We are in the eighth grade, and expect to go out into the world in January, and your process of making pins will be spread abroad to the whole world.
We are very anxious to know more about the making of pins, and we are very much interested in your process.
Yours sincerely,
Ruth Harrison.
Need I say that the American Pin Company sent immediately twenty duplicates of the desired pamphlet?
The work in this school where thought and activity go hand in hand, is done by the regular grade teachers—done, and done well. They are as enthusiastic as the pupils. Four years’ trial has convinced them. On the day that I visited the school, I walked into a classroom where twenty girls were busy sewing. The order was perfect. Every one was busy. The teacher was nowhere in evidence.
“That teacher,” explained the principal to me later, “is off at a teachers’ meeting. She left these girls on their honor to work. You see the result.”
I saw and marveled. Yet why marvel? Was not this a typical product of the system which knits thought and activity into such a harmonious, fascinating whole as the most fortunate adults find in later life? Out of such a school may we not well develop harmony and keen life? Never yet have men gathered grapes from thistles, but often and often have they plucked from fig trees the figs which they craved and sought.
XVII From a Blazed Trail to a Paved Highway
Pages might be filled with descriptions of similar successes, yet I think that my point is already sufficiently established. How can we disagree regarding so plain a matter? The path of educational progress has led away from the three R’s along a trail, blazed at first by a few men and women who dreamed and stepped forward hesitatingly. Often they retraced their steps, discouraged, and gave over the little they had gained. By degrees, however, the trail was blazed. The way became clearer. After all it was possible to connect education with life.
Slowly the light of this truth dawned upon men’s minds. Gradually the way opened before them. One by one they trod the path, bridging the worst defiles, straightening the road, cutting out the thickets and filling in the morasses, until at last, behold the way, explored by hesitating, derided pioneers, no longer a trail, but a broad highway. Others have gone—their name is legion—and have succeeded. The three R’s are but the beginning of an adequate elementary curriculum. You, in your own city, with your own teachers, can vitalize your elementary schools. You can teach the children to use their heads and hands together, and thus show them the way to a deeper interest in your schools, and a larger outlook on their work in life.