The Fireside Schoolma'am
Lynch, Ella Frances
378 T H E C O M M O N W E A L August I4, t929 passed a bill including literally hundreds of changes-- chiefly increases--in the tariff rates. It was estimated variously that the...
...Only in the really few essentials of our great objective need we be in full agreement...
...But when the Senator voiced that opinion publicly there was a prompt denial from the White House that the President had expressed any such views...
...We hope to have the co6peration of the churches, the Mothers' Union of Great Britain, the United Irishwomen, and so on...
...Out of it all comes the suggestion that perhaps the tariff, too, is a noble experiment which must be worked out constructively...
...Individuals may benefit by the plan without joining any group...
...It was estimated variously that the increases provided for by the House bill would raise the cost to the consumer by from $6oo,ooo,ooo to $8oo,ooo,ooo a year, and the cry went up that this was a general tariff revision...
...estiny One shall be taken and another left-The stacked sheaves wait in wonder...
...Senator Borah was called to the State Department and told by Secretary Stimson that the administration was very much disturbed by representations made by the Canadian minister against the proposed duties on shingles, lumber and feeder cattle...
...Without some reference to a crime problem, the magazine article of today presents an unfinished mien...
...When questioned as to the cause, college heads faulted the high school for the lack of application and puerility of attainment in its graduates...
...The experimental stage has been passed without a single casualty...
...If the right training of children were generally understood and faithfully practised, our chief problems would be solved normally by the fostering in early childhood of the habits which constitute upright character...
...After an analysis of Chicago crime it is reported that eminent authorities have placed the blame for lawlessness on low mentality...
...Rather than create new organizations it is proposed to co6perate with existing groups that can undertake systematic work...
...Among serious thinkers there is little divergence of opinion on this subject...
...We understand from the newspapers that there is such a problem and that our ablest criminologists and penologists are completely baffled by its solution...
...CHARLES L. O'DoNNELL...
...Our League has never countenanced the purchase of special equipment or devices or sets of books for the home school, but has sought to develop the seeing eye, the constructive imagination, which finds informative material in natural surroundings and everyday objects...
...This long-considered project has received fresh impetus from China's request for help in outlining a practical course of training for Chinese mothers in the home, and from Belgium's invitation to co6perate with her Ligue de l'Education Familiale in the instruction of parents everywhere for their mission as educators...
...The combined experience of forty-five years in this rich field, supplemented by wisdom gleaned from both the living and the deathless, should be made available to all parents...
...From that time on, the efforts of both Democratic and Republican senators to ascertain the President's attitude on the tariff have provided the most diverting summer entertainment in the national capital...
...THE FIRESIDE SCHOOLMA'AM By ELLA FRANCES LYNCH ee IF EACH of us would sweep the street in front of his own house, the whole street would be clean," says a Chinese proverb...
...The next step was to broadcast a request to parents to educate their children at home, supplementing it with a highly injudicious invitation to them to write to me for help...
...One generalization I shall venture to make: The smallest percentage of school failures comes from old-fashioned homes where old-fashioned discipline and training prevail...
...Others needed only a teacher's word to reassure them, and proceeded to educate their children in a manner entirely satisfying to local school heads even long after the age of school compulsion...
...As the family is the real social unit, acting on the formation of individual character more than all other influences combined, it is evident that the general well-being depends principally on perfecting that unit...
...For thirty years the Belgian Ligue has functioned successfully, and now places itself at the disposal of all for information and material...
...Even a little of that hope had cleft My heart, I think, asunder...
...they are merely fulfilling the r61e of the most ancient of social institutions: the family...
...Here in an August calm of sun they see The end that shaped the sowing-Which shall be bread and which of all shall be His Flesh, there is no knowing...
...Then came the Borah attempt to restrict the scope of the Senate Committee's consideration, as previously related, and the defeat of that attempt by virtue of administration votes in the Senate...
...Senator Watson of Indiana, the majority leader, and Senator Reed of Pennsylvania, had breakfast at the White House and returned to the Capitol to spread the news that the President wanted a "sane and sensible" tariff bill based on "the yardstick of adequate protection...
...The only real and lasting solution is the discipline of religion, obedience and work, through which is formed a character sturdy to resist temptation...
...To complete the performance, on the following day Senator Watson received a telephone call from the White House denying that the earlier denial had been issued...
...The remedies proposed range from shoals of psychiatrists to funds from philanthropists, and from centralized bureaus to "properly sensitized" school superintendents...
