“We need something to make us stronger mentally, and something to abolish the truant officer.”
Many of the children are quite sure that the exhibit was for the instruction of the “lower classes” only, and have a pleasant feeling of superiority as they speak of its influence. Says one with some indignation:
“The thing impressed me as if the Italians and Germans were having more done for them than the Americans and respectable people.”
And finally ends a mournful letter with the conclusion many other observers have reached before her:
“The impression of the whole exhibit on me was that it is slow work.”
It is of course impossible to draw any hard and fast rules as to the effect of exhibit material upon an adult audience from these letters of school children. Certain things, however, are of enough significance to warrant attention on the part of exhibitors. With the exception of the moving picture exhibit all these different features were about as interesting to the children in the seventh and eighth grades as to those in the fourth, fifth and sixth. Difference in age seems to have little to do with the strength of the impression received. The fact that children acted in the entertainments and motion exhibits probably accounts in part for their interest in these two forms of exhibit material, but it cannot account for the high per cent of attention paid to the tidy and untidy home, the moving pictures, the library, the clean and dirty dairy, or the clean and dirty market. Entertainments interested them most, models next, then motion exhibits, and photographs least of all. Difference in age becomes a factor when considering the type of material rather than the individual exhibit, and we find interest in entertainments lessening, and that in photographs and diagrams increasing towards the higher grades. Through all the grades, however, models and motion exhibits receive very nearly the same amount of attention, and together receive more than half of all the references made. Among adults, it seems safe to assume that the relative order of interest would be the same.
SOCIALIZING THE COUNTRYSIDE
MARY H. FISHER
A little over three years ago, in the spring of 1910, a newcomer to the little town of Amenia, Dutchess County, New York, inspired perhaps by the glorious sweep of the twenty-five acre field on his recently acquired possessions, summoned to his home a handful of his neighbors and laid before them the germ of an idea which a few weeks later was to blossom into the full-blown Amenia Field Day. At the start, the newcomer offered the community his field, his time, his assistance in every way possible, and asked and obtained of them that spirit of co-operation which has made Amenia Field Day stand for what it does today. In 1910 the attendance was 3,000; each succeeding year, it has increased; in 1913, it was 10,000, and 1914 will doubtless see it bigger yet.
The Amenia idea has been described as “an experiment in co-operative recreation”; a high-sounding phrase, which means simply that the people of Amenia get together, plan together, work together to the end that one day a year they may play together.