Carl and the Cotton Gin

by Sara Ware Bassett

"Oh, I remember scraps of it. It said at the outset that nobody really knew when people began to spin. Most likely they got the idea from pulling out fibers of cotton or wool long as they could make them with their fingers, and then twisting the stuff together into larger and longer threads. As they could do this better if they had the end fastened to something, they got the notion of using a stick or some sort of spool or spindle to wind the thread up on as they made it. They would go walking round with a mass of material under one arm and this crude spindle with the thread on it under the other. The book said that even now in certain foreign countries there were peasants who did this. It was during the reign of Henry VII that spindles and distaffs first appeared in England. Afterward people improved on the idea and made spinning wheels. The people of India had had these long before, so you see they weren't really new; but they were new to England. To judge from the book they weren't any great shakes of spinning wheels; still they were better than nothing. Later on the English got finer ones such as were used in Savoy and these not only had a spindle but a flyer and bobbin. It was most likely these Saxony wheels that started inventors trying to make something that would be better yet."

Holding the plug he was whittling for his double-runner up to the light, Carl halted.

"I think you've done pretty well, son," remarked his mother over the top of her sewing.

"I think so too," Carl returned with unaffected candor. "I had no idea when I started that I could remember so much. I guess it was because I was interested in the story and wasn't trying to learn it. When you think you're learning things, you get to saying them over and over until by and by what little sense there is in 'em seems to evaporate. At least, that's the way it is with me. If I could just read and not keep thinking that I was trying to learn I'd get on twice as well. Even this page of stuff would have looked different if I'd been going to learn it. You see, you never have the chance to learn what you want to at school; it's always what they pick out for you. Naturally you don't care as much about it as you would if it was what you'd chosen yourself."

Mrs. McGregor could not resist smiling in sympathy with this philosophy of education, novel as it was.

"Now what the teacher sent me to look up in that book," went on Carl, "was some old foreign treaty. Of course I read it over because she made me. But do I remember a line of it? Nix! I told her what the book said as fast as I could, so to get it off my soul before I forgot it. I don't see what she cared about it for anyway, for it didn't seem to hitch up to anything. But this spinning business hitched right up to Uncle Frederick, Hal Harling and what we've been talking about. I don't see why Miss Dewey couldn't have let me alone to learn about that."

"Probably she didn't dream you were interested in it," said Mary. "How should she, pray?"

"I know it. I suppose she didn't," answered Carl with fairness. "She certainly is no mind reader; and I didn't mention it."

"Then don't go blaming poor Miss Dewey," Mary retorted. "Besides, what kind of a school would she have if every child in it refused to learn anything but what he cared about. She would have fifty kids all going fifty different ways."

Carl sighed. Plainly the flaws of the educational system were too many for him. Nevertheless he attempted a modest defense of his theory.