The American Child Part 7

The school-teacher arrived late in the afternoon. My landlady was "expecting" her; so was I, no less eagerly.

"Why were you interested in me?" she inquired, when, on further acquaintance, I confessed this to her.

"Because, with a training that fits you for work in a carefully graded school or a college, you chose to teach here. Why did you?"

"For three reasons," she answered. "Country life is better for my health than city life; the people around here are thoroughly awake to the importance of education; and the children--they are such dears! You must see them when school opens."

I did see them then. Also, I saw them before that time. When the news of their teacher's arrival reached them, they came "by two, and threes, and fuller companies" to welcome her. They ranged in age from a boy and a girl of fifteen to two little girls of six. Each and every one was rapturously glad to see the teacher; they all brought her small gifts, and all of them bore messages from their homes, comprising a score of invitations to supper, the loan of a tent for the remainder of the mild weather, and the offer of a "lift" to and from school on stormy days.

The teacher accepted these tributes as a matter of course. She was genuinely glad to see her old pupils. In her turn, she sent messages to their several homes, and gave into the children's hands tokens she had purposely gathered together for them. "We'll meet on Monday at the school-house," she finally said; and the children, instantly responding to the implied suggestion, bade her good-bye, and went running down the dusty road. Each one of them lived at least a mile away; many of them more than two miles.

On Monday I accompanied the teacher to school. The school-house was a small, one-roomed, wooden building. It contained little besides a few rows of desks and benches for the children, two or three maps, and blackboards, a tiny closet filled with worn books, the teacher's desk, and a coal stove. But it had windows on three sides, and was set down in the midst of a gra.s.sy meadow bordered with a stone wall.

There were fourteen pupils. They were all a.s.sembled in the school-yard when we arrived. The boys were playing baseball, and the girls, perched on the stone wall, were watching them. The moment they saw the teacher boys and girls alike came to escort her to her place in the school- house. When she was in it, they took their own places--those they had occupied during the former term. There was one "new" pupil, a small boy.

He had been so frequently a "visiting scholar" the previous year that his newness was not very patent. There was a desk that he also claimed as his.

"We will sing 'America,'" were the words with which the teacher commenced the new school year, "and then we will go on with our work, beginning where we left off in the spring."

We hear a great deal at the present time concerning the education of the "particular child." In the very best of our private schools in the city each pupil is regarded as a separate and distinct individual, and taught as such. This ideal condition of things prevailed in that little district school in the farming region of New Hampshire. That teacher had fourteen pupils; practically, she had fourteen "grades." Even when it happened that two children were taught the same lesson, each one was taught it individually.

"They are all so different!" the teacher said, when I commented upon the difference of her methods with the various children. "That boy, who hopes to go to college and then teach, needs to get one thing from his history lesson; and that girl, who intends to be a post-office clerk as soon as she finishes school, needs to get something else."

She did not aim to prepare her pupils for college. The district school was only a "grammar school." There was a high school in the nearest village, which was three miles away; she made her pupils ready for entrance into that. In order to attend the high school, more than one child in that neighborhood, year after year, in sunshine and storm, walked two and three miles twice daily. Many a child who lived still farther away was provided by an interested father with a horse and a conveyance with which to make the two journeys a day. No wonder the teacher of that district school felt that the people in the neighborhood were "thoroughly awake to the importance of education"!

As for the children--she had said that they were "such dears!" They were. I remember, in particular, two; a brother and sister. She was eight years old, and he was nine. They were inseparable companions. On bright days they ran to school hand in hand. When it rained, they trudged along the muddy road under one umbrella.

The school-teacher had taught the little girl George Eliot's poem "Brother and Sister." She could repeat it word for word, excepting the line, "I held him wise." She always said that, "I hold him tight." This "piece" the small girl "spoke" on a Friday afternoon. The most winning part of her altogether lovely recitation was the smile with which she glanced at her brother as she announced its t.i.tle. He returned her smile; when she finished her performance, he led the applause.

Before the end of my visit I became very intimate with that brother and sister. I chanced to be investigating the subject of "juvenile books."

"What books have you?" I inquired of the little girl.

"Ever so many of all kinds," she replied. "Come to our house and look at them," she added cordially.

Their house proved to be the near-by farm. One of the best in that section, it was heated with steam and furnished with running water and plumbing. It had also a local and long-distance telephone. The brother and sister were but two of a family of seven children. Their father, who was a member of the school committee, and their mother, who was a graduate of a city high school, were keenly interested in, and, moreover, very well informed on, the subject of pedagogy. They had read a great number of books relating to it, and were in the habit of following in the newspapers the procedures of the National Education a.s.sociation's Conventions.

"Your children have a large number of exceedingly good books!" I exclaimed, as I looked at the many volumes on a day appointed for that purpose by the mother of the family. "I wish all children had as fine a collection!"

"Country children _must_ have books," she replied, "if they are going to be educated _at all._ City children can _see_ things, and learn about them that way. Country children have to read about them if they are to know about them."

