An elderly woman was talking to me not long ago about her childhood.
"No, my dear, I did not have a governess," she said, in answer to my
questionings. "Neither did I attend the public schools, though I lived
in the city. I went to a private school. The pupils in it were the girls
of the little social circle to which my parents belonged. There were
perhaps twenty of us in all. And there were three teachers; one for the
'first class,' one for the 'second class,' and a French-German-music-
and-drawing-teacher-in-one for both classes."
"And what did you study?" I asked.
"Besides French, German, music, and drawing?" my elderly friend mused.
"Well, we had the three R's; and history, English and American, and
geography, and deportment. I think that was all."
"And you liked it?" I ventured.
"Yes, my dear, I did," replied my friend, "though I used to pretend that
I didn't. I sometimes even 'played sick' in order to be allowed to stay
home from school. Children then, as now, thought they ought to 'hate to
go to school.' I believe most of them did, too. I happened to be a
'smart' child; so I liked school. I suppose 'smart' children still do."
A "smart" child! In my mind's eye I can see my elderly friend as one,
sitting at the "head" of her class, on a long, narrow bench, her eyes
shining with a pleased consciousness of "knowing" the lesson, her cheeks
rosy with expectation of the triumph sure to follow her "saying" of it,
her lips parted in an eagerness to begin. Can we not all see her, that
"smart" child of two generations ago?
As for her lesson, can we not hear it with our mind's ear? In
arithmetic, it was the multiplication table; in English history, the
names of the sovereigns and the dates of their reigns; in geography, the
capitals of the world; in deportment--ah, in deportment, a finer lesson
than any of our schools teach now! These were the lessons. Indeed, my
elderly friend has told me as much. "And not easy lessons, either, my
dear, nor easily learned, as the lessons of schoolchildren seem to be
to-day. We had no kindergartens; the idea that lessons were play had not
come in; to us lessons were work, and hard work."
My friend gave a little sigh and shook her head ever so slightly as she
concluded. It was plain that she deprecated modern educational methods.
"Schools have changed," she added.
And has not the attitude of children toward going to school changed even
more? Do many of them "hate to go"? Do any of them at all think they
"ought to hate to go"? Is a single one "smart" in the old-time sense of
the word?
A winter or two ago I was recovering from an illness in a house which,
by great good fortune, chanced to be situated on a suburban street
corner, not only near a large public school, but directly on the main
route of the children going to and from it. My chief pleasure during
that shut-in winter was watching those children. Four times a day--at
half-past eight, at half-past twelve, at half-past one, and at half-past
three--I would take the window to see them going by. They were of many
ages and sizes; from the kindergarten babies to the boys and girls of
the ninth grade. None of them could possibly have been described as
"creeping like snail unwillingly to school." As a usual thing, they came
racing pell-mell down the three streets that converged at my corner;
after school they as tumultuously went racing up, homeward. I never
needed to consult the clock in order not to miss seeing the children.
When I heard from outside distant sounds of laughing and shouting, I
knew that a school session had just ended--or was about to begin. Which,
I could only tell by noting the time. The same joyous turmoil heralded
the one as celebrated the other. Clearly, these children, at least, did
not "hate to go to school"!
One of them, a little boy of nine, a friend and near neighbor of mine,
liked it so well that enforced absence from it constituted a punishment
for a major transgression. "Isn't your boy well?" I inquired of his
mother when she came to call one evening. "A playmate of his who was
here this afternoon told me that he had not been in school to-day."
"Oh, yes, he is perfectly well!" my friend exclaimed. "But he is being
disciplined--"
"Disciplined?" I said. "Has he been so insubordinate as that in school?"
"Not in school," the boy's mother said; "at home." Then, seeing my
bewilderment, she elucidated. "When he is _very_ naughty at home, I keep
him out of school. It punishes him more than anything else, because he
loves to go to school."
