Vocational Guidance for Girls Part 8

The grammar-school girls of Leominster, Ma.s.sachusetts, serve luncheon to a limited number every day at their domestic science house. Here the girls do the marketing, cook and serve the meal, and keep the various rooms of the house in order. In Montclair, New Jersey, work of this same sort is done. In each of these cases the cooking is done as it would have to be in the home, not for one person, nor for hundreds, but for approximately a family-sized group.

Sewing courses also grow more and more practical. In some schools the girls make their own graduating dresses as a final test of their ability. Courses are definite, and girls completing them will have definite knowledge of everyday processes of hand sewing. The schools which add to their hand-sewing courses well-planned practice in the use of the sewing machine are further adding to the accomplishment of their girls. Those which go farther still and teach garment planning and making may consider their sewing courses fairly complete.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Teachers' luncheon cooked and served by pupils at the Clinton Kelly School, Portland, Oregon. Other schools have adopted similar plans for teaching girls how to cook]

The formation of ideals must go hand in hand with practice in manual processes. The girl must learn to know good work when she sees it, to know a properly constructed garment from one carelessly put together, and to value good work and construction.

Time was when domestic science meant sewing and cooking, and these alone. That time, however, is past. The care of a house is practically taught in many schools throughout the country by the maintenance of a model apartment in or near the school building. In Public School No. 7, New York City, grammar-school girls, many of whom are of foreign parentage and tradition, are thus introduced to the American ideal of living. The school is thus establishing standards of equipment, of food, of service, of comfortable living, that tend to Americanize quite as much as the establishment of standards of speech, of business methods, or of civic duties. The work done in this school is typical of that prevailing in hundreds of towns and cities.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A girls' sewing cla.s.s. Work in sewing offers unlimited possibilities]

The question arises: How much of her housekeeping training should a girl receive before entering upon her high-school course? After careful consideration it seems wise to urge that the greater part of the practical household work be taught during the period from eleven to fourteen. This does not imply that homemaking training should cease at fourteen, but rather that after that age attention shall be centered upon the more difficult aspects of the subject--upon "household economics" rather than the skillful doing of household tasks.

In view, however, of the fact that the majority of girls never reach the high school, every bit of household science which they can grasp should be given them in the elementary school. Knowing how to do is only part of the housekeeper's work. Knowing what and when to do is quite as important. Elementary study of food values is quite as comprehensible as elementary algebra. Home sanitation and decoration are no harder to understand than commercial geography. The principles of infant feeding and care may be grasped by any girl who can successfully study civil government or grammar.

Shall we then crowd out commercial geography or government or grammar to make room for these homemaking studies? Not necessarily, although, if it came to a choice, much might be said for the practical studies in learning to live. Fortunately it need not come to a choice. There is room for both. We must, however, learn to adapt existing courses to the requirements of girls.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Courtesy of L.A. Alderman A model school home where all the practical details of housekeeping are taught]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A domestic science cla.s.s at work in the model school home shown above]

There is arithmetic, for instance. Most of us have already learned to skip judiciously the pages in the textbook which deal with compound proportion, averaging payments, partial payments, and cube root. Now we must learn to insert the keeping of household accounts; the study of apportioning incomes; the scientific spending of a dollar in food or clothing value; the relative advantage of cash or credit systems of paying the running expenses of a home; the dangers of the "easy-payment plan"; the cost of running an automobile; comparison with the upkeep of a horse and wagon; comparison of the two from the point of view of their usefulness to a family; mortgaging homes, what it means, and what it costs to borrow; when borrowing is justified; the acc.u.mulation of interest in a savings account; the comparative financial advantage of renting and owning a home; the cost of building houses of various sorts; the cost of securing, under varying conditions, a water supply in the country home; and other locally important problems. We already have "applied science" in our courses, and we are making a strenuous effort to apply arithmetic; but we have not usually tried to apply it to the education of the prospective homemaker.

Take the one question of the "installment plan." Where, if not in the public school, can we fight the menace offered to the inexperienced young people of the land by this method of doing business? And where in the public school if not in the arithmetic cla.s.s? Consider the possibility of lives spent in paying for shoes and hats already worn out, of furniture double-priced because payment is to be on the "easy plan," of families always in debt, with wages mortgaged for months in advance. The pure science of mathematics will be of little avail in fighting this possibility, but "applied arithmetic" can be a most effective weapon.

