief that has been described as the foundation stone upon which Quakerism is built. This is the belief in the “Inner Light”—in “That of God in every man”. The authoritative Quaker history claims that all the distinguishing views of Friends flow from this main proposition. It is not possible in this short paper to trace the connection between the various aspects of the work at Barns House on the one hand, and this fundamental proposition and its corollaries on the other.