"Did you ask her?" I questioned, with much curiosity.
"Yes," answered the child's mother; "but she only smiled, and looked embarrassed, so I said nothing further. She seemed to want to keep her secret, the dear baby! So I thought I'd let her!"
And I—I, too, kept it. "Yes, do let her," was all I said.
American children, when "playing alone," impersonate the heroes and heroines of the dramas they see, or the stories they are told, or the books they read (how much more often they must do it than we suspect our memories of our own childish days will teach us), but when they play together, even when they "play at books that they have read," they seldom "pretend." A group of small boys who have just read "Robin Hood" do not say: "Wouldn't it be fun to play thatweare Robin Hood and his Merry Men, and that our grove is Sherwood Forest?" They are more apt to say: "It would be good sport forus—shooting with bows and arrows. We might get some, and fix up a target somewhere and practise." The circle of little girls who have read "Mary's Meadow" do not propose that they play at being Mary. They decide instead upon doing, in their own proper persons, what Mary did in hers. They can play together, the children of our Nation, but they seem unable to "pretend" together. They are perhaps too self-conscious.
It is a significant circumstance that yearly there are published in America a large number of books for children telling them "how to make" various things. A great part of their play consists in making something —from a sunken garden to an air-ship.
I recently had a letter from a boy in which he said: "The boys here are getting wireless sets. We have to buy part of the things; but we make as many of them as we can."
And how assiduously they attempt to make as many as they can of the other things we grown-ups make! They imitate our play; and, in a spirit of play, they contrive to copy to its last and least detail our work. If we play golf or tennis, they also play these games. Are we painters of pictures or writers of books, they too aspire to paint or to write!
It cannot be denied that we encourage the children in this "endless imitation." We not only have diminutive golf sticks and tennis rackets manufactured for their use as soon as they would play our games; when they show signs of toying with our work, we promptly set about providing them with the proper means to that end.
One of our best-known magazines for children devotes every month a considerable number of its pages to stories and poems and drawings contributed by children. Furthermore, it offers even such rewards as we grown-up writers and painters are offered for "available" products. Moreover, the young contributors are instructed in the intricacies of literary and artistic etiquette. They are taught how to prepare manuscripts and drawings for the editorial eye. The "rules" given these children are identical with the regulations governing well-conducted grown-up writers and artists—excepting that the children are commanded to "state age," and "have the contribution submitted indorsed as wholly original!"
It is a noteworthy fact that hundreds of children in America send in contributions, month after month, year after year, to this magazine. Even more significant is it that they prepare these contributions with all the conscientious care of grown-up writers or painters to whom writing or painting is the chiefest reality of life. So whole-heartedly do the children play at being what their elders are!
[Illustration: THE DEAR DELIGHTS OF PLAYING ALONE]
An Italian woman once asked me, "The American children—what do they employ as toys?"
I could only reply, "Almost anything; almost everything!"
When we are furthest from seeing the toy possibilities of a thing, they see it. I have among my treasures a libation cup and aushabtifigurine—votive offerings from the Temple of Osiris, at Abydos.
A short time ago a little boy friend of mine lighted upon them in their safe retreat. "What are these?" he inquired.
"They came from Egypt—" I began.
"Oh,reallyandtruly?" he cried. "Didthey come from the Egypt in the poem—
"'Where among the desert sandsSome deserted city stands,There I'll come when I'm a manWith a camel caravan;And in a corner find the toysOf the old Egyptian boys'?"
He spent a happy hour playing with the libation cup and theushabti— trophies of one of the most remarkable explorations of our era. I did not tell him what they were. He knew concerning them all he needed to know—that they could be "employed as toys." Perhaps the very tiniest of the "old Egyptian boys" had known only this, too.
