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GIVING THE GIRLS A SENSE OF THE MAJESTY OF HISTORY

BY PARTICIPATION IN AN INSPIRING PAGEANT WHEN THE CORNERSTONE OF THEIR GREAT NEW SCHOOLHOUSE IN IRVING PLACE WAS LAID

and what they mean for everyone. Why is the family the unit of government? What holds the family together? What threatens it? What do you owe your mother? How would you assist a younger sister who was growing away from her parents? What is the limit of parental absorption of the lives of daughters? All the course in civics is personal. It is for use.

The business girl, about to seek employment in some sort of office, needs and should have enlightenment and she should have it from business women who know what offices are. This is social service. This is

of habit incline us to judge of school service in terms not of personal value but of school usage. So when we added to the exercises of school girls seven years ago the dressing and undressing of babies, school folks shook their heads. Every change must always bring its head-shake. Dancing came into New York schools as regular instruction through our classes ten years ago. Official suspicion required its modification and concealment under the head of "esthetics."

The forms of good breeding are admittedly of such necessity to a woman and confessedly so impossible of satisfactory ac

quisition at home, that they must find a regular place in a course of study with a hand book and a teacher. Yet such is the force of tradition that, although every man on a board of education believes this, no one dares act accordingly and authorize in our school the study and practice of etiquette with full recognition of credits for promotion and graduation. We are trying to maintain that the mother and father's ideals for the daughter are a real and vital purpose and must be ours. The changed conditions of the city-bred girl demand adaptive teachers and not defenders of a form which never was designed for our girls and which never has been proved good for any girl at all.

One irreconcilable difficulty of running a girl-centred school upon the studycentred organization arises from the matter of health. The father and mother, whom theoretically we should stand for, want more than anything else a healthy, beautiful, happy daughter. The typical high school, on the other hand, does not put health, beauty, or happiness first, nor even second. The prime consideration which general usage urges upon us is to cover the course of study. The main duty which you remember as emphasized by your high school teachers was not health, beauty, nor happiness, but hard work. There is so general a fear of departure from this model that we have to keep ourselves from loading down growing girls with night tasks that whiten their cheeks, blear their eyes, and taint their breath. Instinctively every teacher, following her mother heart, wants to keep, day by day, the radiant freshness of youth in her children. We who are attempting to write this account have once and forever renounced the fallacy that success or advantage to Society comes from the kind of hard work which high schools glorify. That which moves the world forward is youth. We would send up women charged with it, not because it is a sweet thing, a pretty conceit, but because it is the only potency that can save the world. It is a force, a physical fact, an essence of progress, really progress itself. When you lose it, at eighty or ninety, you are thereafter a dead weight. An institution that destroys it at twenty commits a

civic crime. We have seen high school girls grow into old women in four years. We had rather help an adolescent girl to find encouragement for a robust motherhood and promise of a virile race.

We are trying to capitalize for their own instruction the talents of all the girls instead of imposing upon them all the time our own conceptions. Every day the girls assemble as a public forum. Every gathering has its own girl chairman, secretary, and programme committee. They change daily. Every girl gets some training in courage, self-possession, and service for the common good. It is part of the day's business to inform others what the world is doing and discussing. The WORLD'S WORK is reproduced by girls who study it. All notices, announcements, and sermonizing which school men ordinarily furnish to assemblies of pupils are done by girls. Part of it is spontaneous; much of it is at the suggestion of teachers. Stereopticon exhibitions are chiefly in the hands of girls. Addresses made by adult visitors are at once summarized by girls called at random from the audience. It delights a speaker mightily to hear himself reviewed by attentive listeners. The instincts of all normal young persons for fun are not suppressed but fostered.

English classics get themselves presented in the school theatre, which has footlights, scenery, and an asbestos drop. The girls write and give their own plays. The sentiment is clean and healthy. Every year the entire company of more than five thousand build a play together. First every girl writes as a composition exercise her version of the coming play. It has no central motive. It is unconnected atoms. From the thousands of conceptions, committees select the newest and most suitable. A central committee strings them into line. Assembly discussions engender a connected motive. This purpose of the play, once voted on, makes the elaboration and arrangement of the parts inevitable. You have the Conflict of Work and Play appearing in "Rip Van Winkle's Dream." You have the Choice of Things Worth While growing into "The Vision of Youth." Class by class, the groups select their portions. There are no stars, no risk of

failure from the absence of any one, because every development of the story is entrusted to thirty or sixty girls. Their rehearsal comes in school hours as a part of music, or of declamation, or of practice with the teacher of calisthenics. The classes in costume-design sketch the dresses; the sewing classes make them. The management committee gets an armory and invites Mrs. Roosevelt or Mrs. Hughes or Mrs. Dix or Mrs. Gaynor to be the guest of honor. All the teachers of the schools from which the girls came into high school sit as guests in the capacious galleries. "Papa" Mc Gowan, the school's chief sponsor in the Board of Education, circulates among the guests, insisting that what they shall see has taken not an instant from "regular" school work. And then the wonderful mass of beautiful young girlhood, to the music of the regimental band, shows you for two hours how Right, in spite of Error and Despair, always triumphs in the end.

