Little Aliens Part 1

Little Aliens.

by Myra Kelly.

"EVERY GOOSE A SWAN"

An ideal is like a golden pheasant. As soon as the hunter comes up with one he kills it in more or less b.l.o.o.d.y fas.h.i.+on, tears its feathers off, absorbs what he can of it, and then sets out, refreshed, in pursuit of another. Or if, being a tender-hearted hunter, he tries to keep it in a cage to tame it, to teach it, to show it to his friends, it very soon loses its original character so that beholders disparagingly exclaim: "Why, it's only a little brown hen! Hardly worth the trouble of hunting."

But among the pheasant and the trout of the ideal hunting-fields the true relation between home and school flits ever along the horizon, a very sea-serpent. Every one has heard of it. Some have pursued it. Some even vow they have seen it. Almost any one is ready to describe it.

Expeditions have gone forth in search of it, and have come back empty-handed or with the haziest of kodak films. And the most conservative of insurance companies would consider it a safe "risk."

In every-day and ordinary conditions this relation between home and school is really a question of mother and teacher, with the child as its stamping-ground. Two very busy women, indifferent, hostile, or strangers to each other, are engaged in the formulated and unformulated education of the child. To the mother this child is her own particular Mary or Peter. To the teacher it is the whole generation, of which Peter and Mary are such tiny parts.

The ideal teacher is as wise as Solomon, as impartial as the telephone directory, as untiring as a steam-engine, as tender as a sore throat, as patient as a glacier, as immovable as truth, as alert as a mongoose, and as rare as a hen's tooth. But her most important qualification is the power to combine her point of view with the parental one, and to recognize and provide for the varieties of character, temperament, mentality, and physical well-being of the children intrusted to her care.

The average teacher--nearly as elusive as the ideal--is, to a surprising and ever-increasing extent, learning to do this. It is, in fact, a very large part of the law and the prophets in modern pedagogy. The teacher is expected to know, and she generally does know, what, in hospital parlance, is called the "history" of her pupils, and the newer schools are equipped with apparatus for making thorough physical examinations upon which the pupil's curriculum will largely depend.

As rare perhaps as the dodo-bird is the mother who takes an intelligent and helpful interest in the school life of her offspring. She generally regards the school as a safe house of detention, a sort of day nursery of larger growth. Mrs. O'Rourke will send Tim and Pat and Biddy and Jimmy and Mike and Delia, so that she may have leisure to take care of the twins and the baby, and to do the was.h.i.+ng; while Mrs. Fitz-Jones will send Robert Albert Walter Fitz-John Fitz-Jones, so that she may be--to quote Browning, and since he's dead whatever he wrote must be considered proper--"safe in her corset lacing," ere she sallies out to bridge. Occasionally the two powers for good and evil in the child's world meet. A large mother will drag a reluctant boy to school, and loudly bewail herself for that she can do nothing with him. He has been dismissed as unteachable by another teacher.

"He ain't, so to speak, bad, miss. He's just naturally ugly an' stoopid.

Look at him now," and she directs the general attention to the writhings of her victim. "Would you think I just washed and combed him an' came around--leavin' my housework, too--to ask you to try him? He don't appreciate nothin' I do for him. Just naturally ugly and stoopid."

It may take a week to undo the effects of this introduction and to gain the little chap's confidence. Then the teacher wheedles him through the physical examination and seeks further speech with the mother.

"Your little boy--" she will begin.

"He's been botherin' you, too, most likely. Him and me will have a settlin' this afternoon----"

"No, not that, please. I hardly know how to tell you. I'm afraid you have--we all have--been misjudging him. But have you ever had his eyes examined?"

"What fur?"

"His sight. He is--I hope you will be strong and brave about it--very nearly blind in his left eye, and the right is affected, too."

It has, on several occasions, been my unhappy duty to make some such announcement, and never has it been received twice in the same way. Some ladies entirely disbelieve, and set it down to the natural officiousness of teachers--"b.u.t.tin' in where they ain't got no call." Others will fall away into hysterics. Yet others will remark that their own eyes were unsatisfactory in earlier stages: "It's just growin', I guess. I outgrew the trouble before I was twelve." One mother accepted the facts frankly, took the child to an oculist, bought the gla.s.ses he prescribed, and applied the drops he recommended, until she inadvertently used the dropper to fill her fountain-pen. Soon the boy lost his gla.s.ses, and the incident was closed.

