A country school need not be idle during the summer. This one housed a group of farm cadets.
Flying squadron leaving camp on an emergency call for berry pickers at Highland, New York.
President Wilson has honored the school children of our country by a proclamation dated September 18, 1917, in which he calls upon them to do their part in the war by joining the Junior Red Cross, thus assisting in the mercy work of the senior organization. A portion of his message is quoted:
The school is the natural center of your life. Through it you can best work in the great cause of freedom to which we have all pledged ourselves.
Our Junior Red Cross will bring to you opportunities of service to your community and to other communities all over the world, and guide your service with high and religious ideals. It will teach you how to save in order that suffering children elsewhere may have the chance to live. It will teach you how to prepare some of the supplies which wounded soldiers and homeless families lack. It will send to you through the Red Cross bulletins the thrilling stories of relief and rescue. And, best of all, more perfectly than through any of your other school lessons, you will learn by doing those kind things under your teacher's direction to be the future good citizens of this great country which we all love.
Our President is a master of good pedagogy as well as a leader of men, and he expresses the very best in modern educational thought. He tells the children to think of their school as the natural center of their lives; to serve the community in which they live; to reach out through service and study to the larger world outside; to have behind all action high ideals; to save that others less fortunate may have; to learn how to do and through doing how to grow; to learn directly of the world of action while it is in action; to work with their elders for a common purpose,—the common purpose of being useful citizens of our great country.
CHAPTER IX
REËDUCATION OF THE DISABLED
In all probability not one person in a hundred ever heard the word "reëducation" before reading the very recent newspaper accounts of the government's plans as announced by Surgeon-general Gorgas for rehabilitating and reëducating the disabled soldiers. We have been in the habit of seeing blinded and crippled men selling lead pencils at street corners, and we have given our pity and our penny. We have seen the wonderful rugs woven by the blind (assisted in the designing and setting up by people who could see), and we have bought them, impelled by a sympathetic interest in a charitable cause. We have heard some exceptional person, who has overcome tremendous physical disabilities, describe her methods of studying college subjects and competing successfully with those who are unhandicapped, and we have said "How wonderful!" and stopped thinking at that point.
As a nation we have failed in our duty to make the physically handicapped economically self-supporting and normally strong. It is an educational problem as great as, if not greater than, that of assisting the mental defective.