"Little girls do not play with dolls in these days!" is a remark that has been made with great frequency of late years. Those of us who have many friends among little girls often wonder what is at the basis of this rumor. There have always been girls who did not care for dolls. In the old-fashioned story for girls there was invariably one such. In "Little Women," as we all recall, it was Jo. No doubt the persons who say that little girls no longer play with dolls count among their childish acquaintances a disproportionate number of Jos. Playing with dolls would seem to be too fundamentally little-girlish ever to fall into desuetude.
"Girls, as well as boys, play with dogs in these days!" is another plaintive cry we often hear. But were there ever days when this was not the case? From that far-off day when Iseult "had always a little brachet with her that Tristram gave her the first time that ever she came into Cornwell," to the time when Dora cuddled Jip, even down to our own day, when the heroine of "Queed" walks forth with her Behemoth, girls both in fact and in fiction have played with dogs; played with them no less than boys. This proclivity on the part of the little girls of our Nation is not distinctively American, nor especially childish, nor particularly girl-like; it is merely human.
In few activities do the children of our Nation reveal what we call the "American sense of humor" so clearly as in their play. Slight ills, and even serious misfortunes, they instinctively endeavor to lift and carry with a laugh. It would be difficult to surpass the gay heroism to which they sometimes attain.
Most of us remember the little hunchbacked boy in "Little Men" who, when the children played "menagerie," chose the part of the dromedary. "Because," he explained, "I have a hump on my back!"
Among my acquaintances there is a little girl who is blind. One day I invited her to go picnicking with a party of normal children, one of whom was her elder sister. She was accustomed to the company of children who could see, and she showed a ready disposition to join in the games of the other picnickers. Her sister stayed close beside her and guarded and guided her.
"Let's play blind man's buff," one of the children heedlessly suggested after a long course of "drop-the-handkerchief."
The other children with seeing eyes instantly looked at the child who was sightless, and whispered, "Ssh! You'll hurt her feelings!"
But the little blind girl scrambled eagerly to her feet. "Yes," she said, brightly; "let's play blind man's buff!Ican be 'It'allthe time!"
There is a phrase that has been very widely adopted by Americans. Scarcely one of us but uses it—"playing the game." Our highest commendation of a man or a woman has come to be, "He plays the game," or "She plays the game." Another phrase, often upon our lips, is "according to the rules of the game." We Americans talk of the most sacred things of life in the vocabulary of children at play. May not this be because the children of our Nation play so well; so much better than we grown- ups do anything?
One spring, not long ago, a friend of mine, knowing that I had a desire to spend the summer in the "real country," said to me, "Why don't you go to a farm somewhere in New England? Nothing could be more 'really countrified' than that! You would get what you want there."
Her advice rather appealed to my fancy. I at once set about looking for a New England farmhouse in which I might be received as a "summer boarder." Hearing of one that was situated in a particularly healthful and beautiful section of New England, I wrote to the woman who owned and operated it, telling her what I required, and asking her whether or no she could provide me with it. "Above all things," I concluded my letter, "I want quiet."
Her somewhat lengthy reply ended with these words: "The bedroom just over the music-room is the quietest in the house, because no one is in the music-room excepting for a social hour after supper. I can let you have that bedroom."
My friend had said that nothing was so "really countrified" as a New England farm. But a "music-room," a "social hour after supper!" The terms suggested things distinctly urban.
I sent another letter to the woman to whom this amazing farmhouse belonged. "I am afraid I cannot come," I wrote. "I want a simpler place." Then, yielding to my intense curiosity, I added: "Are many of your boarders musical? Is the music-room for their use?"
"No place could be simpler than this," she answered, by return mail. "I don't know whether any of my boarders this year will be musical or not. Some years they have been. The music-room isn't for my boarders, especially; it is for my niece. She is very musical, but she doesn't get much time for practising in the summer."
She went on to say that she hoped I would decide to take the bedroom over the music-room. I did. I had told her that, above all things, I desired quiet; but, after reading her letters, I think I wished, above all things, to see the music-room, and the niece who was musical.
