Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 May 1892 — SHOULD BE ATTRACTIVE [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

SHOULD BE ATTRACTIVE

SCHOOLROOMS OUGHT TO BE MADE INVIVING. L*t Parents and Teachers Unite Their Efforts In This IMreetton—That «« Hard School "—The Molding Board—What Is Good Order? The Schoolroom.

LITTLE children should be happy in school. An effort should be made by * ho teachers and to put them —J into this frame of mind. There are r scores of ways in whioh this may be done. The most suggestive, problies in making the surroundings

and physical conditions promote the comfort of body and mind. Early in ; the eighteenth century Bulwer wrote: .“Wherever you see a flower in a cottage garden, or a bird-cage at the cottage casement, you may feel sure that the inmates are better and wiser than their neighbors.” The observation has lost none of its force. Our environments .singularly shape and control, within certain limits, our thoughts and feelings, and not unfrequently our purposes ;and actions. We despise shabby and Ineglected surroundings, be they walls, I floors, furniture or premises, and storm and rush through them without feel'ing one Impulse of restraint or respect. Their language is in a strange tongue, and grates upon the nerves of sense. They seem to Shave nothing in common with the current of living events, but to belong to things that are useless and have lost their affinity with life. But we have a | keen sense of the ohqerful. At onoe wo are in touch with the noblest impulses of nature when brought in oontact with conditions that appeal to taste and refinement. Childhood moves along the same plane. Give the ohildren plenty to enjoy through the senses. Let them freely commune with objects in their surroundings that are suggestive of beauty and neatness. Enoourage them to take an interest in flowers, plants, pictures and oare of property. Have plants on every window, neat pictures on the walls, scrupulously clean furniture and floors, plenty of sweet, cheerful air and light, a cozy tone permeating every movement of the school. Seek to make the children happy. Multiply your efforts to endear school-life to them. Believe that you have not discharged your whole duty until you have done this. What teacher will stand up and say, “Impossible!”— School Forum.

“That Hard School."

Miss Grey was asked to take the school, but they told her that it had driven out four teachers in succession. She was not large, not muscular, just an ordinary-looking little woman with extraordinary will power. She was advised to “whip those pesky boys the first chance" she got. Everybody was ready with advice. It was really kind of them, she thought, and she told them so. They talked, and she listened. They went away just a little bit perplexed. They had told her what they should do, but she had not told them what she would do. It piques us to be treated courteously, not confidentially, by people to whom we condescend to give advice. She looked like a person who would be glad of advice, but when you grew better acquainted with her she really had a provoking, thoughtful, strange way of weighing your words and looking very much as if she were weighing you, too. Well, school began. The pupils looked for such a teacher as they were used to; instead they found Miss Grey. She rang the bell, read the Bible, and ordered them all about in a masterful way, which was a quiet way—a determined way—a watchful way—a thorough way. She specified how Bhe wanted the pupils to sit and insisted on their sitting just that way; and withal she was so ladylike and polite to them that they just let her have her way. Day after day, steadily, the school grew into order, and outside of school the pupils had no nicknames for Miss Grey. She was simply Miss Grey. The school had found its mistress.

What Is Good Order? The teacher*ls sometime? so anxious for a quiet school that he etherizes the intellect in order to paralyze the muscles, to the end that quiet may reign. He forgets that good order is only a means to an end; that it is in no sense an end; that it is at the best an unfortunate necessity, an unnatural condition that keeps coltish children physically inactive for five hours a day. The end is mental feeding and intellectual exercising for growth and development in this direction, and experience teaches that the greatest amount of the best results are economically attained by feeding and exercising several minds at once; and such is the freakishness of children in the mass that they can only be treated skillfully when theyare in such physical subjection as to be loyal to the commands'of a superior. Whoever has the tactto secure the highest intellectual activity of the right kind, without giving special attention to the Btillness of the school, has attained high art in school management. The old-fashioned committeeman, who went the rounds of the school once a term to see how the children sat, and wrote a report once a year to tell the taxpayers that Miss Z of district No. 5 did not keep as good order as Miss A of No. 1, whose children did not move a foot, slate, or book with the slightest noise, has found his occupation gone. Good order is now estimated by good work, not by stillness; by intellectual activity rather than by physical inactivity; by life rather than death. The Molding Board. Much of the molding done in sand is lacking in character and purpose; is less real and illustrative than the play in mud. We occasionally find'a firstclass use of the board, however. The accompanying view is of a molding

board in a kindergarten—Mrs. Carolyn M. N. Alden’s, Providence—taken literally from a photograph. The little ones make mountains that are genuinb in their eyes. There are rounded hills, lesser mountains, and a towering peak.

Why They Fail.

Strange as it may seem, there can be too much intellectuality in the schoolroom. Many a teacher of fine mental endowments has failed in her chosen laVdr, because unable to get down to the crude* untutored minds of her little oaes. Children do not take kindly to the abstract, and any knowledge or operation above their comprehension is an

abstraction to them. Dr. Boot, in hii “Story of a Musical Life,” tells of a criticism some of his friends made concerning his compositions. They were too simple: hi 6 talents were capable of higher flights. So he says, “At last I thought I would publish a song or two above the grade of the “People’s Song." This he did; and when the “old question” was put to him, “Why don’t you do something better?" he answered, “Have you ever seen or heard 4 Gently, Ah, Gently,’ or ‘Pictures of Memory?’ To which," he says, "they would have to answer, ’No,’ and I would say, ’That is why I do not write something better, as you call it.’ * And he adds, that he “should be wasting his time in supplying the wants of a few people when he had the multitude to feed.” It is just as true In the school-room, that the teacher who would succeed must adapt herself to the intellectual capacity of her children. It is the height of folly to shoot above their heads or to criticise and soold them because they are not mentally acufie or perfect in their manners. The teacher who gains the love of her pupils, and so succeeds, is one who always feeds the many and not the few.