...In fulfilling their mission as educators, parents are not encroaching upon the territory of either church or school or state...
...This admonition out of the contemplative East will point the moral of the National League of Teacher-Mothers, which is fostering a world-wide movement to enlighten parents concerning their duty and privilege as the true educators of their children...
...The National League of Teacher-Mothers was not invented primarily to check a crime wave, but to attune the mind and heart of childhood to joyous learning and more abundant life...
...furthermore, that the New York State Committee on Mental Hygiene asserts there are in New York City public schools Ioo,ooo mentally deficient children, or one-tenth of the entire enrolment...
...Though the best minds are studying the industrial, commercial, maritime and financial betterment of the country, the future of America will be what the parents of today make it...
...The reformation of human beings is a difficult, complicated, expensive and uncertain process, whereas the forming of characters during the plastic years is a simple process of wise parental guidance and control, as inexpensive as it is heart-satisfying, and as certain of success as any known undertaking...
...So far the smoking-out process, designed to induce the President either to defend the bill or to disapprove of it, has been an entire failure...
...378 T H E C O M M O N W E A L August I4, t929 passed a bill including literally hundreds of changes-chiefly increases--in the tariff rates...
...When the story was printed Secretary Stimson issued a formal statement denying "unequivocally" that any protest had been received from Canada, and on the same day it was announced by the Cana.dian government at Ottawa that the attitude of Canada had been made very clear to the Washington administration through the Canadian minister there...
...The Democrats, with that lack of reverence customary on the part of minorities when dealing with majorities, have sought to smoke the President out by making all manner of charges to the general effect that the House bill constitutes legalized extortion and highway robbery...
...The work is non-sectarian, sponsored by a committee representing various countries as well as the great religious faiths...
...Within less than two hours there was an inspired denial from the White House that the President had said anything about "yardsticks" or "adequate protection...
...The results of this experiment in training parents by correspondence may be summed up briefly: Of 75,000 children educated by their parents before being sent to school, none has been labeled a school failure...
...Senator Jones of Washington, assistant majority leader, went to the White House for a conference and came away under the impression that the President wanted a bill restricted to agricultural commodities and a very few other schedules...
...Successful pupils have had their minds formed for learning before being sent to school...
...Twenty years ago the percentage of school failures was more spectacular than since our adjustment of the system to the gait of the unwilling, the unprepared and the unbalanced, so that the writer, who had had little contact with schooling and a great deal with books, was appalled and mystified by the repellent armor which learning seemed to wear for many pupils...
...The tariff bill has been a very fruitful source of official denials...
...while every grade teacher blamed her failures on the rank below...
...More than any or all other causes combined, the source of delinquency is parental negligence and incompetence...
...The volume of appeals for advice was convincing refutation of the slnr that parents do not want to educate their children...
...Our aim, then, is to surround the earth with learning by way of the homes...
...It is usual and convenient to speak of "mental defectives" as of poor human beings August 14, I929 T H E C O M M O N W E A L 379 handicapped from birth by an organic deficiency of brains, but many authorities on the subject do not so regard them, declaring that very often mental deficiency is wholly due to parental neglect...
...But Republican senators have had no better luck...
...That one-tenth of our children are congenital mental defectives will not be granted by responsible students of human life...
...high school teachers declared it impossible to pour high school subjects into minds that had not opened to grammar school instruction...
...Many of the solutions appear to the unsensitized cynic quite as dynamic as the recent world-shaking discovery that left-handedness is related to the curve of a person's hair...
...The financial outlay should be comparatively modest...
...The work is essentially preventive, and it addresses itself to private initiative...
...that they only want to palm them off on the school...
...The National League of Teacher-Mothers has been in active correspondence with parents for more than fifteen years, helping to educate children from infancy to adolescence...
...Lack of development of the will and the emotions results in a lack of balance, in wrong-mindedness, that cannot be remedied by schooling, segregation, courts, clinics or other common reformative agencies...
...Then I opened a school of individual instruction and continued the effort to find out why bright children so often fail...
...Details are a matter of individual election...
...Many letters were from parents who thought they could buy a patent process--"send me full instructions by return mail for educating my child at home"--while others appended "without cost or obligation to me...
...none has gone down before the crime wave...
...I soon learned that trying to instruct the children of delinquent parents is not unlike the housewife's effort to knead into a batch of resisting dough the yeast she neglected to incorporate at the beginning...
Vol. 10 • August 1929 • No. 15