Another aspect of the subject presented itself to my mind. "I should
think he would fall behind in his studies," I commented.
"Oh, no," she replied; "he doesn't. Children don't fall behind in their
studies in these days," she added. "They don't get a chance. Every
single lesson they miss their teachers require them to 'make up.' When
my boy is absent for a day, or even for only half a day, his teacher
sees that he 'makes up' the lessons lost before the end of the week.
When I was a child, and happened to be absent, no teacher troubled about
_my_ lost lessons! _I_ did all the troubling! I laboriously 'made them
up'; the thought of examination days coming along spurred me on."
Those examination days! How amazed, almost amused, our child friends are
when we, of whose school-days they were such large and impressive
milestones, describe them! A short time ago I was visiting an old
schoolmate of mine. "Tell me what school was like when you and mother
went," her little girl of ten besought me.
So I told her. I dwelt upon those aspects of it differing most from
school as she knows it--the "Scholarship Medal," the "Prize for Bible
History," and the other awards, the bestowal of which made "Commencement
Morning" of each year a festival unequaled, to the pupils of "our"
school, by any university commencement in the land, however many and
brilliant the number of its recipients of "honorary degrees." I touched
upon the ease with which even the least remarkable pupil in that school
could repeat the Declaration of Independence and recount the "causes" of
the French Revolution. Finally, I mentioned our examination days--six in
January, six more in June.
"What did you do on them?" inquired the little girl.
"Will you listen to that?" demanded her mother. "Ten years old--and she
asks what we did on examination days! This is what it means to belong to
the rising generation--not to know, at ten, anything about examination
days!"
"What _did_ you do on them?" the little girl persisted.
"We had examinations," I explained. "All our books were taken away, and
we were given paper and pen and ink--"
"And three hours for each examination," my friend broke in. "We had one
in the morning and another in the afternoon."
"Yes," I went on. "One morning we would have a grammar examination.
Twenty questions would be written on the blackboard by our teacher, and
we would write the answers--in three hours. On another morning, or on
the afternoon of that same day, we might have an arithmetic examination.
There would be twenty questions, and three hours to answer them in, just
the same."
"Do you understand, dear?" said the little girl's mother. "Well, well,"
she went on, turning to me before the child could reply, "how this talk
brings examination days back to my remembrance! What excitement there
was! And how we worked getting ready for them! I really think it was a
matter of pride with us to be so tired after our last examination of the
week that we had to go to bed and dine on milk toast and a soft-boiled
egg!"
The little girl was looking at us with round eyes.
"Does it all sound very queer?" I asked.
"The going to bed does," she made reply; "and the milk toast and the egg
for dinner, and the working hard. The examinations sound something like
the tests we have, _They_ are questions to write answers to, but we
don't think much about them. I don't believe any of the girls or boys go
to bed afterwards, or have milk toast and eggs for dinner--on purpose
because they have had a test!"
She was manifestly puzzled. "Perhaps it is because we have tests about
every two weeks, and not just in January and June," she suggested.
She did not seem disposed to investigate further the subject of her
mother's and my school-days. In a few moments she ran off to her play.
When she was quite out of hearing her mother burst into a hearty laugh.
"Poor child!" she exclaimed. "She thinks we and our school were very
curious. I wonder why," she continued more seriously, "we did take
examinations, and lessons, too, so weightily. Children don't in these
days. The school-days of the week are so full of holiday spirit for them
that, actually, Saturday is not much of gala day. Think of what Saturday
was to _us_! What glorious times we had! Why, Saturday was _Saturday_,
to us! Do you remember the things we did? You wrote poems and I painted
pictures, and we read stories, and 'acted' them. Then, we had our
gardens in the spring, and our experiments in cake-baking in the winter.
My girls do none of these things on Saturday. The day is not to them
what it was to us. I wonder what makes the difference."
