HOME AND EDUCATION

...WILEY, chemist in the Department of Agriculture, who has rendered the nation special service by his advocacy of the Pure Food Law, is reported as having spoken recently against coeducation and the higher education of women on the ground that their education should prepare them particularly for the care of the home...

...The conservation of human resources must ultimately plan for woman's life and woman's work as broadly as it has done for men...

...Conducted by BELLE CASE LA FOLLETTE and CAROLINE L. HUNT Moral and Physical Habits OUR FIRST subscribers will remember that I began my writing with a series of informal health talks...

...Give the beginning momentum that will carry us over the difficult part of the road...

...There were time-sheets to be sure, and cost-sheets and a certain amount of division of iabor, all suggestive of factory life, but there were besides instruction in arithmetic and drawing and history and geography and the opportunity to get acquainted with good literature and a chance for physical education and training...

...I hesitated to continue the lessons, fearing that it might not be possible to awaken by written directions the interest necessary to make them of practical value...

...Wiley is engaged should give him a wider outlook...

...If she does marry, it brings her to the period when childbearing imposes its necessary limitations, not so well prepared as she might be, for carrying on her special work in hours of leisure...

...I should think that toy-making would be good work for other schools than those from which the outlook is in the direction of trade...

...We have not only the investigations of William Hard and Rheta Childe Dorr to emphasize it, but President Thomas of Byrn Mawr says: "Everything seems to indicate that women will not only make their way into all, except a few of the trades and professions, but that they will be compelled, by economic causes beyond their control, to stay in them after marriage...

...She is free from the care of young children, and if she were not handicapped by inexperience, she could enrich her own life, and add to her usefulness by systematic work in her own line...

...The training must be systematic and continuous until there is no longer need of conscious effort...

...If we wish to reduce flesh, we should not pretend to modify our diet and increase our exercise just as a matter of choice...

...But this place where I saw the work in progress was not a factory...

...And yet there are, here and there, indications that the gap between factory and school is being bridged...

...The need of it was demonstrated not so very long ago by the Commissioner of Education in New York State where conditions differ little from those in Massachusetts...

...We should not cease our effort until we have made a perceptible bodily improvement in the direction in which we are aiming...

...That is where Mrs...

...To childr3n of this age, whose interests are bounded by the ego, the strongest appeal is through articles of construction useful in carrying out their own play interests...

...2) In forming new habits and overcoming old ones we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong an initiative as possible...

...Later the unfortunate effect of this failure to recognize and cultivate talents becomes most apparent...

...Later, courses in manual training and cooking were started and carried on till the school board adopted them, too...

...There is no wrong to the child in work...

...All of which means that it should be primarily a part of the child's preparation for life and not a source of private profit to an employer...

...Just a lttle systematic daily discipline will harden and fortify the body against unusual demands and strain upon it, which will come, even to the most fortunate at times...

...Suppose we are narrow chested...

...3) Never suffer any exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted...

...their greatest wrong is the deprivation of the right to work, the right to participate in the great productive process of life...

...The work in which Dr...

...In some of the larger cities of the country, trade schools are being established to take boys and girls when they finish the grammar grades or when they are fourteen years of age and prepare them for trades if they want to be so prepared or their parents want them to be...

...Probably it would be the artistic eye that would be most frequently wanting—that is a scarce commodity everywhere...

...Lettering is certainly good training for the eye as well as for the hand...

...But the other day I met a friend who told me she had reduced her hip measurement five inches by the exercises I had suggested for conquering the flesh habit...

...5) Have faith in a rational effort to secure the normal...

...Now a new experiment is being made...

...But that women's education should be limited to domestic subjects, or that women should be educated separately from men, does not follow...

...only in the conditions under which it is performed...

...On the other hand, if the intelligent, educated women of the country who are able to recognize their obligation arising from changed conditions, had not been organized in clubs ready to support the Pure Food Law with all their power, its passage could never have been secured...

...He became interested to find out what proportion of the children who enter the first grade get as far as the eighth and he says he was as much surprised as anyone to find it was only four in every ten...

...If your physician prescribes walking as a remedy for illness, follow his directions with at least as much confidence as though he had told you to take pills...

...Alvin E. Dodd, principal of the North Bennet Street School, says about the work: "It is distinctly an appeal to the child's love of construction utilized for the expression of his play spirit...

...Having convinced ourselves that something can be accomplished, there is much greater incentive to work...

...It does not seem quite fair to let these boys and girls prepare themselves for industrial life just at the time when other boys and girls are beginning to get ready for college, but we have to face the fact that we permit them to go into industry at the age of 14 and if we do that, it is only fair to give them a chance to prepare for it...

...Never was mutual cooperation of men and women so important to the solution of social and labor problems as today...

...These subjects, affecting as they do every side of human life, and representing the accumulated experience of the race, open up a most important educational field...

...They are compelled to do it and are fortunate if in their hard struggle they can earn a livelihood, and be decent and honest...

...It should be remembered that women are not to blame for industrial conditions that force them to leave their homes and their home-work...

...Toy Making in the Schools AWISE teacher of manual training, Professor William Noyes, of Teachers' College, a man whose vision extends far beyond the boundaries of his work-shop and his study, said in a recent address: "The greatest loss that modern life inflicts on children is not the loss of play, not the loss of home-advantages, not the loss of out-of-door and country associations serious and dreadful as all these are...

...Education of Women for Care of the Home DR...

...You will see on this page some of the designs made by the director of manual training, Mr...

...However we may regard the invasion of women into the work of the world, we must recognize it as a fact...

