CHAPTER III
THE REAL GIRL
What Is the Ideal Home?
A School Garden in Jordan Harbor, Ontario, Canada. Any Child Who has had this Experience, Who Has Produced or Helped Nature to Produce such Wonderful Things, will be Richer in Sympathy for Fine Things
Domestic Science Class. These Girls not only Cook but Learn about Foods, Housekeeping, Entertaining, and Themselves Keep Open House at the School Occasionally
Strange as it may seem, most of the plans for industrial training, the majority of school courses of study, and probably seventy-five per cent. of the books on the crafts and arts have been devised for the use of boys. Now there are hosts of girls in this world, probably as many girls as boys, and these girls are just as keen, intelligent, ambitious and curious about things and how to make them, as are boys. In very early childhood when both boys and girls have the same interests, similar books of amusement are used by both. But as girls develop the feminine point of view and need the stimulus of suggestion and aid in creative work, the literature for them seems meagre; they have somehow been passed by save for a manual now and then on cooking or sewing, left as a sop to their questioning and eagerness. This state of affairs is more than unfortunate, it is fundamentally wrong for two very good reasons. (1) The girl up to the age of twelve or thirteen has practically the same interests, pleasures and play instincts as the boy. She is perhaps not so keenly alive to the charm of mechanical things as the boy, but like all children regardless of sex, she seeks to be a producer. She is just as much absorbed in pets and growing things, in nature, in the current activities of her environment, and requires the same easy outlet for her play instincts as the boy. (2) The girl, when a woman grown, becomes the creator of the home, and too often enters upon her domestic career with a minimum of skill or taste in the great body of household arts, which in the aggregate, give us the material comforts and homely pleasures. Moreover, since she, as a girl, probably did not have the chance to satisfy her play desires and consequently never learned to do things herself, she is at a loss to understand the never ceasing, tumultuous demands of her own children for the opportunity to experiment. To quote Gerald Lee in the "Lost Art of Reading," which is one of the real modern books: "The experience of being robbed of a story we are about to read, by the good friend who cannot help telling how it comes out, is an occasional experience in the lives of older people, but it sums up the main sensation of life in the career of a child. The whole existence of a boy may be said to be a daily—almost hourly—struggle to escape being told things ... it is doubtful if there has ever been a boy as yet worth mentioning, who did not wish we would stand a little more to one side—let him have it out with things. There has never been a live boy who would not throw a store-plaything away in two or three hours for a comparatively imperfect plaything he had made himself...."
When one goes deep enough—below the showy veneer of present-day living—one comes to agree with Mr. Lee. The normal child, especially the boy, is potentially a creator, a designer, discoverer, and we have committed the everlasting sin of showing him short cuts, smoothing away difficulties, saying "press here." No child can survive the treatment.