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
It is to be hoped that every girl in the school above the age of ten
will enroll in the sewing class and not sit idly by while a few do
all the work. Very likely the household-arts teacher will organize a
home-cadet unit, just as the boys will be organized into farm-cadet
units. The girls will have their pledge of loyalty and perhaps will
wear their chevrons, badges, or buttons, and will enroll for specific
work in food, clothing, or shelter projects.
The agricultural teacher will have more than he can do. An effective
teacher in normal periods is always busy with his supervision of
home-project work, preparation of material for classroom teaching,
gathering of laboratory exhibits, etc. But in war time he must carry
on his shoulders still larger burdens. In the early spring he will
discontinue his formal agricultural teaching to the special vocational
group and broaden his work to include those who have not regularly
enrolled in the agricultural course. To the latter he will give some
very definite suggestions for immediate use on the farm; while the boys
who have been with him all winter will be excused from school to give
their entire time to their home projects. To those who have recently
come into the class there will be given special work in the classroom
which they may practice outside of school hours and which they can
follow for full time during the summer.
He will have a good deal to do with the farm-cadet idea, and in the
winter he will doubtless be thinking of the type of camp which he
will establish or with which he will be connected. He may decide that
he can do best by organizing a labor-distributing camp on his own
initiative, or that he will serve as an assistant at the state-farm
training camp, or that he will take his boys, if they are village boys,
to the outskirts of the village and establish a coöperative camp; or
he may get in touch with the teacher of biology in a city school and
offer the country schoolhouse and his services for a training camp
made up of city boys. It is assumed that he is in close touch with the
county farm agent; perhaps he is the local representative of the club
work which the United States Department of Agriculture is promoting;
and, of course, he is taking the responsibility of acting as agent in
his territory for the United States Boys' Working Reserve,--a really
wonderful organization full of immense possibilities.
This Boys' Working Reserve movement started under the auspices of the
United States Department of Labor in coöperation with the Council of
National Defense, for the purpose of mobilizing young men between the
ages of 16 and 21 for productive labor in the war emergency.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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