Ears and teeth, tonsils and adenoids, frequently furnish stumbling-blocks to education, but the teacher who reports them to the home authorities does so at the risk of wasting her time, or of being accused of causing or inventing the conditions. Recently the boards of education in the larger cities have been legislating for appropriations to be applied to free gla.s.ses, free dentistry, free professional services of all kinds to the children of the public schools. And the grat.i.tude of the parents--whose duties are being attended to--takes fearful and wonderful forms.

Philosophers, in their slow and doddering way, may question the exact part played by heredity in the formation of human character. Not so the mother. She has reduced the problem to a formula. All that is bad, hateful, and spiteful in the child is the direct contribution of his father or his father's house. All that is appealing, lovable, interesting, and most especially all that is "cute," is directly inherited from the female side. The only exception to this rule is the half-orphan. In his case one or two good qualities may be inherited from the deceased parent.

Once I taught a Gwendolin. She was a peculiarly abominable individual, as, poets to the contrary notwithstanding, a child may sometimes be. The cla.s.s was large, the school was a public one, and the curriculum prescribed from on high. There was no time for private instructions, and Gwendolin lagged far in the rear. She was late by habit; lazy by nature; and tearful by policy and experience. I spent hours which should have been devoted to the common good in setting down Gwendolin's tardiness, listening to her excuses, and drying her tears. Finally I sent for the mother, and a large, blonde, lackadaisical person responded to my call.

She came, contrary to regulations, during cla.s.s hours, and Gwendolin promptly began to howl at sight of her. It is, by the way, noted by most teachers and explained by few parents, that the sight of a face from home will generally produce hysterics.

Well, I allowed Mrs. Marks to undo the effect of her appearance, and with Gwendolin almost buried in the exuberances of the maternal costume and figure, she proceeded to explain that dear Gwendolin was always deliberate. It was her nature. We all, she hoped, were ent.i.tled to our natures. Gwendolin's dear father was always late for breakfast, and they never did, by any chance, see the first act of a play. She thought she would step around and explain this to me, knowing that I would make allowances for the sweet child. "For I always tell her," she beamed on me, "that her dear teacher would rather have her late every day in the year than ruin her stomach by eating too quickly." And as to her crying, well, Mrs. Marks opined, it was a very strong commentary on the manners and natures of the other children in the cla.s.s. Of course Gwendolin cried. Her mother cried. On the slightest provocation. Never could help it. Never hoped to be able to help it. Why, it was only that morning that Mr. Marks had remarked that any one who cried over the newspaper should wait until after breakfast to read it.

I controlled my true feelings sufficiently to ask her what effect an epidemic of Gwendolin's little characteristics would have upon my cla.s.s.

I urged her imagination to picture fifty children late every morning because their fifty fathers always missed the first act of a play, and fifty voices always raised in howls because fifty mothers wept upon one hundred poached eggs on toast.

"Oh, but dear me," purred Mrs. Marks, as she heaved herself to the perpendicular, shedding Gwendolin, a pocket-book, a handkerchief, and a fan--"oh, but dear me, my sweet Gwendolin is such an exceptional child."

There is another cla.s.s of parent from whom teachers suffer much. It generally has but one child, and that child is generally a pitiful, conscientious, earnest little creature in sombre hair ribbons and "Comfort" shoes. Very frequently this parent has been, in some prehistoric age, a teacher of mathematics in a high-school. Now, a spiritualistic seance at which Messrs. Froebel, Pestalozzi, Herbart, Locke, and Spencer should appear and explain their theories of education, and at which Professor James should come from Harvard to preside, while Professor John Dewey looked in to make a few remarks, would never persuade that parent that her child's progress was not to be gauged by an ability to spell obsolete words, and to worry her way through complicated problems in long division.

