That failure back in 1903 was the seed-ground of later success. The community was interested to the extent of a thousand dollars at least. The manufacturers were not only interested in education, but were willing to support it financially. There was a change of administration. Mr. F. B. Dyer became Superintendent of Schools and at once met the situation by establishing a manual training center in the Oyler School.
III Solving a Local Problem
The end was not yet, however. The truant officers and the Juvenile Court were still busy keeping Oyler children out of mischief and in school. The conventional type of manual training—one period per week in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades—was not holding the pupils.
“The children were not getting enough manual work to establish either habit or efficiency,” Mr. Voorhes comments, “besides, this work reached only to the sixth grade. At this time there were in the school fifty boys and girls below the fifth grade who were from two to five years behind their normal classes. That is to say, they were—most of them—of that unfortunate class that has seen more trouble in a few years than most of us see in a lifetime. I was constantly asking myself: ‘Where do these folks come in?’ ‘What is our school doing to help their function in life?’ ‘Are we really of any assistance to them after all?’ ‘Is it worth their while to come to our school?’ My sympathy for the pupils was constantly growing, and I went at last in desperation to the superintendent with a plan for a revolution in the organization of my school, a revolution that I was sure would meet the needs of the community and one upon which I was willing to stake my reputation if I had any.”
At this point it is worth remembering, parenthetically, that Cincinnati school men have a habit of going about their school problems in very much that spirit, beginning by sizing up the needs of the community, continuing by becoming imbued with an idea of the community needs and ending by presenting this idea to the school authorities and getting—within bounds—carte blanche to make their schools serve the locality in which they are situated.
This was Mr. Voorhes’s experience. He was told to go ahead and make good—a permission of which he availed himself in an astoundingly short space of time by introducing a system of applied education, aimed to meet the needs of the children who attended the Oyler School.
“There is a peculiar situation,” said Mr. Dyer, “and it needs peculiar handling. You have only one problem to solve—that of the west end. Go ahead!” Mr. Voorhes did go ahead with a plan under which all children in the sixth and seventh grades were given three periods a week in laboratories and shops. Subnormal pupils in the third, fourth and fifth grades were to have four and one-half hours (one school day) for applied work each week. In order to give special help to backward pupils they were sent in small groups to the seventh and eighth grade teachers while their classes were doing applied work. Below-grade children go to the eighth grade teacher for special work in arithmetic and geography, and the seventh grade teacher for English and history. In this way the backward children from the lower grades have special training by the best equipped teachers in the school.
The eighth grade pupils give one-fifth of their time to applied work. During the year the boys have, in addition to the shop-work, twenty lessons in preparing and cooking plain, substantial meals. To make this “siss” work palatable to the sterner sex much of it takes the form of instruction in camp life—cooking in tin cans and other handy home-made devices. In a community where boys have always been trained to regard home work as menial, but where the absence of servants makes a “lift” from the husband or brother such a Godsend to the wife at odd times, the value of giving grade boys a taste for cooking can hardly be over-estimated.
The boys also receive twenty lessons in the simpler forms of sewing—darning, hemming, sewing on buttons. At the same time the girls are taught the use of simple tools.