In our geography cla.s.ses we may find time for the study of food and clothing products, of their sources, their comparative usefulness, and their cost. We may learn whether it is best to buy American-made macaroni or the imported variety; whether French silks and gloves are superior to those made in America; what "shoddy" is, what we may expect from it if we buy it, how much it is worth in comparison with long-wool fabrics, how to know whether shoddy is being offered us when we buy. Countless other matters concerning the markets and products of the world will repay the same sort of treatment.

[Ill.u.s.tration: One of the cla.s.s exercises in the model school home shown on page 115]

[Ill.u.s.tration: The correct serving of meals forms part of the cla.s.s work in this same home]

Food questions are opened up by study of our meat, vegetable, and fruit supply. Every town may make this a personal and immediate problem. From whom did Mr. Blank, the local grocer, obtain his canned tomatoes? It is sometimes possible to follow up those canned tomatoes to their source. In one investigation of this sort they were found to have pa.s.sed through six hands. The arithmetic cla.s.s may pa.s.s upon the question of profits and comparative cost between this and the "producer-to-consumer" method.

The art work of the schools may also contribute generously to the body of homemaking knowledge. For the average girl the designing and making of Christmas cards and book covers, or even the prolonged study of great paintings, is a less productive use of time than the designing of cushion covers, curtains, bureau scarfs, or candle shades. In a certain town in New England considerable effort was expended in bringing about the introduction of art work in the schools a few years ago. A normal-school art graduate took charge of the work. It has now been abandoned because "the children took so little interest." And really, if you knew the conditions, you could not blame them They studied art and copied art and tried to cultivate an artistic sense in ways as remote from their daily lives as could apparently be contrived. And the pity of it all is that here were girls whose homes, whose personal dress, were crying out for the application of art; whose artistic sense was growing of failing to grow according as their individual conditions would allow; and the public school has pa.s.sed its opportunity by.

Art, as applied to school work, is divided usually into appreciative and creative work. We place before children the best in picture and sculpture and music. Why do we not teach them also the foundation principles of good taste in matters less remote from the lives of many of them? Why not teach the girl something of artistic color combination? Why not apply the test of art to the lines of woman's attire? Why not study the contour of heads and styles of hairdressing?

Happily, in these days, these things also are being done. We have "manual arts" rooms and teachers by whose aid girls are taught to use the principles of design they study in their everyday planning of everyday things. A visitor to the Central School of Auburn, Washington, reports interesting work going on in such a room. On the blackboard was written:

The general aim of design work--order and beauty.

The three principles governing design are: Balance--Harmony--Rhythm.

Balance: opposition of equal forms.

Rhythm: movement in direction--joint action--motion.

Harmony: similarity.

In the room were girls doing various sorts of work--coloring designs on fabrics for curtains and pillow covers; making original designs for crocheted lace; hemst.i.tching draperies; preparing color material for a primary room; while on a table in the center of the room were many finished articles, made by the girls and carrying out their principles of design--"not one of which," says the visitor, "but would serve a useful purpose in home or office."

House building, interior decorating, and furnishing are all worthy of serious attention in the art course. Simplicity, harmony, and suitability may well be taught as the principles of good taste. Girls must learn these principles somewhere to make the most of their homes by and by. And again the public school, and probably the elementary school, must do the work.

Physiology and hygiene are already contributing to the knowledge which makes for human betterment, but they also can be made to contribute much more than they have sometimes done. The physiology of infancy must be widely and insistently taught.

With proper education she [the young mother] would know the meaning of the words food and sleep; she would know something of their overwhelming importance upon the future being and career of her child, who in his turn is to be one of the world's citizens with full capacity for good or evil.

Knowing what were normal functions, she would be able to recognize and guard against deviations from them. No day would pa.s.s in which she would not find opportunity to exercise self-restraint, keen observation and sensible knowledge in furthering the normal and healthful evolution of her child.[6]

The "little mother" cla.s.ses in settlement houses, in community social centers, and in some public schools are doing excellent work in beginning this knowledge of infancy. No elementary school can really afford to miss the opportunity such work holds out. Have we any right to let a girl approach the care of her child with less than the best that modern science can offer in this most important and exacting work of her life? If not, it is again the public school which alone can be depended upon to do the work, and we must get at least the beginning of it done before the girl escapes us at the close of her elementary-school course.