"She will probably be a shy, awkward girl," one of my city neighbors said to me; "and no doubt she will play 'The Maiden's Prayer' on a melodeon which will occupy one corner of the back sitting-room. You will see."
In order to reach the farm it was necessary not only to take a journey on a train, but also to drive three miles over a hilly road. The little station at which I changed from the train to an open two-seated carriage in waiting for me was the usual rural village, with its one main street, its commingled post-office and dry-goods and grocery store, and its small white meeting-house.
The farm, as we approached it, called to mind the pictures of old New England farms with which all of us are familiar. The house itself was over a hundred years old, I afterward learned; and had for that length of time "been in the family" of the woman with whom I had corresponded.
She was on the broad doorstone smiling a welcome when, after an hour's drive, the carriage at last came to a stop. Beside her was her niece, the girl whom I had been so impatient to meet. She was neither shy nor awkward.
"Are you tired?" she inquired. "What should you like to do? Go to your room or rest downstairs until supper-time? Supper will be ready in about twenty minutes."
"I'd like to see the music-room," I found myself saying.
"Oh," exclaimed the girl, her face brightening, "are you musical? How nice!"
As she spoke she led the way into the music-room. It was indeed a back sitting-room. Its windows opened upon the barnyard; glancing out, I saw eight or ten cows, just home from pasture, pushing their ways to the drinking-trough. I looked around the little room. On the walls were framed photographs of great composers, on the mantelshelf was a metronome, on the centre-table were two collections of classic piano pieces, and in a corner was,—not a melodeon,—but a piano. The maker's name was on it—a name famous in two continents.
"Your aunt told me you were musical," I said to the girl. "I see that the piano is your instrument."
"Yes," she assented. "But I don't play very well. I haven't had many lessons. Only one year with a really good teacher."
"Who was your teacher?" I asked idly. I fully expected her to say, "Some one in the village through which you came."
"Perhaps you know my teacher," she replied; and she mentioned the name of one of the best pianists and piano teachers in New England.
"Most of the time I've studied by myself," she went on; "but one year auntie had me go to town and have good lessons."
At supper this girl waited on the table, and after supper she washed the dishes and made various preparations for the next morning's breakfast. Then she joined her aunt and the boarders, of whom there were nine, on the veranda.
"I should so like to hear you play something on the piano," I said to her.
She at once arose, and, followed by me, went into the music-room, which was just off the veranda. "I only play easy things," she said, as she seated herself at the piano.
Whereupon she played, with considerable skill, one of Schumann's simpler compositions, one of Schubert's, and one of Grieg's. Then, turning around on the piano-stool, she asked me, "Do you like Debussy?"
I thought of what my neighbor had prophesied concerning "The Maiden's Prayer." Debussy! And this girl was a country girl, born and bred on that dairy farm, educated at the little district school of the vicinity; and, moreover, trained to take a responsible part in the work of the farm both in winter and in summer. Her family for generations had been "country people."
It was not surprising that she had made the acquaintance of Debussy's music; nor that she had at her tongue's end all the arguments for and against it. Her music-teacher was, of course, accountable for this. What was remarkable was that she had had the benefit of that particular teacher's instruction; that, country child though she was, she had been given exactly the kind, if not the amount, of musical education that a city child of musical tastes would have been given.
My neighbor had predicted a shy, awkward girl, a melodeon, and "The Maiden's Prayer." One of our favorite fallacies in America is that our country people are "countrified." Nothing could be further from the truth, especially in that most important matter, the up-bringing of their children. Country parents, like city parents, try to get the best for their children. That "best" is very apt to be identical with what city parents consider best. Circumstances may forbid their giving it to their children as lavishly as do city parents; conditions may force them to alter it in various ways in order to fit it to the needs of boys and girls who live on a farm, and not on a city street; but in some sort they attempt to obtain it, and, having obtained it, to give it to their children.
[Illustration: "THE CHILDREN—THEY ARE SUCH DEARS!"]
