The Child in School : Part 1

The American Child
by Elizabeth McCracken

(Page 5 of 12)

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 is very naughty 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 about my lost lessons! I did all the troubling! I laboriously 'made them up'; the thought of examination days coming along spurred me on."