"No," concluded Miss Belle, laughingly, "you can"t do a thing with the old folks. Why if I was to go into a kitchen belonging to one of those women and tell her how to sift flour she would run me out quick, but when Annie comes home and makes such m.u.f.fins that the man of the family eats eleven the first time, there is no way to answer back. The m.u.f.fins speak for themselves."
IV Taking the Boys in Hand
While the girls were making over the diet of the neighborhood Miss Belle was working through the boys to improve the strains of corn used by the farmers, the methods of fertilizing and the quality of the truck patches. A few years ago when the farmer scorned newfangled ideas it was the boys that took home methods for numbering and testing each ear of corn to determine whether or not the kernels on it would sprout when they were planted. The farmer who turns a deaf ear to argument can offer no effective reply to a corn-tester in which only one kernel in three has sprouted. The ears are infertile, from one cause or another, and the sooner he replaces them by fertile seed the better for his corn crop.
Out beside a white limestone pike stands the school in which Miss Belle has done her work. One would hardly stop to look at it, because it differs in no way from thousands of similar country school-houses.
Modest and una.s.suming, like Miss Belle, it holds only one feature of real interest--the faces of the children. Bright, eager, enthusiastic, they labor earnestly over their lessons in order that they may get at their "busy work," and linger over their "busy work" during recess and after school, because it glides so swiftly from their deft fingers. In this, as in everything else which she does, Miss Belle has a system. The child whose lessons are not done, and done up to a certain grade, is not taught new st.i.tches or new designs. Even the youngest responds to the stimulus, and the little girl in a pink frock, with pink ribbons on her brown pig-tails, lays aside the mat she is making to write "Annie Belle Lewis" on the board, and to tell you that she is seven; while John Murphy, of the mature age of eleven, stops crocheting ear-m.u.f.flers for a moment to tell you what he is doing and why he does it.
V "Busy Work" as an a.s.set
"You never would guess what a help the "busy work" is," smiled Miss Belle. "You see, they never can do it until their lessons are finished, so they are as good at arithmetic as they are at patching. Then I always teach the little ones patterns and st.i.tches where they have to count, "One, two, three, four, five, and drop one," you know, and in the shortest time they learn their number work. It seems to go so much more quickly when they do it in connection with some pieces that they can see. But you never would guess the best thing the sewing has done--it has stopped gossiping. It"s hard to believe, I know, but it"s true.
There used to be a lot of trouble in this neighborhood. People told tales, there was ill feeling, and folks quarreled a great deal of the time. It wasn"t long before I found out that it was the girls who did most of the tale-bearing. No wonder, either! They weren"t very busy in school, and they had nothing much to do at home except to listen and talk. Really, they hadn"t any decent interest in life. Of course there was no use in saying anything, but I felt that if I could get them busy at something they liked they would stop talking. It wasn"t enough to start them at dressmaking, either, but when I started in on hard, fancy work designs I had them. They made pretty clothes, embroidered them; made lace and doilies. Most of the girls can pick up a new Irish-lace pattern from a fashion-book as easily as I can, and they are rabid for new patterns. The same girls who did most of the tale-bearing are busy at work, and I find them swapping patterns and recipes instead of stories."
While the girls patch, darn, crochet, hem, knit, weave baskets, make garments and do the various kinds of "busy work," the boys clean the school yard, plant walnut trees--Mrs. Faulconer, the County Superintendent, is having the school children plant nut trees along all the pikes--and do anything else which is not beneath their dignity.
"They have no work benches," lamented Miss Belle, "I hope they will get them soon, although there is really no place to put them." Indeed, in a little building packed with fifty children and the school-room furniture the s.p.a.ce is narrow.
Yet this little one-room building at Locust Grove has left such a mark on the community that when the County School Board recently decided to transfer Miss Belle to a larger school the member from her district promptly resigned, and refused to be placated until every other member of the board had apologized to him and promised to leave Miss Belle in his school.
"We never saw the old gentleman mad before," said a neighbor. "But he certainly was mad then. He had watched Miss Belle"s work grow, and knew what it had meant to the children; so when they proposed to take her away he went right up in the air."
VI Marguerite
What wonder? He had seen the magic workings of a hand that felt the pulse, judged the symptoms, and prescribed a sure-to-cure remedy for a countryside full of ignorance, drunkenness, bitter hatreds and never-ending quarrels. Within a stone"s throw of his house he had seen the transformation in the life of a little girl named Marguerite. Since her birth she had lived in darkness, but into her desolate home Miss Belle had sent light.
