The American Child Part 10

"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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.ses.

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 p.r.o.nounce 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'?"

"n.o.body," 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 p.r.o.nunciation 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 p.r.o.nounce words as she p.r.o.nounces 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 Gallic.u.m" 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 a.s.sist 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 pa.s.s. 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 att.i.tudes 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Sat.u.r.day.

"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 Sat.u.r.day."

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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

THE CHILD IN THE LIBRARY