Rensselaer Union, Volume 11, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 May 1879 — A Plea for Sewing in Schools. [ARTICLE]

A Plea for Sewing in Schools.

The Boston Transcript, vigorously defending sewing classes ifi the public schools, asks: "If our girls are occupied ip school the same length of -time as the boys how can they boexpedted to sit down at home two hours at work for another instruction? What time could the mother find for such an instruction? Bow many fathers give' two hours a week to teaching their sons how to use the knife? It must be as easy for a boy to whittle as for a duck to swim, yet now many boys are good carpenters? It is not prohable that many men are able to do tbeir own plumbing or there are not many fathers.of families that save the carpenter’s bills by doing the fam-ily-carpentering. Certainly the masters the schoof would hardly undertake' to do the carpentering on the school buildings: .Yet the teachers, because they are women, are expeoted to be able to teach sewing by Nature, and in a community where sewing has never boon taught systematically until withifithe- “ Some years hence, if the present thorough teaching of sewing should be allowed to continue, every teacher who has received her education in pur pub*

lie schools will have learned to set? with as much thoroughness as she has learned her arithmetic and drawing. But Bow can she teaofc it n*w, when it has been a subject of instruction iystematically avoided In her education? The teacher of the future will be certainly incapable Of teaching it if any superficial pretense of instruction in tho schools takes tho place of a thorough, persistent teaching such as is now insisted upon in the schools. “ For the schools of the future tho fact may have become Acknowledged that a class of sixty ie too large for any teacher to teach anything, and some reform will have taken place in lessening the numbers for a class. While the classes are allowed to be so crowded .it is hopeless to. expect one teacher to teach sewing, even if she has been educated to teach it.”