They are as ambitious for the education of their children as city parents; and to an amazing extent they provide for them a similar academic training. An astonishing proportion of the students in our colleges come from country homes, in which they have learned to desire collegiate experience; from country schools, where they have received the preparation necessary to pass the required college entrance examinations. Surrounded, as we in cities are, by schools especially planned, especially equipped, to make children ready for college, we may well wonder how country children in rural district schools, with their casual schedules and meagre facilities, are ever so prepared. By visiting even a few district schools we may in part discover.
I happened, not a great while ago, to spend an autumn month on a farm in a very sparsely settled section of New Hampshire.
One morning at breakfast, shortly after Labor Day, my landlady said: "School opens next week. The teacher is coming here to board for the winter. I expect her to-day."
"Where does she come from?" I asked.
"From Smith College," the farmer replied, unexpectedly. "This is her second year of teaching our school."
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 grassy meadow bordered with a stone wall.
There were fourteen pupils. They were all assembled 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 title. 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 Association'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 childrenmusthave books," she replied, "if they are going to be educatedat all.City children canseethings, 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' Assistant."
"Who selected the books?" I asked.
"Nobody exactlyselectedthem," the librarian said. "Every one around here gave a few from their collections, so's we could have a near-to library—principally 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 theoldestbooks 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 quantity 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 thatallchildren 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 passage 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 "pass 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 thereisone; 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 therighthand, 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.
[Illustration: A SMALL COUNTRY BOY]
In the matter of clothes, too, the country mother, like any other mother in America, wishes her children to be becomingly attired, in full accord with such of the prevailing fashions as seem to her most suitable. In company with the greater portion of American mothers, she devotes considerable time and strength and money to the wardrobes of her boys and girls. The result is that country children are dressed strikingly like city children. Their "everyday" garments are scarcely distinguishable from the "play clothes" of city children; their "Sunday" clothes are very similar to the "best" habiliments of the boys and girls who do not live in the country.
We have all read, in the books of our grandmothers' childhood, of the children who, on the eve of going to visit their city cousins, were much exercised concerning their wearing apparel. "Wouldthe pink frock, with the green sash, bejustwhat was being worn to parties in the city?" the little girl of such story-books fearfully wondered. "Will boys of my age be wearing short trousersstill?" the small boy dubiously queried. Invariably it transpired that pink frocks and green sashes, if in fashion at all, wereneverseen at parties; and thatlongtrousers were absolutely essential, from the point of view of custom, for boys of our hero's age. Many woes were attendant upon the discovery that these half-suspected sumptuary laws were certain facts.
No present-day country boy and girl, coming from the average home to the house of city cousins, would need to feel any such qualms. Should they, five minutes' inspection of the garments of those city cousins would relieve their latent questionings. They would see that, to the casual eye, they and their cousins were dressed in the same type of raiment.
How could they fail to be? A large crop of "fashion magazines" flourishes in America. The rural free delivery brings them to the very doors of the farmhouse. By the use of mail orders the mother on the farm can obtain whatever materials the particular "fashion magazine" to which she is a subscriber advises, together with paper patterns from which she can cut anything, from "jumpers" to a "coat for gala occasions."
The approved clothes of all American children in our time are so exceedingly simple in design that any woman who can sew at all can construct them; and, in the main, the materials of which they are made are so inexpensive that even the farmer whose income is moderate in size can afford to supply them. A clergyman who had worked both in city and in country parishes once told me that he attributed the marked increase in ease and grace of manner—and, consequently, in "sociability"—among country people to-day, as compared with country people of his boyhood, very largely to the invention of paper patterns.
"Rural folk dressed in a way peculiar to themselves then," he said; "now they dress like the rest of the world. It is curious," he went on, reflectively, "but human beings, as a whole, seem unable not to be awkward in their behavior if their costumes can possibly be differentiated otherwise than by size!"
