Community Servants
The basis for good citizenship having been laid through habit-formation in the civic virtues, the next step is for the children to learn how these virtues are being embodied in the people round about them who are serving them and their families. The baker, the milkman, the grocer, the dressmaker, the shoemaker, the carpenter, the plumber, the painter, the physician, the druggist, the nurse—these are the community servants who come closest to the life-experience of the children.
How dependent each member of a community—especially an urban community—is on all the rest, and how important it is that each shall contribute what he can to the community’s welfare, are illustrated by the stories of the Duwell family. Here a typical though somewhat ideal American family is shown in its everyday relations, as a constant recipient of the services rendered by those community agents who supply the fundamental need of food, clothing, shelter, and medical attendance. The children in the class will learn, with the Duwell children, both the actual services that are rendered and the family’s complete dependence on those services. Moreover, they will acquire the splendid working ideals of interdependence and coöperation. And, finally, they will discover that the adult citizens who are rendering them these services are embodying the very civic virtues in which they themselves have been so carefully trained.
Public Servants
The pupils are now ready to follow the services rendered by public servants such as the policeman, the fireman, the street cleaner, the ashes and garbage collector, the mail carrier; and by those who furnish water, gas, electricity, the telephone, the trolley, etc.; and these are presented in civics readers that follow this one. The civic virtues previously considered are again found exemplified to a marked degree; and the threefold idea of dependence, interdependence, and coöperation through community agencies finds ample illustration.
Training for Citizenship
But it is not enough for the pupils to stop with finding out what the community is doing for them. The essential thing in this citizenship-training is for the young citizens to find out what they can do to help things along. Civic activities are suggested both in the stories, poems, etc., in these books, and in the suggestive questions at the close of each chapter.
Like all texts or other helps in education, these civics readers cannot teach themselves or take the place of a live teacher. But it is believed that they can be of great assistance to sympathetic, civically minded instructors of youth who feel that the training of our children in the ideals and practices of good citizenship is the most imperative duty and at the same time the highest privilege that can come to any teacher.
J. Lynn Barnard.