The Child in School : Part 2

The American Child
by Elizabeth McCracken

(Page 6 of 12)

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!"

"What did you 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, They are 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 to us! What glorious times we had! Why, Saturday was Saturday, 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."

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?