"You never saw a worse home," says Miss Belle. "Her mother was woefully ignorant of everything in the way of home-making. The children were wretchedly dressed. The house was barrenness itself--no shades, no curtains, no decorations of any kind. It was pathetic. When she came to school neither she nor her mother could sew a st.i.tch."
Marguerite, an apt girl with her fingers, eagerly learned the needlework lessons of the school. She taught her mother to sew, while she herself made portieres and curtains, lightening up the old home with a rare new beauty.
Here again is Lillie, who is very slow at needlework and arithmetic, but who has put the family diet on a wholesome basis by learning to cook some of the most delicious, nourishing dishes. Her bread--the best in Fayette County--is light as a feather. Hannah comes back after leaving school to learn how to ply her needle. Until a year ago Christmas she could not sew a st.i.tch; now her st.i.tches are so neat as to be almost invisible. Mrs. Hawly, aroused to enthusiasm by her thirteen-year-old daughter, has come to school, learned plain and fancy sewing, and started to make her own and her daughter"s clothes. Everywhere are the marks of a teacher"s handiwork stamped indelibly on the lives of her scholars and their families. Small wonder that the old gentleman on the board was loath to part with Miss Belle!
VII Winning Over the Families
With supreme joy Miss Belle tells of her conquest of the fathers of her boys and girls--her family, as she calls it. "The children were very poorly cared for," she says. "The fathers spent the money for whiskey, and the mothers lacked the means and the knowledge to clothe the children better. Sometimes they were pitiful in their poor shoes and thin clothes. Well, sir, we got up a Christmas entertainment, and, except for one or two, the children wore the same clothes they had been coming to school in all winter--shabby, patched and dirty as some of them were. They stood up there, though, one and all, to do their turns and speak their pieces, and their fathers were ashamed. They saw their children in old clothes, and the children of some of the neighbors all fixed up, and they just couldn"t stand it.
"It surely did make a difference the next year." Miss Belle"s cheery face broadened with a satisfied smile. "The men didn"t say a word--you know our men aren"t in the habit of saying very much--but they went to town themselves the day before the entertainment and came back with new dresses for the girls and new clothes for the boys. Of course some of them were so small they would scarcely go on, while others were miles big; but every one had something new and no one felt badly.
"This Christmas," concluded Miss Belle, "our entertainment packed the school-house, and some were turned away. Just to show you how crowded it was--there were twenty-four babies there. I was ready for them, though, with two pounds of stick candy; so whenever a baby squalled he got a stick of candy quick."
Strange, good things have followed the visits of the mothers to the schools. They would never have come had it not been for the wonderful things which their children were learning with such untoward enthusiasm.
One girl, who had been particularly successful with her needlework, brought her mother to school--a hard woman who had a standing quarrel with seven of her neighbors at that particular time. It took a little tact, but when the right moment arrived Miss Belle suggested that she pay a visit to a sick neighbor and offer to help. The woman went at last, found that it was a very pleasant thing on the whole to be friendly, and carried the glad tidings into her life, subst.i.tuting kindness for her previous rule of incivility. To her surprise her enemies have all disappeared.
The mothers, coming to school to talk over the work of their children, have for the first time seen one another at their best. Sitting over a friendly cup of tea, chatting about Jane"s dress or Willie"s lessons, they have learned the art of social intercourse. Slowly the lesson has come to them, until to-day there is not a woman in the neighborhood who is not on speaking terms with every one else, a situation undreamed of five years ago.
Nine months in each year Miss Belle McCubbing holds her cla.s.ses in the Locust Grove School, which stands on the Military Pike, seven miles outside of Lexington, Kentucky. "Angels watch over that school," says Mrs. Faulconer. Doubtless these angels are the good angels of the community, for in six years the bitterness of neighborhood gossip and controversy has been replaced by a spirit of neighborly helpfulness.
Boys and girls, doing Miss Belle"s "busy work," fathers and mothers learning from their children, have heaped upon Miss Belle"s deserving head the peerless praise of a community come to itself--regenerated in thought and act, turned from the wretchedness and desolation of the past to the light and civilization of the future, saved and blessed by the lives of a teacher and her children.
CHAPTER XI
WIDE-AWAKE SLEEPY EYE
I Fitting Schools to Needs
This is the story of a school that was built to fit a town, and it begins with a hypothetical case. Suppose that there was a town--a prosperous town of some 2,247 souls, set down in the middle of a well-to-do farming district. As for business, the town has a few industries and some stores; the countryside is engaged in general farming. Suppose that the school board of such a town should come to you and say: "We are looking for a school superintendent. Are you the one?"
Suppose you said, "Yes." How would you prove your point?
