Democratic Sentinel, Volume 4, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 March 1880 — The School Home. [ARTICLE]

The School Home.

The school should be a home for the children. In the absence of a compulsory education statute, something ought to be done to make the school room attractive. What is that “something?” It is, it must be that es-ence of home, the dearest spot on earth, pervaving every nook and recess. In this country where rich and poor alike are j brought up in the same society, educated in the same school, and partaking in common of the equal blessings of freedom, there is much necessity of ibis home spirit on the school premises. The children of affluence accustomed to luxury and the surroundings of wealth, should find the equivalent for these in the home-like atmosphere of the school. The children of toil should meet a “Highland welcome” in the school. “Red tape”destroys this. Where so much form exists, sociability is excluded. Military discipline may be the thing for the army, hut it kills a school. The teacher by its means may secure a “quiet school,” but it will he the silence of mental death, the quiet of a broken spirit. If the children in most our “form schools” were permitted for a single day to take the liberties which are given to an equal number of adults in the colleges and normal schools where teachers are educated, they would regard it as a holiday.

The t eacher, by making his school a pleasant home and treating his pupils as trusted and esteemed companions, drawing no line oi demark, ation between the rich and poor, treating old and young alike, cultivating interest in all his pupils, and befriending “even the least ot these,” no matter how or where his lot be east. “I have no home;” for he will have a home in the hearts of the children, a dwelling place in the kind memories of men and women to be, and finally “blessings in the gales” before the King of teachers who taught a homelike school

near Galilee.

E. R. PIERCE.