...They were the outgrowth of a number of years' work with a physical culture club, of which I was President some ten years...

...To assume, as Dr...

...This is what Mr...

...It is these same women who are fighting now for its maintenance and enforcement...

...Quincy Shaw's money made it possible, years ago, to experiment with kindergartens till their value was so proved that they were taken over by the public school system...

...Later in the North Bennet Street Industrial School in Boston I saw young lads making toys, "participating in one of the great productive industries of life," for toy making is a great industry and it gathers many little children into factories, there joylessly to create joy for others...

...Any Rip Van Winkle plan of improving the bodily habits will not be successful...

...Wiley appears to, that women should be prepared exclusively for home making and to limit their education to those matters purely, is as narrow as to naintain that because men are engaged chiefly in business they should receive a purely business education...

...In order that this strong statement may not be misunderstood, it should be taken in connection with that which followed and which emphasized the fact, so familiar to us all, that the only way in which modern industrialism has provided work for the children is under conditions so horrible that the very word child-labor has become a shame and a disgrace...

...Incidentally it might be suggested that the row at the bottom, if repeated several times, would make an interesting and decorative frieze for a child's room...

...1-2 hour General exercises.............................1 1-2 hours Intermissions................................1 1-2 hours Total ..................................25 1-2 hours It was the boys in this school that I saw making toys, cutting out animals and quaint little peasant figures with jig-saws, mounting them on boards and sometimes on rollers and painting them...

...the huddling of other great masses together in factories where training and education have no place, all this presents a very serious situation and one which at times seems almost hopeless...

...And let us remember that no effort made in the true spirit toward health, toward perfection of life, is ever lost...

...Certainly the equipment required for the work would be very little—just a jig saw and a little paint and an artistic eye somewhere in the neighborhood...

...I am, therefore, encouraged to resume the lessons, taking up other important subjects...

...But how about the sixty per cent, that fall by the wayside before they get into the eighth grade...

...We should consider it in the same light as educational improvement...

...It means," she says, "a waste of time in early life and frequently failure to find a life work suited to the individual woman's natural endowment...

...Make circumstances aid in every way...

...Women must be enlightened, liberally educated, coeducated with men to fully understand their obligations and prepared to do their part in the preservation of right standards and ideals...

...After covering the ground in a general way, I took up the subjects of poise and proportion along the lines of our class work...

...Though we may come far from reaching the ideal, though we finally succumb to the influence we bravely resist, the effort rightly to meet it has its reflex influence upon our own character, and, bv example, upon the character of others...

...4) We should keep the faculty of effort alive by gratuitous exercise every day, diet occasionally when well, walk sometimes when we would rather ride, work when we do not need to...

...In another issue of La Follette's, reference was made to a promising experiment being conducted in Pasadena and a few days ago, in Jamaica Plain, I saw boys in the schools making catalogue-card cases and other small pieces of office furniture for the city, thus actually doing some of the necessary work of the community...

...It is an interesting experiment, that school, being carried on in a place where many other interesting experiments have been made—a picturesque old church building in the North End of Boston...

...6 hours Geography and history.......................3 1-3 hours Drawing, free hand and mechanical............1 1-3 hours Hygiene and personal habits...

...It is women of education and experience who see their obligation to home and society most clearly, and are helping most effectively to meet it...

...We should not keep the intention of making bodily improvement a secret, as though it were something to be ashamed of...

...It should be a part, not of factory-life but of home- and school-life, should be related to play and association with the out-of-doors and the country...

...Then I would add one that I consider of great importance...

...It is the fact that the preparation of so much of our food is entirely beyond the control of individual women that creates the necessity for such a law...

...I will place (1) imperative necessity of securing success at the outset...

...Miss Hunt, in her interesting little book, "Home Problems from a New Standpoint," says limiting women's education to preparation for home-making defeats one of the first purposes of education,—the discovery and development of special talents...

...So it has induced the School Beard to lend it twenty boys from the grammar grades (their parents to have consented) and it is giving them what it calls a preparatory vocational course...

...We should keep at work until we have increased the chest measurement...

...We can never get rid of the idea of self help, and the lungs once started on the right road, will continue to improve...

...W. W. Lunt...

...This is their weekly program: Shop work—wood and metal.................6 hours —printing ........................2 hours Practical mathematics........................3 1-3 hours English literature and composition...

...On the one hand, if women were altogether employed in domestic duties, as formerly, when all the food for the family was prepared in the home, there would be no need of a* national pure food law...

...The separation of the work of life from the work of preparation for life, the segregation of great masses of young people in schools where they have no part in the useful labor of the world...

...If the sanctity of the home is at stake, men and women are alike interested in the preservation of its essential idea...

...If she does not marry, it affords an unnecessary handicap to her in a business and professional life...

...Last summer at a convention in Denver he was reported as having taken women severely to task for allowing their families to be poorly fed and poisoned by reason of their failure to attend personally to their marketing, and to the inspection of their ice-boxes...

...When I got lost the next day in a blinding snow storm in a town where the streets were not marked, and missed my train, I wondered why school children could not make street signs...

...The North Bennet school thinks that some of them, at least, could be saved if they could be given an idea of what a trade education is like, and what it would mean to them in later life...

...We should make our intentions known to our friends...

...In the beginning I want to suggest that most of the maxims laid down by ethical writers respecting moral habits apply equally well to physical habits...

...The influence of these women has secured the introduction of the study of domestic science and arts into our schools...

...The skill developed by the use of such tools as are proper for the age is just as great as that developed through the construction of other models, and the interest is much greater...