Rensselaer Republican, Volume 12, Number 26, 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 essence of home, the deas* est spot on earth, pervaving every nook and recess. In this country where rich and poor alike are 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 this 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. Tho children of toil should meet a “Highland welcome” in tlie school. “Red tape”destroys this. Where so much form exists, sociability is excluded. Military discipline may be the thing for the army, but it kills a school. The teacher by its means may secure a “quiet school,” but it will be 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 tho colleges and normal schools where teaohers ave educated, they would regard it as a holi* day. The teacher, by making his school a pleasant home and treating his pupils as trusted and esteemed companions, drawing no line of demark ation betweeu the rich and poor, treating old and young alike, cultivating interest in all his pupils, and befriending “even the' least of these,” no matter how or where his lot be cast. “I have no home;” for ho will have a home in the hearts of the ohildrcn, a dwelling place in the kiud 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.