[Illustration: THEY PAINT PICTURES AS A REGULAR PART OF THEIR SCHOOL
ROUTINE]
I had often wondered; but these reflections of my old schoolmate gave me
an inkling of what the main difference is. To us, school had been a
place in which we learned lessons from books--books of arithmetic, books
of grammar, or other purely academic books. For five days of the week
our childish minds were held to our lessons; and our lessons, without
exception, dealt with technicalities--parts of speech, laws of
mathematics, facts of history, definitions of the terms of geography.
Small marvel that Saturday was a gala day to us. It was the one "week
day" when we might be unacademic!
But children of the present time have no such need of Saturday. They
write poems, and paint pictures, and read stories, and "act" them, and
plant gardens, and even bake cake, as regular parts of their school
routine. The schools are no longer solely, or even predominantly,
academic. As for technicalities, where are they in the schools of to-
day? As far in the background as the teachers can keep them. Children do
not study grammar now; they are given "language work." It entails none
of the memorizing of "rules," "exceptions," and "cautions" that the
former study of grammar required. History would seem to be learned
without that sometime laying hold of "dates." Geography has ceased to be
a matter of the "bounding" of states and the learning of the capitals of
the various countries; it has become the "story of the earth." And
arithmetic--it is "number work" now, and is all but taught without the
multiplication tables. How could Saturday be to the children of to-day
what it was to the children of yesterday?
My old schoolmate's little girl had spoken of "tests." In my school-days
we called such minor weekly or fortnightly matters as these, "reviews."
We regarded them quite as lightly as my small friend looked upon her
"tests." Examinations--they were different, indeed. Twice a year we were
expected to stretch our short memories until they neatly covered a
series of examination papers, each composed of twenty questions,
relating to fully sixteen weeks' accumulation of accurate data on the
several subjects--fortunately few--we had so academically been studying.
It is little wonder that children of the present day are not called upon
to "take" such examinations; not only the manner of their teaching, but
the great quantity of subjects taught, make "tests" of frequent
occurrence the only practicable examinations.
"Children of the present time learn about so many things!" sighed a
middle-aged friend of mine after a visit to the school which her small
granddaughter attended. "What an array of subjects are brought to their
notice, from love of country to domestic science! How do their young
minds hold it?"
I am rather inclined to think that their young minds hold it very much
as young minds of one, two, or three generations ago held it. After all,
what subjects are brought to the notice of present-day children that
were not called to the attention of children of former times? The
difference would seem to be, not that the children of to-day learn about
more things than did the children of yesterday, but that they learn
about more things in school. Love of country--were we not all taught
that by our fathers as early and as well as the children are taught it
to-day by their teachers? And domestic science--did not mothers teach
that, not only to their girls, but to their boys also, with a degree of
thoroughness not surpassed even by that of the best of modern domestic
science teachers? The subjects to be brought to the notice of children
appear to be so fixed; the things to be learned by them seem to be so
slightly alterable! It is only the place of instruction that has
shifted. Such a quantity of things once taught entirely at home are now
taught partly at school.
It is the fashion, I know, to deplore this. "How dreadful it is," we
hear many a person exclaim, "that things that used to be told a child
alone at its mother's knee are now told whole roomfuls of children
together in school!"
Certainly it would be "dreadful" should the fact that children are
taught anything in school become a reason to parents for ceasing to
teach them that same thing at home. So long as this does not happen,
ought we not to rejoice that children are given the opportunity of
hearing in company from their teachers what they have already heard
separately from their fathers and mothers? A boy or a girl who has heard
from a father or a mother, in intimate personal talk, of the beauty of
truth, the beauty of purity, the beauty of kindness, is fortified in an
endeavor to hold fast to these things by hearing a teacher speak of them
in a public, impersonal way.
