Strange, good things have followed the visits of the mothers to the schools. They would never have come had it not been for the wonderful things which their children were learning with such untoward enthusiasm. One girl, who had been particularly successful with her needlework, brought her mother to school—a hard woman who had a standing quarrel with seven of her neighbors at that particular time. It took a little tact, but when the right moment arrived Miss Belle suggested that she pay a visit to a sick neighbor and offer to help. The woman went at last, found that it was a very pleasant thing on the whole to be friendly, and carried the glad tidings into her life, substituting kindness for her previous rule of incivility. To her surprise her enemies have all disappeared.
The mothers, coming to school to talk over the work of their children, have for the first time seen one another at their best. Sitting over a friendly cup of tea, chatting about Jane’s dress or Willie’s lessons, they have learned the art of social intercourse. Slowly the lesson has come to them, until to-day there is not a woman in the neighborhood who is not on speaking terms with every one else, a situation undreamed of five years ago.
Nine months in each year Miss Belle McCubbing holds her classes in the Locust Grove School, which stands on the Military Pike, seven miles outside of Lexington, Kentucky. “Angels watch over that school,” says Mrs. Faulconer. Doubtless these angels are the good angels of the community, for in six years the bitterness of neighborhood gossip and controversy has been replaced by a spirit of neighborly helpfulness. Boys and girls, doing Miss Belle’s “busy work,” fathers and mothers learning from their children, have heaped upon Miss Belle’s deserving head the peerless praise of a community come to itself—regenerated in thought and act, turned from the wretchedness and desolation of the past to the light and civilization of the future, saved and blessed by the lives of a teacher and her children.
CHAPTER XI
WIDE-AWAKE SLEEPY EYE
I Fitting Schools to Needs
This is the story of a school that was built to fit a town, and it begins with a hypothetical case. Suppose that there was a town—a prosperous town of some 2,247 souls, set down in the middle of a well-to-do farming district. As for business, the town has a few industries and some stores; the countryside is engaged in general farming. Suppose that the school board of such a town should come to you and say: “We are looking for a school superintendent. Are you the one?” Suppose you said, “Yes.” How would you prove your point?
Out in Minnesota there is a town named Sleepy Eye, set down in a well-to-do farming district. At the head of the Sleepy Eye schools there is J. A. Cederstrom. Mr. Cederstrom has proved by a very practical demonstration that he is “the one.”
When Mr. Cederstrom took charge of the Sleepy Eye schools he found an excellent school plant, an intelligent community and a school system that was like the school system of every other up-to-date two-thousand-inhabitant town in the Middle West. Before Mr. Cederstrom there lay a choice. He could continue the work exactly as it had always been carried on, improve the school machinery, and make a creditable showing at examination time. That path looked like the path of least resistance. Mr. Cederstrom did not take it, however. Instead he made up his mind that after measuring the community and the children he would, to use his own words, “fit the work to their respective needs.”