If it is a very good thing to hang attractive pictures on the walls
of the home, then it is doubly so thus to ornament the walls of the
schoolroom. "In the emptiest room," says Ruskin, "the mind wanders
most, for it gets restless like a bird for want of a perch, and casts
about for any possible means of getting out and away. Bare walls are
not a proper part of the means of education; blank plaster about and
above them is not suggestive to pupils." The landscape makes a bright
opening through the dead wall like a window; flowers and ferns are
suggestive of the garden, the lane, the field, the woods, the purling
stream; of song-birds in the air or among the branches, and blue sky
overhead. Animals suggest a life with which we should be more or less
familiar. The portrait speaks the man, what we know of him, suggesting
trains of thought that may be most interesting and profitable.
A mother wondered why her three brave lads had all gone to sea from an
inland home. She was speaking, in her loneliness, with a friend who had
called upon her, and she could not suggest any reason why they should
all have adopted the sea-faring life when none of their friends or
relatives had been sailors. The man observed a picture of a full-rigged
ship hanging above the mantel. It was perhaps the only picture in the
room, at least the only one at all conspicuous. A thought struck him.
"How long has that picture been hanging there?" he asked. "Oh, it has
been there ever since the boys were little children." "It was that," he
said, "that sent your boys away. The sea grew upon their imagination
until they longed for it, and sought it, and so they are gone."
So a striking or attractive picture, in the schoolroom as in the home,
may sink deep into the heart of the child, and mean far more to him
than much of the work which the school program usually imposes. He may
forget the name and lose all recollection of the personality of the
teacher and of most of his schoolmates, but the striking picture is a
picture still. That he will always remember. In our experience, as we
grow older, if we are at all observant, we know more and more the value
of these things--how great a factor in education they may become!
Men wonder sometimes how they can expend a modest sum of money to good
purpose in giving pleasure and profit to others. Get some pictures of
good faces, and flowers, and landscapes, and other proper subjects, and
put them upon the walls of your nearest school-house, or of some other
in which you may be interested. When you have done this for one school
you may want to do it for a second, or you will suggest to some other
generous heart the like gift of enduring value. What chance have boys
and girls with a dead-alive teacher in a school-house whose blank walls
are eloquent of poverty? Oh, the weariness of it!
Real, genuine, helpful, beautiful art is now brought within reach of
the million. The arts of chromo-lithography and half-tone engraving are
putting exquisite pictures, at low cost, wherever there is taste to
appreciate and enjoy them. In our homes they are everywhere. Why not
everywhere also upon schoolroom walls bare of these choice educational
influences? To many a child good pictures come like the ministrations
of the angels. We feel this, we know it; and for the years remaining to
us shall do what we can to make school-life better for the pictures on
the wall.