The American Child Part 9

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 const.i.tuted 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, Sat.u.r.day is not much of gala day. Think of what Sat.u.r.day was to _us_! What glorious times we had! Why, Sat.u.r.day was _Sat.u.r.day_, 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 Sat.u.r.day. The day is not to them what it was to us. I wonder what makes the difference."

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Sat.u.r.day. 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 Sat.u.r.day 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' acc.u.mulation 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 quant.i.ty 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 surpa.s.sed 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 quant.i.ty 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Sat.u.r.day children have now on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, _and_ Sat.u.r.day!

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 amus.e.m.e.nt--a doll, with the trunk that still contained her wardrobe; an autograph alb.u.m, with "verses" and sketches in it; and a "joining map," such as the brother of Rosamond of the Purple Jar owned.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 gla.s.s 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.