The New Education Part 16

The struggle of Oyler is the story of a man, a delivered message, a thriving, enthusiastic school and a reborn neighborhood. Many years ago--about twenty to be exact--a young man named Voorhes was made first a.s.sistant in a West End school. Like other young men who go into school work he applied himself earnestly to his tasks, but unlike most of them he did some hard thinking at the same time. Among other things he thought about the relation between the school and the community, wondering why the two were so completely divorced from one another. Then the problem was focused on one concrete example--a boy named John, nearly sixteen years old, who had succeeded in getting only as far as the eighth grade. John, who had never taken kindly to language or grammar, began thinking pretty seriously toward the end of his last year in the grammar school. He tried, he struggled, but the syntax was too much for him. After all, it was not his fault, and he complained bitterly against a punishment in the form of "leaving down" for something which he could not help. His training was so inadequate that he was entirely unable to pa.s.s the high school examinations which, in those days, were like the laws of the Medes and the Persians.

"I am safe in saying that he did not know the difference between a verb and a preposition," said Mr. Voorhes, "but during the grammar lesson he could make a drawing of the face of the teacher that was in no sense a caricature. This phase of his ability gave me a cue to what might be done for him. Knowing both the superintendent and the princ.i.p.al of the Technical School, I talked the situation over with them, begging them, with all the persuasive power at my command, to take the boy, forgetting his shortcomings, and magnifying his peculiar talents, which I felt sure were considerable along mechanical lines. They acceded to my request, giving John a place in the school, to which he walked three miles back and forth daily for three years. For many years John has been superintendent of the lighting plant of a large city, and his experience has always stood out before me as a terrible rebuke to the then dominant educational regime, which could offer John nothing but a sneer. These facts took such a vital hold on me, seeming to reinforce so fully the thought that the industrial abilities which I had acquired back on the farm proved of incalculable value to me, that the resolution to promote industrial education became a fixed part of my educational creed. The memory of that lesson in educational equity kept the need for industrial training constantly in my mind, till I had opportunity to give it expression in the Oyler School."

John bespoke the needs of the community by which Oyler was surrounded.

It was so different from other communities. There were the ugly straggling factory buildings, the miserable homes, their squalid tenants, and worst of all there were the rough, boisterous, over-age, uninterested, incorrigible boys and girls, who flitted from school to home, to street, to jail, and then, gripped by the infirm hand of the law, in the form of a Juvenile Court probation officer, or a truant officer, they came back to school unwillingly enough to begin the cycle all over again.

"As for discipline," remarked one of the city school officials, "the school hadn't known it for years, the probation officer couldn't keep the children in school and the Juvenile Court couldn't keep them out of jail. Even the majesty of the law is lost on children, you know." The children taunted the police; the police hated the children; the home repelled; the factory called, grimly; child labor flourished, and the school despaired.

II An Appeal for Applied Education

Such were the conditions when Mr. Voorhes became school princ.i.p.al.

Grinding factories, wretched homes, parental ignorance, social neglect, educational impotence--few men could enter such a field of battle with a light heart, but Mr. Voorhes did.

What, think you, was his first move? He addressed to the heads of all of the factories in the neighborhood a letter, suggesting the establishment of a manual training department in connection with the grade work of the Oyler School. "As I become more and more familiar with existing conditions in our school district," he wrote, "I am convinced that a Manual Training Department would be of vital importance to the school and to the general welfare of the community. Such departments are being looked upon to-day as necessary adjuncts to modern school equipment.

"Our school is being drained constantly of its life force by the adjacent factory demands, and if we could send pupils forth with trained hands as well as trained minds they could render a much more useful service, which, in time, would not only show itself in more profitable returns to employers, but must also tend toward a higher standard of culture in the neighborhood, and a longer continuance in school by our pupils.

"I know of no other section of the city where the actual need should make a stronger appeal for support than here. Anything you may do will be greatly appreciated."

"You can imagine my surprise," says Mr. Voorhes, "when during the next few days my mail brought me a hearty response of checks and pledges amounting to nearly a thousand dollars." Manual training was a.s.sured!

No! Not yet. The Board of Education reached the conclusion that manual training in the grades was undesirable. "With the exception of $85 which I was told to use as I saw fit the checks and pledges were alike returned to the donors. That $85 gave a piano to our kindergarten."

