FullReads

I controlled my true feelings sufficiently to ask her what effect an epidemic of Gwendolin’s little characteristics would have upon my class. I urged her imagination to picture fifty children late every morning because their fifty fathers always missed the first act of a play, and fifty voices always raised in howls because fifty mothers wept upon one hundred poached eggs on toast.

“Oh, but dear me,” purred Mrs. Marks, as she heaved herself to the perpendicular, shedding Gwendolin, a pocket-book, a handkerchief, and a fan–“oh, but dear me, my sweet Gwendolin is such an exceptional child.”

There is another class of parent from whom teachers suffer much. It generally has but one child, and that child is generally a pitiful, conscientious, earnest little creature in sombre hair ribbons and “Comfort” shoes. Very frequently this parent has been, in some prehistoric age, a teacher of mathematics in a high-school. Now, a spiritualistic seance at which Messrs. Froebel, Pestalozzi, Herbart, Locke, and Spencer should appear and explain their theories of education, and at which Professor James should come from Harvard to preside, while Professor John Dewey looked in to make a few remarks, would never persuade that parent that her child’s progress was not to be gauged by an ability to spell obsolete words, and to worry her way through complicated problems in long division.

“Why, she’s been to school every day for seven months; rain, nor snow, nor sleet has daunted her. She has an umbrella, a mackintosh, and a pair of rubbers. And yet with all these aids to education she cannot spell ‘parallel.'” If you are rash you will inform her that the rubbers, the mackintosh, and the umbrella may travel to school for yet another seven months, and the child may still remain unable to spell “parallel.” If you are patient and “so disposed,” you would deliver a little lecture on the new methods of teaching reading, in which first a whole sentence is used as a unit; later a phrase; later still a word; and last of all a letter; but do not hope for a favorable reception of this theory. The ex-teacher of high-school mathematics, who, in her own far-distant youth, excelled at spelling-bees, could name the capital of every State in the Union and every country in the world; who could recite the names and dates of the Presidents, “The Village Blacksmith,” “The Old Oaken Bucket,” “The Psalm of Life,” and the Declaration of Independence, is not prepared to accept a method of teaching based upon the interests and the reason of the child, and never upon its mechanical memory. “Things,” she will tell you, “are changed since my day,” and she allows you very thoroughly to understand that they are changed most mournfully for the worse.

Changed they emphatically are, whether for worse or better. Almost every scientific, medical, and sociological discovery of the century has influenced the school. The single theory of the microbe as the cause of disease has well-nigh revolutionized it. It does not require a very long memory to reach back to the days of slates and slate rags, with their attendant horrors of sliminess and sucked pencils. In those dark ages, too, a school-book was used by successive generations of children for as long as its print was legible to the keenest eye. Lead-pencils were collected at the end of the day and dealt out again promiscuously, and, marvellous to reflect upon, several children survived their schooling.

In these days the well-equipped and well-managed school-room is as sanitary as a hospital ward; sterilizing and fumigating are part of the regular work, and every book and pencil undergoes such treatment before being transferred from one child to another. The number of cubic feet of air, per child, per hour, is calculated and provided for. The designing of seats for school children is a matter which occupies the attention of men whose reputation is international, and whole schools of philosophy busy themselves to determine the sequence in which the different formal studies shall be presented.