If you are impatient with a program which presupposes that practically all women will be homemakers and mothers, either trained or otherwise, let me remind you that the majority of women do marry, that most of these and many of the unmarried do become homemakers, and that it will be far safer for society to train the few--less than 10 per cent--who never enter the career than to pursue the economically wasteful plan of a.s.suming educationally that no women will be homemakers, or that if they are they can successfully undertake the most complicated, difficult, and most important profession open to women with no preparation at all, or with only what they have unconsciously absorbed at home in the brief pauses of the education which did not educate them for life.

The education for homemaking will never lose sight of the fact that girls must really be prepared for a double vocation, since it is a question whether or not they will become homemakers, and they must at all events be prepared for the years intervening between school and home. On the contrary, the education which prepares the homemaker will exercise special care in training for those intervening years, or for life work if it should prove to be such. Of all distinctly vocational training, it is only fair, however, that the homemaking training should come first, as a foundation for all later work. Whether the girl thus trained ever presides over a home of her own or not, the training will have made her a broader woman and a better worker, with a finer understanding of the universal business of her s.e.x.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 6: Oppenheim.]

CHAPTER VIII

THE GIRL'S INNER LIFE

While we are occupied in teaching the girl the "ways and means" by which she is later to carry on the business of homemaking, we must not overlook the fact that, although ways and means are vitally necessary, it is after all the spirit of the girl which will supply the motive power to make the home machinery run. With this in view we must so plan the girl's training as to secure not only the concrete knowledge of doing things, but also the more abstract qualities which will equip her for her work.

False ideals and ignorance of housekeeping processes are responsible for thousands of homekeeping failures; but lack of fairness, of good temper, patience, humor, courage, courtesy, stability, perseverance, and initiative must be held accountable for thousands more. For these qualities, then, the girl must be definitely and painstakingly trained. In other words, we must work for the highest type of woman, spiritually as well as industrially.

It may seem that definite instruction in such abstract qualities as good temper or stability or fairness is difficult or perhaps impossible to Secure. Since, however, all the girl's intercourse with her kind affords daily opportunity for practice of these qualities, instruction may easily accompany and become a part of her daily life.

The lack of these qualities handicaps the girl even in her school life and shows there plainly the handicap that, unless help is given her, she will suffer for life.

Her school work offers ample opportunity for the cultivation of patience and perseverance. Teachers must combat vigorously the "give-up" spirit, and the troublesome "changing her mind" which leads the girl along a straight path from "trying another" essay subject or embroidery st.i.tch as soon as difficulties present themselves to trying another husband when the first domestic cloud arises. Play hours as well as work hours are invaluable in teaching the girl the difficult art of getting along with the world. The educational value of games is largely found in their social training. Experience teaches that children require long and patient instruction to enable them to play games. They have to learn fairness, courtesy, good temper; honesty, kindness, sympathy. They have to learn to be good losers and to consider the fun of playing a better end than winning the game.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Photograph by Brown Bros.

Play hours as well as work hours are invaluable in teaching the girl the difficult art of getting on with the world]

Games must be carefully distinguished from the more general term play.

All play not solitary has recognized social value; games, because the idea of contest is involved, have a special value of their own. Close observation of young children in their games, especially when unsupervised, shows us self supreme. According to temperament, the child either pushes his way savagely to the goal or furtively seeks to win by cunning and craft. He must win, regardless of the process. How many of these unsupervised games end in "I sha'n't play," in angry bursts of tears, or even in blows! How many fail upon close scrutiny to show some less a.s.sertive child, who never wins, who is never "chosen," who might better not be playing at all than never to "have his turn"!

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright by Underwood & Underwood Hunter High School girls playing hockey in Central Park, New York.

The educational value of games lies in the fact that they teach fair play, self-control, and proper consideration of others]

During the individualistic period games must be for the satisfaction of individualistic desires. Team work must await a later development of child nature. But while each child may play to win, his future welfare demands that his efforts be in harmony with certain principles.

1. He must respect the rules of the game.

2. He must "play fair."

3. He must control anger, jealousy, boastfulness, and other of the more elemental emotions.

4. He must consider the handicaps suffered by some players, and see that they get a "square deal."