Out in Minnesota there is a town named Sleepy Eye, set down in a well-to-do farming district. At the head of the Sleepy Eye schools there is J. A. Cederstrom. Mr. Cederstrom has proved by a very practical demonstration that he is "the one."
When Mr. Cederstrom took charge of the Sleepy Eye schools he found an excellent school plant, an intelligent community and a school system that was like the school system of every other up-to-date two-thousand-inhabitant town in the Middle West. Before Mr. Cederstrom there lay a choice. He could continue the work exactly as it had always been carried on, improve the school machinery, and make a creditable showing at examination time. That path looked like the path of least resistance. Mr. Cederstrom did not take it, however. Instead he made up his mind that after measuring the community and the children he would, to use his own words, "fit the work to their respective needs."
"The work offered has been somewhat varied," Mr. Cederstrom explains. "I have not attempted to follow any set course or outline of work made out by some one else who is not familiar with our conditions and needs."
Where does there exist a more admirable statement of the principle underlying the new education? This man, when given charge of a school plant, deliberately chose to make the school fit the needs of the community upon which the school was dependent for support. Oblivious of tradition he set about remodeling the school in the interest of its const.i.tuency.
Sleepy Eye is located in a farming district. Many of the boys who come to the Sleepy Eye School will manage farms when they are grown men, and many of the Sleepy Eye girls will marry farmers and manage them. Here were farmer men and farmer women in the making. What more natural than to organize a Department of Agriculture?
A Department of Agriculture in a school? Yes, truly; and a short winter course for farm boys and girls who could not come the year round, and a school experiment station with school farms for the children, and a live farmers" inst.i.tute that met in the school and was fed and cared for by the Department of Domestic Science, and all sorts of courses built up around the needs of the children and of the community.
II Getting the Janitor in Line
As a result of this method of course-making the school janitor found himself on the instruction staff of the school. One day a couple of the short course boys were in the engine-room while the janitor was repairing a defective pipe in the heating plant. The boys lent a hand in the work; and one of them, having a practical turn of mind, suggested that he would like to learn more about pipe-fitting in order to install a water system on the farm at home. The janitor repeated the remark to Mr. Cederstrom, who called the boys out and had a talk with them regarding the possibilities of the plan.
The outlook for the course was not bright. Every instructor in the mechanical department was working on full time. Only one way out remained and that way led to the janitor.
The janitor was a busy man during the day, but his evenings were comparatively free. After some parleying he agreed to give a course in elementary plumbing and steam-fitting on Tuesday and Thursday evenings at seven-thirty. So the boys came to school in the evening, and under the direction of the school janitor learned how to install a water system in their homes. Their work for the year consisted in making a model water system for a house, a barn and the other farm buildings. The materials for this course were picked up from the school"s sc.r.a.p-heap.
Perhaps some people will not understand the spirit of it--getting the janitor in line to give a course in steam-fitting from the odds and ends that are found on the sc.r.a.p-heap. Such a proceeding is unconventional in the extreme. But, on the other hand, here were boys who wished to know how they might go back and improve their homes. Who shall say that the imparting of such knowledge is not the business of a real school?
III The Department of Agriculture
Let us go back for a moment to the organization of the Department of Agriculture. The school at Sleepy Eye have available what every other school should have--five acres of tillable ground. This tract at Sleepy Eye is devoted to tests and experimental work, to flower gardens and to individual school gardens--one for each child who applies.
The experimental work and tests are carried on exactly as they would be at a state experiment station. In the section of Minnesota surrounding Sleepy Eye, corn is the great staple crop. Therefore on the demonstration grounds of the Department of Agriculture, Independent School District No. 24, Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, they are growing a number of plots of corn, each plot variously planted, fertilized, cultivated, and cared for, so that the children may learn at first-hand scientific methods of discovering the best kinds of crop, and the best ways of handling a crop in their own locality.
The allotment of the school gardens carried with it instruction in engineering and in civics at the same time that the bonds between home and school were cemented. The part of the school land that was to be devoted to school gardens was turned over to the older boys, who surveyed it in exactly the same way that the United States government surveyed the homestead tracts. The plot was laid out in towns and ranges. The sections were staked and numbered. Then the children who wished to take up plots went into the newly surveyed territory, picked their plots, and filed an application with the land commissioner for a plot, stating the section, town and range. After that a line formed and the plots (2020 feet) were allotted. No child was permitted to take up an allotment unless he had the endors.e.m.e.nt of a parent or guardian. The form on which this endors.e.m.e.nt was secured was as follows:
Name____________________ Grade______________ _______ Sec____ Town__________ Range________
APPLICATION FOR LAND IN PUBLIC SCHOOL GARDEN, DEPT. OF AGR., SLEEPY EYE HIGH SCHOOL