Indeed, is not this unity between the home and the school the great and
unique fact in the education of the children of the present time? They
are taught at home, as children always have been, and doubtless always
will be, an "array of subjects"; and they are taught at school, as
children perhaps never before were, other aspects of very nearly all the
matters touched upon in that "array." My old schoolmate said that
Saturday had lost the glory it wore in her school-days and mine; but it
seems to me that what has actually occurred is that the five school-days
of the week have taken on the same glory. The joys we had only on
Saturday children have now on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
Friday, _and_ Saturday!
It is inevitable, I suppose, that they should handle our old delights
with rather a professional grasp. One day recently a little girl, a new
acquaintance, came to see me. I brought out various toys, left over from
my childhood, for her amusement--a doll, with the trunk that still
contained her wardrobe; an autograph album, with "verses" and sketches
in it; and a "joining map," such as the brother of Rosamond of the
Purple Jar owned.
[Illustration: THEY DO SO MANY THINGS!]
My small caller occupied herself with these for a flattering length of
time, then she said: "You played with these--what else did you play
with?"
"I made paper-boats," I replied; "and sailed them. I will show you how,"
I added.
She watched me with interest while I folded and refolded a sheet of
writing-paper until it became a boat.
"There!" I said, handing it to her.
"Have you any more, paper you can spare?" she questioned.
"Of course," I said. "Should you like me to make you more boats?"
"I'll make some things for _you_" she remarked, "if you will let me have
the paper."
I offered her the freedom of the writing-paper drawer; and, while I
looked on, she folded and refolded with a practiced hand, until the
table beside us was covered, not only with boats compared with which
mine was as a dory to an ocean liner, but also with a score of other
pretty and somewhat intricate paper toys.
"Who taught you to make all these lovely things?" I asked.
"My teacher," answered the small girl. "We all do it, in my room at
school, every Friday."
They do so many things! Their grown-up friends are hard put to it to
find anything novel to do with, or for, them. Not long ago a little boy
friend of mine was ill with scarlet fever. His "case" was so light that
the main problem attached to it was that of providing occupation for the
child during the six weeks of quarantine in one room. Remembering the
pleasure I had taken as a child in planting seeds on cotton in a glass
of water and watching them grow at a rate almost equal to that of Jack's
beanstalk, I made a similar "little garden" and sent it to the small
boy.
"It was lots of fun, having it," he said, when, quite well, he came to
see me. "It grew so fast--faster than the others."
"What others?" I queried.
"At school," he explained. "We have them at school; and they grow fast,
but the one you gave me grew faster. Was that because it was in a little
glass instead of a big bowl?"
I could not tell him. We had not had them at school in my school-days in
a big bowl. They had been out-of-school incidents, cultivated only in
little glasses.
They have so many things at school, the children of to-day! If many of
these things have been taken from the home, they have only been taken
that they may, as it were, be carried back and forth between the home
and the school.
I have a friend, the mother of an only child, a boy of eight. Her
husband's work requires that the family live in a section of the city
largely populated by immigrants. The one school in the vicinity is a
large public school. When my friend's little boy reached the "school
age," he, perforce, was entered at this school.
"You are an American," his father said to him the day before school
opened; "not a foreigner, like almost every child you will find at
school. Remember that."
"He doesn't understand what you mean when you talk to him about being an
American," the boy's mother said the next morning as we all watched the
child run across the street to the school. "How could he, living among
foreigners?"
One day, about two months later, the small boy's birthday being near at
hand, his father said to him, "If some one were planning to give you
something, what should you choose to have it?"
"A flag," the boy said instantly; "an American flag! _Our_ flag!"
"Why?" the father asked, almost involuntarily.
"To salute," the child replied. "I've learned how in school--what to say
and what to do. Americans do it when they love their country--like you
told me to," he added, eagerly. "Our teacher says so. She's taught us
all how to salute the flag. I told her I was an American, not a
foreigner like the other children. And she said they could be Americans,
too, if they wanted to learn how. So they are going to."
The small boy got his flag. The patriotism taught at home and the
patriotism taught at school, diverse at other points, met and mingled at
that one most fundamental point.