It is another queer fact that normal persons would seem to require "best" clothes. They share the spirit of Jess, in "A Window in Thrums." "But you could never wear yours, though ye had ane," said Hendry to her about the "cloak with beads"; "ye would juist hae to lock it awa in the drawers." "Aye," Jess retorted, "but I would aye ken it was there."
I have an acquaintance who is not normal in this matter. She scorns "finery," whether for use or for "locking awa." One summer she and I spent a fortnight together on a Connecticut farm. During the week the farmer and his wife, as well as their two little children, a girl and a boy, wore garments of dark-colored denim very plainly made. The children were barefooted.
"These people have sense," my acquaintance observed to me on the first day of our sojourn; "they dress in harmony with their environment."
I was silent, realizing that, if Sunday were a fine day, she might feel compelled to modify her approbation. On Saturday night the farmer asked if we should care to accompany the family to church the next morning. Both of us accepted the invitation.
Sunday morning, as I had foreseen, when the family assembled to take its places in the "three-seater," the father was in "blacks," with a "boiled" shirt; the mother, a pretty dark-eyed, dark-haired young woman, a pleasant picture in the most every-day of garments, was a charming sight, in a rose-tinted wash silk and a Panama hat trimmed with black velvet. As for the boy and the girl, they were arrayed in spotless white, from their straw hats even to their canvas shoes. The hands of the farmer and his son were uncovered; but the mother and her little daughter wore white lisle gloves. They also carried parasols—the mother's of the shade of her dress, the girl's pale blue. No family in America could possibly have looked more "blithe and bonny" than did that one in "Sunday" clothes, ready for church.
The face of my acquaintance was a study.
In it were mingled surprise and disapproval. Both these elements became more pronounced when we were fairly in the meeting-house. All the men, women, and children there assembled were also in "Sunday" clothes.
My acquaintance has the instinct of the reformer. Hardly were we settled in the "three-seater," preparatory to returning home after the service, when she began. "Do you make your own clothes?" she inquired of the farmer's wife.
"Yes," was the reply; "and the children's, too."
"Isn't there a great deal of work involved in the care of such garments as you are all wearing to-day?" she further pursued.
"I suppose there is the usual amount," the other woman said, dryly.
"Then, why do you do it—living in the country, as you do?"
"There is no reason why people shouldn't dress nicely, no matter where they happen to live," was the answer. "During the week we can't; but on Sunday we can, and do, and ought—out of respect to the day," she quaintly added.
[Illustration: ARRAYED IN SPOTLESS WHITE]
The city is not a mere name to American country children. Increased train facilities, the improvement in the character of country roads brought about by the advent of the automobile, and the extension of the trolley system have done much to mitigate the isolation of rural communities. The farmer and his wife can avail themselves of the advantages to be found in periodical trips to the nearest city. Like other American parents, they invite their children to share their interests. The boys and girls are included in the jauntings to the city.
I once said to a little girl whom I met on a farm in Massachusetts: "You must come soon and stay with me in the city from Saturday until Monday. We will go to the Art Museum and look at the pictures."
"Oh," she cried, joyously, "I'dloveto! Every time we go to town, and there is a chance, mother and I go to the Museum; we both like the pictures so much."
This little girl, when she was older, desired to become a kindergartner. There was a training-school in the near-by city. She could not afford to go to and fro on the train, but there was a trolley. The journey on the trolley occupied three hours, but the girl took it twice daily for two years.
"Doesn't it tire you?" I asked her.
"Oh, somewhat," she admitted; "but I was already used to it. We usually traveled to town on it when I was small."
"Countrified" is not the word to apply to American farmers and their families. One might as aptly employ it when describing the people of England who live on their "landed estates." Ignorance and dullness and awkwardness we shall not often find among country children. The boys and girls on the farms are as well informed, as mentally alert, and as attractive as children in any other good homes in America.