"Why, she's been to school every day for seven months; rain, nor snow, nor sleet has daunted her. She has an umbrella, a mackintosh, and a pair of rubbers. And yet with all these aids to education she cannot spell 'parallel.'" If you are rash you will inform her that the rubbers, the mackintosh, and the umbrella may travel to school for yet another seven months, and the child may still remain unable to spell "parallel." If you are patient and "so disposed," you would deliver a little lecture on the new methods of teaching reading, in which first a whole sentence is used as a unit; later a phrase; later still a word; and last of all a letter; but do not hope for a favorable reception of this theory. The ex-teacher of high-school mathematics, who, in her own far-distant youth, excelled at spelling-bees, could name the capital of every State in the Union and every country in the world; who could recite the names and dates of the Presidents, "The Village Blacksmith," "The Old Oaken Bucket," "The Psalm of Life," and the Declaration of Independence, is not prepared to accept a method of teaching based upon the interests and the reason of the child, and never upon its mechanical memory. "Things,"

she will tell you, "are changed since my day," and she allows you very thoroughly to understand that they are changed most mournfully for the worse.

Changed they emphatically are, whether for worse or better. Almost every scientific, medical, and sociological discovery of the century has influenced the school. The single theory of the microbe as the cause of disease has well-nigh revolutionized it. It does not require a very long memory to reach back to the days of slates and slate rags, with their attendant horrors of sliminess and sucked pencils. In those dark ages, too, a school-book was used by successive generations of children for as long as its print was legible to the keenest eye. Lead-pencils were collected at the end of the day and dealt out again promiscuously, and, marvellous to reflect upon, several children survived their schooling.

In these days the well-equipped and well-managed school-room is as sanitary as a hospital ward; sterilizing and fumigating are part of the regular work, and every book and pencil undergoes such treatment before being transferred from one child to another. The number of cubic feet of air, per child, per hour, is calculated and provided for. The designing of seats for school children is a matter which occupies the attention of men whose reputation is international, and whole schools of philosophy busy themselves to determine the sequence in which the different formal studies shall be presented.

In these halcyon days when Botany doffs her cap and gown and a.s.sociates with ordinary mortals in the friendly guise of "How to Know the Wild Flowers," "Nature's Garden," and other enticing disguises; when ornithology takes such friendly shapes as "A Kentucky Cardinal" and "Bird Life"; when physiology becomes "How to Grow Young" and "What Ails the Baby"; when even political economy reaches the ordinary plane at the hands of Messrs. Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and Charles Edward Russell--we soon expect psychology to burst its academic bonds.

It has already made one or two tentative appearances, and it was moderately well received; but some day, and soon, a prophet will arise to preach it with a yet more popular voice.

Then shall mother and teacher sweetly lisp of the "fringe of apperception," "the stream of consciousness," "inhibition," "ideal motor action," and "the tabula raza." Psychology has, I am aware, an unappealing sound. But let no one imagine that it is not or, rather, cannot be made interesting. We cannot always catch a bird, find a flower, or unearth a social evil; but every one, under all conditions and at all times, has a psychology in full working order concealed about him, and the art of teaching in its last a.n.a.lysis is applied psychology.

How many mothers have heard of the theory, formulated and vouched for by most distinguished scientists, that the individual during the normal progress of his existence pa.s.ses through the whole history of the development of his race? That he has, in turn, the instincts and the wants which animated all his ancestors, from the age of chaos to the day of the flying-machine? Upon this theory the whole scheme of education is based. Its essential principle is that if you can catch the child at the stone-age point of its development, you can then most readily teach him the rather restricted sum of knowledge by which the stone man steered his daily course. The difficulty lies in catching what is then most literally "the psychologic moment," at which a raw root dug up with a stone hammer will strike the young learner as a square meal.

Any interested outsider will testify that the new baby confirms this theory. It is an absolute savage. No head-hunter of Borneo could be more dest.i.tute of the "self-knowledge, self-reverence, self-control" which characterize the civilized man. Observe the small boy taking care of his small sister, and you will see the spirit of the Inquisition reproduced in all its ingenuity for torture. Note the length of time which a boy will spend in a green-shaded swimming-hole on a summer day, and you will see him dating back to his jelly-fish ancestors. A little girl will lavish all the pa.s.sion and absorption of motherhood upon a bath towel and a croquet-ball. Hundreds of Davids have gone forth against their Goliaths. Thousands of knights in short stockings have kept the law of the Table Round. The most pampered of lads and la.s.sies, left to their own devices, will revert to the cuisine of the cave man and sustain themselves upon mud pies.