In former days children did not quote their teachers much at home, nor
their parents much at school. They do both in these days; occasionally
with comic results. A little girl of my acquaintance whose first year at
school began less than a month ago has, I observed only yesterday,
seemed to learn as her introductory lesson to pronounce the words
"either" and "neither" quite unmistakably "[=a]ther" and "n[=a]ther."
"This is an amazing innovation," I said to her mother. "How did she ever
happen to think of it?"
"Ask her," said her mother plaintively.
I did inquire of the little girl. "Whom have you heard say '[=a]ther'
and 'n[=a]ther'?"
"Nobody," she unexpectedly answered.
"Then how did you learn to say it?"
"Uncle Billy told me to--"
This uncle is an instructor of English in one of our most famous
colleges. "My _dear_ child," I protested, "you must have misunderstood
him!"
"Oh, no," she affirmed earnestly. "You see, papa and mamma say 'eether'
and 'neether,' and my school-teacher says 'eyether' and 'nyether.' I
told papa and mamma, and they said to say them the way my teacher did;
and I told my teacher, and she said to say them the way papa and mamma
did! I couldn't say them two ways at once; and I didn't know which one
way to say them. So Uncle Billy told me, if _he_ were doing it, _he_
wouldn't worry about it; _he_ would say them '[=a]ther' and
'n[=a]ther'!"
She is a very little girl, only seven; and she has not yet rounded out
her first month of school. I suppose before she has been in school a
full term she will have discovered the impracticability of her uncle's
method of settling the vexed question as to the pronunciation of
"either" and "neither." Very likely she will decide to say them
"eyether" and "nyether," as her teacher does.
It takes the children so short a time to elevate the teacher to the rank
of final arbiter in their intellectual world. So soon, they follow her
footsteps in preference to any others along the ways of education. Not
only do they pronounce words as she pronounces them; in so far as they
are able, they define words as she defines them. In due course, they are
a bit fearful of any knowledge obtained otherwise than as she teaches
them to obtain it. Is there one of us who has attempted to help a child
with "home lessons" who has not been obliged to reckon with this fact?
Have we not worked out a problem in "bank discount," for instance, for a
perplexed youthful mathematician, only to be told, hesitatingly, "Ye-es,
you have got the right answer, but that isn't the way my teacher does
bank discount. Don't you know how to do it as she does?" Or, with a
young Latin "beginner" in the house, have we not tried to bring order
out of chaos with respect to the "Bellum Gallicum" by translating, "All
Gaul is divided into three parts," to be at once interrupted by, "Our
teacher translates that, 'Gaul is, _as a whole_, divided into three
parts.'" If we would assist the children of our immediate circles at all
with their "home lessons," we must do it exactly after the manner and
method ordained by their teachers.
This condition of things ought not to be displeasing to us, for the
reason that, in the main, we have ourselves brought it to pass. The
children, during their first days at school, are loyally ready to force
the views of their fathers and their mothers, and their uncles and
aunts, upon their teachers; and their teachers are tactfully ready to
effect a compromise with them. But, before very long, our reiterated,
"Your teacher knows; do as she says," has its effect. The teacher
becomes the child's touchstone in relation to a considerable number of
the "array of subjects" taught in a present-day school. School-teachers
in America prepare themselves so carefully for their duties, train
themselves to such a high order of skill in their performance, it is but
just that those of us who are not teachers should abdicate in their
favor.
However, since we are all very apt to be in entire accord with the
children's teachers in all really vital matters, our position of second
place in the minds of the boys and girls with regard to the ways of
doing "bank discount" or translating "_Gallia est omnes divisa in partes
tres_" is of small account. At least, we have a fuller knowledge of
their own relations with these mathematical and Latinic things than our
grandparents had of our parents' lessons. And the children's teachers
know more about our relations to the subjects taught than the teachers
of our fathers and mothers knew respecting the attitudes of our
grandfathers and grandmothers toward the curriculum of that earlier
time. For the children of to-day, unlike the children of a former time,
talk at home about school and talk at school about home. Almost
unconsciously, this effects an increasingly cooperative union between
home and school.