We all know Mr. James Whitcomb Riley's poem, "Little Cousin Jasper." The country boy in it, we recall, concluded his reflections upon the happier fortune of the boy from the "city" of Rensselaer with these words:
"Wishst our town ain't like it is!—Wishst it's ist as big as his!Wishst 'athisfolks they'd movehere,An'we'dmove to Rensselaer!"
Only last summer I repeated this poem to a little girl whose home was a farm not far from a house at which I was stopping.
"But," she said, in a puzzled tone of voice, "no place is as big as the country! Look!" she exclaimed, pointing to the distant horizon; "it's so big it touches the edge of the sky! No city isthatbig, is it?"
An elderly woman was talking to me not long ago about her childhood.
"No, my dear, I did not have a governess," she said, in answer to my questionings. "Neither did I attend the public schools, though I lived in the city. I went to a private school. The pupils in it were the girls of the little social circle to which my parents belonged. There were perhaps twenty of us in all. And there were three teachers; one for the 'first class,' one for the 'second class,' and a French-German-music- and-drawing-teacher-in-one for both classes."
"And what did you study?" I asked.
"Besides French, German, music, and drawing?" my elderly friend mused. "Well, we had the three R's; and history, English and American, and geography, and deportment. I think that was all."
"And you liked it?" I ventured.
"Yes, my dear, I did," replied my friend, "though I used to pretend that I didn't. I sometimes even 'played sick' in order to be allowed to stay home from school. Children then, as now, thought they ought to 'hate to go to school.' I believe most of them did, too. I happened to be a 'smart' child; so I liked school. I suppose 'smart' children still do."
A "smart" child! In my mind's eye I can see my elderly friend as one, sitting at the "head" of her class, on a long, narrow bench, her eyes shining with a pleased consciousness of "knowing" the lesson, her cheeks rosy with expectation of the triumph sure to follow her "saying" of it, her lips parted in an eagerness to begin. Can we not all see her, that "smart" child of two generations ago?
As for her lesson, can we not hear it with our mind's ear? In arithmetic, it was the multiplication table; in English history, the names of the sovereigns and the dates of their reigns; in geography, the capitals of the world; in deportment—ah, in deportment, a finer lesson than any of our schools teach now! These were the lessons. Indeed, my elderly friend has told me as much. "And not easy lessons, either, my dear, nor easily learned, as the lessons of schoolchildren seem to be to-day. We had no kindergartens; the idea that lessons were play had not come in; to us lessons were work, and hard work."
My friend gave a little sigh and shook her head ever so slightly as she concluded. It was plain that she deprecated modern educational methods. "Schools have changed," she added.
And has not the attitude of children toward going to school changed even more? Do many of them "hate to go"? Do any of them at all think they "ought to hate to go"? Is a single one "smart" in the old-time sense of the word?
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 constituted 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 isverynaughty 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 aboutmylost lessons!Idid 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!"
"Whatdidyou 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,Theyare 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, Saturday is not much of gala day. Think of what Saturday was tous! What glorious times we had! Why, Saturday wasSaturday, 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 Saturday. The day is not to them what it was to us. I wonder what makes the difference."
[Illustration: THEY PAINT PICTURES AS A REGULAR PART OF THEIR SCHOOLROUTINE]
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 Saturday 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 Saturday. 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 Saturday 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' accumulation 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 quantity 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 surpassed 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 quantity 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 Saturday 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 Saturday children have now on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,andSaturday!
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 amusement—a doll, with the trunk that still contained her wardrobe; an autograph album, with "verses" and sketches in it; and a "joining map," such as the brother of Rosamond of the Purple Jar owned.
[Illustration: 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 foryou" 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 glass 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.
"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 glass 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 glasses.
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!Ourflag!"
"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 pronounce 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'?"
"Nobody," 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. "Mydearchild," 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, ifhewere doing it,hewouldn't worry about it;hewould 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 pronunciation 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 pronounce words as she pronounces 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 Gallicum" 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 assist 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 pass. 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 attitudes 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 Saturday 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 Saturday.
"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 Saturday."
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.
[Illustration: 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?