Whole volumes, learned, authoritative, but so far ponderous, have been devoted to determining the age at which the different impulses which prompt or qualify human action are added unto the individual. Reason, honor, self-control, knowledge, religion, the sense of right and wrong and of responsibility, hate, envy, love, joy--all the forces developed in the race through immemorial ages--are born and reach maturity in the individual during the little span of one short life.

Whether this theory be right or wrong, no one can question that it is interesting and suggestive. It is but one of dozens with which the teacher is supposed to be at least on speaking terms. There is another large field of experiment and accomplishment in what is known as the manual-training movement, the marvellous and so long unrecognized connection between the development of the hand and the development of the mind and morals. Any one craving greater marvels than are furnished in modern romance can find them in the reports of reformatories, prisons, lunatic asylums, or schools for the defective, in which manual training has been introduced.

The whole trend of education changed when the "three R's" ceased to be its war-cry, and it behooves the modern mother to realize this change and to adapt herself to it. For the school and the home are but two agencies in the training of the child, two powers which should work together for good; and the ideal relation between the two is that they should be as one. It was a very great Teacher who taught that "no man can serve two masters." Then let the mother conform her rule and her judgments to the laws of the sister kingdom.

Let her hold, for instance, that the principle of self-activity is stronger than blind obedience ever was; that emulation as a spur to effort is the abomination of desolation; that a sound mind in a sound body is more to be valued than riches; that a keen eye for color and form, a steady hand to guide a pencil or a tool, a mind alert, eager, and reasonable, a heart which feels its brotherhood with all living, growing things, a free, frank speech, a generous nature, and an honest tongue, are in themselves a Declaration of Independence and a Psalm of Life.

"GAMES IN GARDENS"

Isaac Borrachsohn, Room 18's only example of the gilded youth, could never be described as a brilliant scholar, but on a morning in early April Miss Bailey found him more trying even than was his wont. He was plainly the centre of some sub-evident interest. First Readers nudged one another and whispered together, casting awed or envious looks upon him, and when the hour for recess came he formed the centre of an excited and gesticulating crowd. But Isaac Borrachsohn had never quite outgrown his distrust for his Krisht teacher. It was fostered by all his womankind at home, and was insisted upon almost as an article of faith by his grandfather the Rabbi. It was not to him, therefore, that Miss Bailey looked for an explanation of the general excitement, though she knew that before the day should pa.s.s she would hear several accounts of it.

It was after three o'clock; the prescribed school work was over and friendly converse was the order of the hour. The Board of Monitors, closing the door carefully upon the last unofficial First Reader, gathered solemnly round Teacher and proceeded to relate Isaac Borrachsohn's saga of his latest adventure.

"He says like that," said Eva Gonorowsky, Monitor of Pencil Points, in awed and envious tones. "He says he goes by his papa's side in a carriage on Games in Gardens."

"I guess maybe he lies," Nathan Spiderwitz, Monitor of Window Boxes, suggested with some disparagement. "I was to Gardens--Summer Gardens--mit my papa und no games stands in 'em. Stands bottles from beer und pretzels on'y. I ain't seen nothings like how Ikey says."

"And what does Ikey say?" asked Miss Bailey.

"Well," began Morris Mowgelewsky, Monitor of the Gold Fish Bowl, "Ikey says Gardens is a house mit thousens und thousens from mans und ladies.

Und they all sets by side theirselves, und they yells somethin' fierce.

Und in Gardens there ain't no upstairs, on'y thousens und thousens from lights. Ikey says on the Bowery even he ain't never seen how there is lights in Gardens."

"Yes, dear, Ikey was quite right," said Miss Bailey, beginning to discern the outline of Madison Square Garden with inter-scholastic athletic games in progress. "The mans and ladies" were, of course, the proud parents, sweethearts, relations, and various colleagues, and the "yells" were their unconfined joy and triumph.