"We are learning 'Paul Revere's Ride,' in school," I heard a small girl
who lives in Boston say recently to her mother.
"Are you, darling?" the mother replied. "Then, shouldn't you like to go
some Saturday and see the church where the lanterns were hung?"
So much did the child think she would like to go that her mother took
her the next Saturday.
"You saw the very steeple at which Paul Revere looked that night for the
lanterns!" I said, when, somewhat later, I happened to be again at that
child's home.
"Twice," she replied. "I told my teacher that mother had taken me, so
she took all of us in my room at school on the next Saturday."
Perhaps the most significant influence of the American home upon the
American school is to be found in the regular setting apart of an hour
of the school-day once, or twice, or even three times a week, as a story
hour; and the filling of that hour with the stories, read or told, that
in earlier times children never so much as heard mentioned at school by
their teachers. It is indeed a pleasant thought that in school-rooms
throughout the land boys and girls are hearing about the Argonauts, and
the Knights of the Round Table, and the Crusaders; to say nothing of
such famous personages in the story world as Cinderella, and the
Sleeping Beauty, and Hop-O'-My-Thumb. The home story hour is no less
dear because there is a school story hour too.
The other afternoon I stopped in during the story hour to visit a room
in the school of my neighborhood. The teacher told the story of Pandora
and the tale of Theseus and the Minotaur. A small friend of mine is a
member of the "grade" which occupies that room. At the end of the
session she walked home with me.
"Tell me a story?" she asked, when, sitting cozily by the fire, we were
having tea.
"What one should you like?" I inquired. "The story of Clytie, perhaps,
or--"
"I'd like to hear the one about Pandora--"
"But you have just heard it at school!" I exclaimed.
"I know," she said; "but I'd like to hear you tell it."
When I had told it, she begged me to tell another. Again I suggested
various tales in my repertory. But she refused them all. "Tell about the
man, and the dragon, and the ball of string, and the lady--" she began.
And once more when I interposed, reminding her that she had just heard
it, she once more said, "Yes; but I'd like to hear it again."
Some of the children whom I have in mind as I write go to private
schools and some of them go to public schools. It has not seemed to me
that the results obtained by the one type of school are discernibly
different from those produced by the other. In the private school there
are fewer pupils than in the public school; and they are more nearly
alike from the point of view of their parents' material wealth than are
the pupils in a public school. They are also "Americans," and not
"foreigners," as are so many of the children in city public schools, and
even in the public schools of many suburbs and villages. Possibly owing
to their smaller numbers, they receive more individual attention than
the pupils of the public school; but, so far as my rather extensive and
intimate acquaintance with children qualifies me to judge, they learn
the same lessons, and learn them with equal thoroughness. We hear a
great deal about the differences between public and private schools, and
certainly there are differences; but the pupils of the public and the
private schools are very much alike. It is considerably easier to
distinguish a public from a private school than it is to tell a public-
school child from a private-school child.
[Illustration: THEY HAVE SO MANY THINGS!]
There are many arraignments of our American schools, whether public or
private; and there are many persons who shake their heads over our
American school-children. "The schools are mere drilling-places," we
hear, "where the children are all put through the same steps." And the
children--what do we hear said of them? "They do not work at their
lessons as children of one, two, or three generations ago did," is the
cry; "school is made so pleasant for them!"
Unquestionably our American schools and our American school-children
have their faults. We must try to amend both. Meanwhile, shall we not be
grateful that the "steps" through which the children are put are such
excellent ones; and shall we not rejoice that school is made so
"pleasant" for the boys and girls that, unlike the children of one, two,
or three generations ago, they like to go to school?
V