The books were of many types--poetry, fiction, historical stories, nature study, and several volumes of the "how to make" variety. All of these were of the best of their several kinds--identical with the books found in the "Children's Room" in any well-selected public library. Some of them had been gifts to the children from "summer boarders," but the majority had been chosen and purchased by their parents.

"We hunt up the names of good books for children in the book review departments of the magazines," the mother said.

When I asked what magazines, she mentioned three. Two she and her husband "took"; the other she borrowed monthly from a neighbor, on an "exchange" basis.

No other children in that region were so abundantly supplied with books; but all whom I met liked to read. Their parents, in most cases unable to give them numerous books, had, in almost every instance, taught them to love reading.

One boy with whom I became friends had a birthday while I was in the neighborhood. I had heard him express a longing to read "The Lays of Ancient Rome," which neither he nor any other child in the vicinity possessed, so I presented him with a copy of it.

"Would you mind if I gave it to the library?" he asked. "Then the other children around could read it, too."

"The library!" I exclaimed.

"Oh, I don't mean the one down in the village," he hastened to explain.

"I mean the one here, near us. Haven't you been to it?"

When he found that I had not, he offered to go with me to see it. It turned out to be a "lean-to" in a farmhouse that was in a rather central position with relation to the surrounding farms. The library consisted of about two hundred volumes. The librarian was an elderly woman who lived in the house. One was allowed, she told me, to take out as many books as one wished, and to keep them until one had finished reading them.

"Do you want to take out any?" she inquired.

After examining the four or five shelves that comprised the library, I wanted to take out at least fifty. The books, especially the "juvenile books," were those of a former generation. Foremost among them were the "Rollo Books," "Sandford and Merton," Mary Howitt's "Story-Book," and "The Parents' a.s.sistant."

"Who selected the books?" I asked.

"n.o.body exactly _selected_ them," the librarian said. "Every one around here gave a few from their collections, so's we could have a near-to library--princ.i.p.ally on account of the children. I live most convenient to every one hereabouts; so I had shelves put up in my lean-to for them."

News travels very rapidly indeed in the country. My boy friend told some of the other children that I was reading the _oldest_ books in the library. "She takes them out by the armfuls," I overheard him remark.

No doubt he made more comments that I did not overhear; for one morning a small girl called to see me, and, after a few preliminaries, said, "If you are through with 'The Fairchild Family,' may I have it? You like it awfully much, don't you?"

Not only in the secular teaching of their children do thoughtful country parents, in common with careful fathers and mothers living elsewhere, try to obtain the best means and to use them to the best ends; in the religious instruction of their children they make a similar attempt.

They are not content to let their children learn entirely at home, to depend solely upon parental guidance. The church, and even the Sunday school, are integral parts in the up-bringing of the most happily situated country children. The little white meeting-houses in the small rural villages are familiar places to the country child--joyously familiar places, at that. The only weekly outing that falls to the lot of the younger children of country parents is the Sunday trip to church and Sunday school.

What do they get from it? Undoubtedly, very much what city children receive from the church and the Sunday school--in quant.i.ty and in quality. There is a constant pleasure from the singing; an occasional glimmer of illumination from the sermon; and an unfailing delight from the Bible stories. We can be reasonably sure that _all_ children get thus much from the habitual church and Sunday-school attendance. Some, irrespective of city or country environment, glean more.

A small country boy of my acquaintance brought from Sunday school one of the most unique versions of a Scriptural pa.s.sage with which I have ever met. "Did you go to church this morning?" I inquired of him, one Sunday afternoon, when, catching a glimpse of me under the trees near his home, he came, as he explained, to "pa.s.s the time of day" with me.

"Yes," he answered; "and I went to Sunday school, too."

"And what was your lesson about?" I asked.

"Oh, about the roses--"

"Roses?" I interrupted, in surprise.

"Yes," the little boy went on; "the roses--you know--in the gardens."

"I don't remember any Sunday-school lesson about them," I said.

"But there _is_ one; we had it to-day. The roses, they made the children have good manners. Then, one day, the children were greedy; and their manners were bad. Don't you know about it?" he added anxiously.

He was but five years old. I told him about Moses; I explained painstakingly just who the Children of Israel were; and I did my best to point out clearly the difference between manna and manners. He listened with seeming understanding; but the next day, coming upon me as I was fastening a "crimson rambler" to its trellis, he inquired solemnly, "Can the roses make children have good manners, _yet_?"

Country children are taught, even as sedulously as city children, the importance of good manners! On the farm, as elsewhere, the small left hand is seized in time by a mother or an aunt with the well-worn words, "Shake hands with the _right_ hand, dear." "If you please," as promptly does an elder sister supplement the little child's "Yes," on the occasion of an offer of candy from a grown-up friend. The proportion of small boys who make their bows and of little girls who drop their courtesies is much the same in the country as it is in the city.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A SMALL COUNTRY BOY]