Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 211, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 September 1918 — Many Forms of Vacation Service Open for Teacher Both in City and Country [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Many Forms of Vacation Service Open for Teacher Both in City and Country

By PHILANDER P. CLAXTON,

Ufflted Stoles Conmissioner of Education

I have every admiration for the woman who offers herself for Red Cross nursing, for canteen service in France, for ambulance driving behind the lines, or for the countless-other war tasks that women are doing so cheerfully and so well. But this is only a part of our war work, after all. The woman teacher in America today need have no concern as to where her patriotic duty lies. Not only is her task of teaching boys and girls one of supreme national and even military importance, as France has shown, but her position as teacher gives her an opportunity for leadership, par-

ticularly in the smaller communities, that is unsurpassed for direct national service. • It is from the point of view of possibilities in the home community, then, that I urge teachers to face the summer vacation.,For many patriotic ’teachers it need not be so much a change of scene as a change of activity. The suburban teacher who has been doing her work under the formal conditions that still prevail in too many schools can work her own garden or help work someone rise’s.' Better still, she can help her boys and girls in their home gardens, as a hundred thousand or more patriotic teachers are doing in the United States school garden army organized under the department of the' interior. It will help the food situation and the teacher who does this work will be a better teacher for her contact with thb soil. For the teacher who wants to do Bed Cross work there is the field of junior membership that has been opened up. Here, too, the teacher can not only help her children produce things for the soldiers but she will be getting something that will make her fundamental work of teaching better and she will be giving an example of the school’s influence in the community that will be valuable in the many more emergencies of the coming months and years. Many teachers will wish to go away for a rest and change, for a part of the summer at least. It is hard to think of a better rest and change for such teachers, if they must leave the community, than to go to some good summer school and learn how to do better the thing they are doing.