That failure back in 1903 was the seed-ground of later success. The community was interested to the extent of a thousand dollars at least.

The manufacturers were not only interested in education, but were willing to support it financially. There was a change of administration.

Mr. F. B. Dyer became Superintendent of Schools and at once met the situation by establishing a manual training center in the Oyler School.

III Solving a Local Problem

The end was not yet, however. The truant officers and the Juvenile Court were still busy keeping Oyler children out of mischief and in school.

The conventional type of manual training--one period per week in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades--was not holding the pupils.

"The children were not getting enough manual work to establish either habit or efficiency," Mr. Voorhes comments, "besides, this work reached only to the sixth grade. At this time there were in the school fifty boys and girls below the fifth grade who were from two to five years behind their normal cla.s.ses. That is to say, they were--most of them--of that unfortunate cla.s.s that has seen more trouble in a few years than most of us see in a lifetime. I was constantly asking myself: 'Where do these folks come in?' 'What is our school doing to help their function in life?' 'Are we really of any a.s.sistance to them after all?' 'Is it worth their while to come to our school?' My sympathy for the pupils was constantly growing, and I went at last in desperation to the superintendent with a plan for a revolution in the organization of my school, a revolution that I was sure would meet the needs of the community and one upon which I was willing to stake my reputation if I had any."

At this point it is worth remembering, parenthetically, that Cincinnati school men have a habit of going about their school problems in very much that spirit, beginning by sizing up the needs of the community, continuing by becoming imbued with an idea of the community needs and ending by presenting this idea to the school authorities and getting--within bounds--carte blanche to make their schools serve the locality in which they are situated.

This was Mr. Voorhes's experience. He was told to go ahead and make good--a permission of which he availed himself in an astoundingly short s.p.a.ce of time by introducing a system of applied education, aimed to meet the needs of the children who attended the Oyler School.

"There is a peculiar situation," said Mr. Dyer, "and it needs peculiar handling. You have only one problem to solve--that of the west end. Go ahead!" Mr. Voorhes did go ahead with a plan under which all children in the sixth and seventh grades were given three periods a week in laboratories and shops. Subnormal pupils in the third, fourth and fifth grades were to have four and one-half hours (one school day) for applied work each week. In order to give special help to backward pupils they were sent in small groups to the seventh and eighth grade teachers while their cla.s.ses were doing applied work. Below-grade children go to the eighth grade teacher for special work in arithmetic and geography, and the seventh grade teacher for English and history. In this way the backward children from the lower grades have special training by the best equipped teachers in the school.

The eighth grade pupils give one-fifth of their time to applied work.

During the year the boys have, in addition to the shop-work, twenty lessons in preparing and cooking plain, substantial meals. To make this "siss" work palatable to the sterner s.e.x much of it takes the form of instruction in camp life--cooking in tin cans and other handy home-made devices. In a community where boys have always been trained to regard home work as menial, but where the absence of servants makes a "lift"

from the husband or brother such a G.o.dsend to the wife at odd times, the value of giving grade boys a taste for cooking can hardly be over-estimated.

The boys also receive twenty lessons in the simpler forms of sewing--darning, hemming, sewing on b.u.t.tons. At the same time the girls are taught the use of simple tools.

IV Domestic Science Which Domesticates

Beginning with the second grade the girls have domestic science while the boys are at manual training. This domestic science has a truer ring to it than most of the teaching which pa.s.ses under that name. The children at Oyler have a peculiar need for domestic science, because in many of the homes mother works out, and even when she is not away her knowledge of domestic arts is so rudimentary that she can impart little to her daughters. So it comes about that the Oyler School seeks to teach the girls all that they would have under intelligent direction in a normal home.

Once each week they cook and once they sew, devoting from one-eighth to one-fifth of their entire time to these activities. By way of preparation for both cooking and sewing they are carefully trained in buying. They must make the dollar go a long way--buying in season the things cheapest at that time and preparing them in a way to yield the maximum of return. For example, they are called upon in January to buy a 50 cent dinner for six persons. Laura Wickersham's cost list is:

Soup meat $0.20 Can of tomatoes .10 Spaghetti .05 Cheese .05 Bread .05 b.u.t.ter, etc. .08 ---- $0.53

Gus Potts, a mere boy, makes this suggestion:

Meat $0.20 Potatoes .05 Cabbage .05 Bread .05 Milk .04 b.u.t.ter .05 Coffee .05 ---- $0.49

In their cooking laboratory they learn to cook simple foods, one thing at a time, until they reach the upper grades, where they must prepare entire meals on limited allowances.

