A NECESSARY WORK, UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES.
By T.
Much is being said in these days about helping and training children. But many of the plans and methods proposed are out of the true and natural order of things. Peruse carefully the following, which we clip from the columns of an esteemed religious weekly:— Two lady teachers in the public school of —— have for some months been doing a work among the children of their schools, and for the benefit of some parents, that is proving a wonderful transforming power, and is deserving of adoption in every school. . . . The ladies began with no thought that the work would enlarge as it has done, their sole object being to help the boys and girls to develop a noble manhood and womanhood, and to brighten the lives of their parents, especially mothers. Miss ——’s first step was taken for the purpose of keeping the boys from the streets at night. She secured permission to use the school building, and opened a boys’ club, and afterwards a girls’ club. The boys meet Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings. They are provided with books, magazines, and games, and subdivided into classes for basket-making, Venetian ironwork, physical exercise, military drill, and manual training. It is made a serious matter to become a member of the club, and a boy who misbehaves or loses interest is dropped. . . . The manual training school is fitted up in a large apartment in the basement, and is in charge of a teacher in a —— school, who donates his services. The girls receive practical instruction in various branches of housework. For this purpose a number of —— ladies offered the use of their homes for instruction. . . . There are four teachers, and four departments of housekeeping taught,—laundry work, mending, cooking, and general housework, the latter including bed-making, care of the table, dish-washing, sweeping, cleaning, and general thrift. . . . To the mending class they take their own family stockings and clothes to darn, and to the laundry their own clothes to wash. They take tin pails to the cooking class, in which they take home the food they prepare. In the general housework class they have one lesson in bedroom, one in dining-room (clearing and setting a table), one in kitchen (including dish-washing), one in sweeping and dusting, and the other two classes in systematically applying the former lessons in putting a whole house to rights. A class in physical culture, also, meets once a week. “Now isn’t that fine?” I hear you saying. Well, perhaps it is for these times in which we live. If boys and girls are permitted to run the streets, with no thought on the part of their parents of giving them any training in these common every-day necessary duties, then of course some one should take pity on the poor children and try to help them. And since our streets are lined with boys and girls who are simply drifting about as so much useless material, we say, All honor to the noble women who are trying to gather them in and teach them to be useful. But what a sad commentary on many of the fathers and mothers of this age, that it should seem necessary for such schools to be started! Imagine, a person coming to a true father and asking that his boys might attend such an evening club-school. The reply would be both prompt and spirited: “The place for our boys at night is at home. They must go early to bed in order to arise in time in the morning to get the chores out of the way so that we can get an early start at our work. When we become incompetent at home, then it will be soon enough for us to call on the neighbors to assist in caring for our children of evenings.” “But,” you say, “such a humdrum life of early going to bed, early rising, and work, will make home distasteful to the boy.” Don’t you believe such doctrine for a moment. Those of us who were raised under the old method remember too well those happy evenings that we spent at home for them ever to be anything else but the brightest spots in our lives. There were the books and papers we had to read, the instructive stories that father and mother would tell us, and all of the hundred things that made every evening altogether too short; then those holidays that we spent in the woods, or in journeying to places we had never visited before, or occasionally in play with some of the neighbors’ children, father and mother of course joining in it all and enjoying it even as did the children. Any “humdrum” in home life?—Not a bit of it. Any of those boys “go to the bad”?—Not one of them. Then how about that club-school for girls, where they are taught to wash, and iron, and mend, and cook, and make beds, and wash dishes, and sweep? My imagination paints a very vivid picture at the thought of some one coming to the real mother to ask that her girls attend such a school. “Why,” she would say, “do you mean to insinuate that my Mary, and Lucinda, and Catharine, and Margaret can’t do such common household duties as making beds and washing and ironing and such like? Do you suppose I would ever allow my name to be tarnished by the disgrace of sending my girls out upon the world without such essential qualifications as the necessary duties of housework? Never! The very idea that you would want to teach my girls such things! You7just come over for dinner some day, and you may select whichever girl you choose, and we will have it demonstrated that she can prepare a meal, and do any of the work about the house, in the most approved manner.” But we are sorry to say that all children are not blessed to-day with such parents. And so let the good work go on of gathering in the unfortunate and teaching them. But what a confession for our American parents to have to admit that there is a need for such schools! The best place, and the only perfectly natural place, for children to be taught these every-day duties is in the home. But children are not always welcome at home, hence their neglect. If the children of to-day could have more real, practical, happy, and natural home life, and less school outside, they would know more and be much better in every way. T.