Miss Hendrickson taught in the town of Ridgeway, where the leading
industries were carried on in factories of various kinds. Nearly all the
parents worked in some one of these. Naturally, with their long hours of
work, these parents had little time for such secondary matters as
polishing their children’s manners. Most of them were thankful if they
could feed the hungry youngsters and provide a place where they could
sleep.
Miss Hendrickson soon became aware that the matter of teaching good
manners devolved upon her exclusively. She also felt that a direct
attack upon the rude customs of her pupils would be less effective than
indirect procedure, since refined manners in this particular community
usually resulted in having the scornful epithet, “Stuck-up!” attached to
the possessor of said manners.
[Sidenote: Interest in Manners]
After careful deliberation, Miss Hendrickson decided to take advantage
of the story period in laying the foundation for more explicit teaching
of manners later. Accordingly, she began the story of the feudal system
and the institution of chivalry that sprang from it, a story always
appealing to seventh and eighth grade pupils. She told how the feudal
lord had to build strong castles for the safety of his family in those
days of warfare. She vividly portrayed life in the castle, and showed
how women also often had to do brave, daring acts in defending the
castle when the husband was away. She explained how little boy pages
were trained to wait on the ladies of the castle and to be polite to
them, and how, when these same boys were older and became knights their
highest duty was to protect these women who had few neighbors and who
were shut up much of the time in the castles because it was unsafe to go
abroad, and how the women returned this care by making the homecoming a
very happy time for the lords and husbands whenever they came back from
war. As the story progressed from day to day, Miss Hendrickson developed
the thought that this sort of life in the castle gradually changed in
many ways the ideals and habits of the people. Poetry and music, for
other than religious purposes, began to be written and sung, and the
rude people who had formerly laughed at refinement in manners as
something effeminate and unsuited to a warrior, began to realize after a
while that a man could be brave and strong, yet at the same time be
gentle and polite toward women and toward all who were weaker or more
dependent than himself. So, in time, the lords began to vie with each
other to see who could be most polite or who could render the greatest
service to his lady.
Chivalry sprang up, and, indeed, died out, many hundreds of years ago,
yet it still has an influence over us, for we still use the term lady,
not meaning now, exclusively, the wife of a lord, but any woman who is
worthy of our respect. And a chivalrous man is still a man who is polite
to women, and who always springs to their defense whenever they need
protection. Gentlemen in those days meant a lord or someone of high
birth. But such men had more refined manners than had the other people,
or serfs, as they were called, having been trained in chivalry; and
today we use the term in this country to mean any man who has fine
manners.
Of course Miss Hendrickson told the story very much more in detail than
has been done here. She dwelt upon phases which she knew would strongly
appeal to the children and illustrated them with many pictures borrowed
from the library. She had the children bring in baskets of stones from
the river bank and asked two of the boys who had the most offensive
manners to build a miniature castle on the sand table. She read a few of
the poems sung by the minnesingers and troubadours, and the oath which
the squires must take before they could be dubbed knights.
All this time Miss Hendrickson had said very little about the personal
manners of her pupils, but she had substituted a new ideal regarding the
desirability of good manners for the crude one generally held by her
pupils. She had made such manners seem attractive, and thereafter when a
child was about to do some act which she could not approve, she would
often say, “What would a knight do, James, in such a case?” and many
times the suggestion was sufficient to induce the desired conduct.