The sewing is equally practical. The girls learn to patch, darn, hem and make underclothing and dresses. Then, going into homes where no intelligent needlework has ever been done--where frequently a darning needle is unknown--they teach the mother and older sisters how to sew, until whole families, under the influence of one school child, improve their wardrobe and reduce their cost for clothing. Certain sewing days in school, called darning days, are sacred to the renovation of worn-out garments which the girls bring from home.

The Oyler system may not turn out artists in dress design--it has no such aim. The children who come to its cla.s.s-rooms are ignorant of the simplest devices known to civilization for the making of comfortable homes. The domestic science courses are organized to take care of their children by teaching them to be intelligent home-makers.

V Making Commercial Products in the Grades

No less practical is the work of the boys in the shops, since the great majority of them will enter factories. The shop-work is designed to familiarize them with the ideas underlying shop practice. Instead of making useless joints and surfaces the boys turn out finished, marketable products. The eighth grade boys, with the aid of the instructor, have built a drill-press from the sc.r.a.ps of machinery which were found lying about. Now they are at work on an engine. Elaborate products you will say, for eighth grade boys, yet these boys are likely interested, they do their task with zest, and linger about the shop after school hours are over--anxious to complete the jobs which the day's work has begun.

Boys in grades two to six made three dozen hammer handles for use in the high school machine shops. Of forty-two pieces of rough stock there were produced thirty-six handles, a record which some commercial shops might envy. These same boys made a book and magazine rack, of rather elaborate design, and an umbrella rack for each of the schools in Cincinnati.

These racks, displayed in the offices of the various princ.i.p.als, would stand comparison with a high grade factory product. The boys are now engaged in making a desk book-rack (a scroll saw exercise) for every school teacher in Cincinnati. When they have finished there will be more than a thousand.

Besides these routine cla.s.s exercises the Oyler boys are privileged to make anything which appeals to them and for which they can supply the material. The school machines are theirs, subject to their use at any time. Taking advantage of this, the boys sharpen the home knives and hatchets, make axe handles, umbrella racks, hall stands, stools, sleds, cane chairs, and repair or make any product which fancy or home necessity may dictate.

VI A Real Interest in School

Let no one infer that the academic branches are neglected at Oyler. Far from it, they are taught with consummate skill by a corps of teachers who enjoy the work because they find the children interested. Strange to relate, an interest in school came in at the front door with Mr.

Voorhes' new plan for applied education. The wild boys and dishevelled girls of the West End, who had erstwhile hated school, came now to partic.i.p.ate in school activities with an interest seldom surpa.s.sed in public or private schools.

"You see," Mr. Voorhes remarked, "a day a week in the shop or laboratories is just about enough to keep down the high spirits of the older ones, and at the same time give them an applied education of which they feel the value. That one day of practical work did the trick. It made the other four days of academic work taste just as good as pie."

Mr. Voorhes' plan arrived. It won the interest of the children and later with the a.s.sistance of the Mothers' Club and the kindergarten it won the sympathy of the community.

VII The Mothers' Club

Like all of the other school centers in Cincinnati, Oyler has a kindergarten and a Mothers' Club, around which the change in community feeling has centered, until Mr. Voorhes describes them as "the most important influence that ever came into our school." Yet the kindergarten here, as elsewhere, has had a life and death grapple for existence. In the West End, dominated by its conservative, German atmosphere, the pleas for kindergartens fell on deaf ears. At last, after much preparation, a meeting of mothers and children was held for the purpose of forming an organization; at the meeting there were thirteen children and five mothers, and all antagonistic, or at best suspicious.

"I went around and played with every one of those children," said Mr.

Voorhes, "talking to the mothers, and trying to persuade them that this was not failure, but merely the forerunner of success. The next day I went into every grade, saying to the children:

"'What was the matter? Mother did not come to the Mothers' Meeting yesterday.'

"'Oh, she couldn't leave the baby.'

"'Leave the baby! Why, of course not. No one expected her to leave the baby. Tell her to come and bring the baby along.'"