Our Schools in War Time—and AfterDean, Arthur D. (Arthur Davis)
History
Our Schools in War Time—and After
Dean, Arthur D. (Arthur Davis)
Education -- United States; World War, 1914-1918 -- War work -- Schools
Dealing with boys under fifteen, as the average manual-training teacher
will, it is possible for him to develop a type of manual arts which
will serve to create or arouse a set of industrial interests helpful
to the boy in determining his life career. With every temptation to a
pupil to leave school, the manual-training teacher will now have an
unusual opportunity to make his work so attractive and economically so
helpful that the boy may see the advantage of paying no attention to
industrial-service inducements.
This is a time for increasing the field of usefulness of the industrial
arts in connection with the problems involved in the junior high
school. This type of school is certain to meet with increased favor
during and after the war, and the reasons are both educational and
administrative.
So much has already been said in several places in this book about the
service which cooking and sewing teachers may render, that it is hardly
necessary in this place to do more than give a very brief summary. As
supplies for cooking lessons become more expensive, the cooking teacher
must make more of demonstrations to pupils, and less, perhaps, of
actual practice. The war recipes which she uses must be mimeographed or
printed and given the pupils to take home. She must organize classes
for adults in unit courses and hold them afternoons and evenings. In
fact, she might well have the mothers come with the children during
the regular session and receive some special instructions which the
children receive. She will be busy the year round; her larger work
will begin when the schools close, in that she will start her canning
and community-club work. A situation can easily be conceived wherein
she will have in reality very little teaching responsibility in the
classroom. She will be looked upon as the community organizer for
all types of food conservation, and some of her older girls will, in
all probability, be teaching in the regular classes. Of course, she
will interest all the children in the school in saving bottles, jars,
crocks, large-mouthed bottles, tumblers, small wooden pails, etc. for
containers for the jams, preserves, and fruit juices which will be put
up. She will obtain all the new bulletins on processes of drying and
dehydrating. Perhaps she may have initiative enough to discover a fruit
crop which will not be picked except through her efforts. Perhaps she
will find an orphan asylum in the community filled with boys and girls
who can pick this fruit crop.
The sewing teacher has more than enough to do. If the Red Cross chapter
does not keep her busy, then she can keep the chapter active. With the
price of materials as high as it is now and the quality as poor, there
is plenty of opportunity to look over, in every home, the last year's
wardrobe. She might organize a Thrift Club. Enthusiastic youth will do
almost anything under the name of "club."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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