Destiny (verse)
O'Donnell, Charles L.
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...
...For thirty years the Belgian Ligue has functioned successfully, and now places itself at the disposal of all for information and material...
...The experimental stage has been passed without a single casualty...
...The work is non-sectarian, sponsored by a committee representing various countries as well as the great religious faiths...
...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...
...while every grade teacher blamed her failures on the rank below...
...high school teachers declared it impossible to pour high school subjects into minds that had not opened to grammar school instruction...
...Only in the really few essentials of our great objective need we be in full agreement...
...We hope to have the co6peration of the churches, the Mothers' Union of Great Britain, the United Irishwomen, and so on...
...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...
...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...
...The volume of appeals for advice was convincing refutation of the slnr that parents do not want to educate their children...
...Rather than create new organizations it is proposed to co6perate with existing groups that can undertake systematic work...
...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...
...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...
...The work is essentially preventive, and it addresses itself to private initiative...
...When questioned as to the cause, college heads faulted the high school for the lack of application and puerility of attainment in its graduates...
...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...
...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...
...Individuals may benefit by the plan without joining any group...
...they are merely fulfilling the r61e of the most ancient of social institutions: the family...
...Even a little of that hope had cleft My heart, I think, asunder...
...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...
...estiny One shall be taken and another left-The stacked sheaves wait in wonder...
...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...
...The financial outlay should be comparatively modest...
...More than any or all other causes combined, the source of delinquency is parental negligence and incompetence...
...Our aim, then, is to surround the earth with learning by way of the homes...
...that they only want to palm them off on the school...
...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...
...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...
...Then I opened a school of individual instruction and continued the effort to find out why bright children so often fail...
...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...
...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...
...In fulfilling their mission as educators, parents are not encroaching upon the territory of either church or school or state...
...The only real and lasting solution is the discipline of religion, obedience and work, through which is formed a character sturdy to resist temptation...
...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...
...CHARLES L. O'DoNNELL...
...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...
...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...
...Details are a matter of individual election...
Vol. 10 • August 1929 • No. 15
