Our Schools in War Time—and After

by Arthur D. Dean

It cannot be too emphatically stated that the war-service work of the elementary and secondary schools needs definite direction from the state departments of education if the unity of effort based upon directions common to all are to result not only in effective work but also in fulfilling the social and civic purposes which are behind the service.

This is an opportune time for the manual-training teacher to abandon his set of models. They should have been set aside long ago. His war-service duties will give an additional motive for socializing his work. In small cities and villages where there is plenty of land available for cultivation the director of manual training, on the first of May, ought to change his title and assume his duties as director of community gardens. He should have been preparing for this work by giving instruction in garden work in the manual-training room during March and April. Meanwhile he should have interested adults of the community in the plan of a garden where both old and young might work, and should have brought together civic forces to accomplish the purpose—a purpose which is educational, social, recreational, and useful.

Dealing with boys under fifteen, as the average manual-training teacher will, it is possible for him to develop a type of manual arts which will serve to create or arouse a set of industrial interests helpful to the boy in determining his life career. With every temptation to a pupil to leave school, the manual-training teacher will now have an unusual opportunity to make his work so attractive and economically so helpful that the boy may see the advantage of paying no attention to industrial-service inducements.

This is a time for increasing the field of usefulness of the industrial arts in connection with the problems involved in the junior high school. This type of school is certain to meet with increased favor during and after the war, and the reasons are both educational and administrative.

So much has already been said in several places in this book about the service which cooking and sewing teachers may render, that it is hardly necessary in this place to do more than give a very brief summary. As supplies for cooking lessons become more expensive, the cooking teacher must make more of demonstrations to pupils, and less, perhaps, of actual practice. The war recipes which she uses must be mimeographed or printed and given the pupils to take home. She must organize classes for adults in unit courses and hold them afternoons and evenings. In fact, she might well have the mothers come with the children during the regular session and receive some special instructions which the children receive. She will be busy the year round; her larger work will begin when the schools close, in that she will start her canning and community-club work. A situation can easily be conceived wherein she will have in reality very little teaching responsibility in the classroom. She will be looked upon as the community organizer for all types of food conservation, and some of her older girls will, in all probability, be teaching in the regular classes. Of course, she will interest all the children in the school in saving bottles, jars, crocks, large-mouthed bottles, tumblers, small wooden pails, etc. for containers for the jams, preserves, and fruit juices which will be put up. She will obtain all the new bulletins on processes of drying and dehydrating. Perhaps she may have initiative enough to discover a fruit crop which will not be picked except through her efforts. Perhaps she will find an orphan asylum in the community filled with boys and girls who can pick this fruit crop.

The sewing teacher has more than enough to do. If the Red Cross chapter does not keep her busy, then she can keep the chapter active. With the price of materials as high as it is now and the quality as poor, there is plenty of opportunity to look over, in every home, the last year's wardrobe. She might organize a Thrift Club. Enthusiastic youth will do almost anything under the name of "club."

It is to be hoped that every girl in the school above the age of ten will enroll in the sewing class and not sit idly by while a few do all the work. Very likely the household-arts teacher will organize a home-cadet unit, just as the boys will be organized into farm-cadet units. The girls will have their pledge of loyalty and perhaps will wear their chevrons, badges, or buttons, and will enroll for specific work in food, clothing, or shelter projects.

The agricultural teacher will have more than he can do. An effective teacher in normal periods is always busy with his supervision of home-project work, preparation of material for classroom teaching, gathering of laboratory exhibits, etc. But in war time he must carry on his shoulders still larger burdens. In the early spring he will discontinue his formal agricultural teaching to the special vocational group and broaden his work to include those who have not regularly enrolled in the agricultural course. To the latter he will give some very definite suggestions for immediate use on the farm; while the boys who have been with him all winter will be excused from school to give their entire time to their home projects. To those who have recently come into the class there will be given special work in the classroom which they may practice outside of school hours and which they can follow for full time during the summer.

He will have a good deal to do with the farm-cadet idea, and in the winter he will doubtless be thinking of the type of camp which he will establish or with which he will be connected. He may decide that he can do best by organizing a labor-distributing camp on his own initiative, or that he will serve as an assistant at the state-farm training camp, or that he will take his boys, if they are village boys, to the outskirts of the village and establish a coöperative camp; or he may get in touch with the teacher of biology in a city school and offer the country schoolhouse and his services for a training camp made up of city boys. It is assumed that he is in close touch with the county farm agent; perhaps he is the local representative of the club work which the United States Department of Agriculture is promoting; and, of course, he is taking the responsibility of acting as agent in his territory for the United States Boys' Working Reserve,—a really wonderful organization full of immense possibilities.

This Boys' Working Reserve movement started under the auspices of the United States Department of Labor in coöperation with the Council of National Defense, for the purpose of mobilizing young men between the ages of 16 and 21 for productive labor in the war emergency.