If you frankly endeavor to show the educational significance of school entertainments, express the belief that the pleasure of them is sufficient in a girls' school, you are sure to run athwart of fearful educators who persuade themselves that what is pleasant must be naughty. We are trying as foster-parents to avoid the dreary mistake of those strict fathers who have driven their daughters into evil because of the utter lack of merriment at home. For the last twenty years the amusements of New York have been growing more salacious, more immoral, more clever, more witty, more alluring. Almost every kind of thing that is attractive to young folks: music, sociability, politeness, variety, beauty, color, interest, noise, vivacity, and wit, has been taken by the devil to lure girls away from us. We are trying not to wince when dear old blunderers conclude we must be slighting "regular" work when we encourage our children to gratify their God-given appetites for fun and happiness. This is Nature's spring-time for a girl. Her little head is whirling with romance: her little heart is bursting with sympathy. Soul-sunshine is as vital to her healthy growth and to her moral strength in days to come as food and drink are to her body. You can starve her sympathies and grind

her heart out with your high standards and solemn praise of drudgery. You can drive her out of school, away from the cleanest associations she has, and thenGod help her! No conscientious systemsoaked teacher can.

We are trying to put the brightest side of every school subject forward, to substitute artistry for drudgery, to eliminate the disagreeable, and to make work what every expert authority who ever analyzed and wrote upon it says it ought to be: the greatest joy in the world which always blesses him who finds it.

For the accomplishment of our purpose we have come into as beautiful and completely appointed a building as was ever furnished by any city for the training of its daughters. The Board of Education encouraged us to plan it. Every teacher had a hand in it. We studied schools all over America and Europe. We drew the plans and specified the equipment. The board's architect made our suggestions workable. We have, in one great company, girls pursuing every kind of work they want to the extent that the Board of Education will permit. We have kitchens, bed-rooms, laundries, nurseries, and parlors for the training of every girl in housewifery. We have banks, stores, offices, studios, dressmaking establishments, and telephones for the preparation of young business women. We have book collections for the training of library keepers. We have the staples of culture: the languages, literature, sciences, and mathematics for the training of the minds, preparing for teachers' schools and colleges. We have the limitations of strict courses and restrictive examintions to keep us within the bounds which an organized system deems necessary.

What we are trying to do is to move and not to stagnate; to catch the best spirit of the time and not to assume that we received it by bequest from some legal possessor of it. We are trying to work together instead of following a leader. We are trying to conceive what the better generation is which the Fathers of this Republic expected from free public schools. In so far as the limitation of system and our own inexpertness permit, we are trying to help the intelligent parents of New York to furnish the girl part of that generation.

THE NEW FREEDOM

A CALL FOR THE EMANCIPATION OF THE GENEROUS
ENERGIES OF A PEOPLE

T

BY

WOODROW WILSON

V

LET THERE BE LIGHT

HE concern of patriotic men is to put our Government again on its right basis, by substituting the popular will for the rule of guardians, the processes of common counsel for those of private arrangement. In order to do this, a first necessity is to open the doors and let in the light on all affairs which the people have a right to know about.

In the first place, it is necessary to open up all the processes of our politics. They have been too secret, too complicated, too roundabout; they have consisted too much of private conferences and secret understandings, of the control of legislation by men who were not legislators, but who stood outside and dictated, controlling oftentimes by very questionable means, which they would not have dreamed of allowing to become public. The whole process must be altered. We must take the selection of candidates for office, for example, out of the hands of small groups of men, of little coteries, out of the hands of machines working behind closed doors, and put it into the hands of the people themselves again by means of direct primaries and elections to which candidates of every sort and degree may have free We must substitute public for private machinery.

It is necessary, in the second place, to give society command of its own economic life again by denying to those who conduct the great modern operations of business the privacy that used to belong properly enough to men who used only their own capital and their

individual energy in business. The processes of capital must be as open as the processes of politics. Those who make use of the great modern accumulations of wealth, gathered together by the dragnet process of the sale of stocks and bonds, and piling up of reserves, must be treated as under a public obligation; they must be made responsible for their business methods to the great communities which are in fact their working partners, so that the hand which makes correction shall easily reach them and a new principle of responsibility be felt throughout their structure and operation.

What are the right methods of politics? Why, the right methods are those of public discussion: the methods of leadership open and above board, not closeted with "boards of guardians" or anybody else, but brought out under the sky, where honest eyes can look upon them and honest eyes can judge of them.

If there is nothing to conceal, then why conceal it? If it is a public game, why play it in private? If it is a public game, then why not come out into the open and play it in public? You have got to cure diseased politics as we nowadays cure tuberculosis, by making all the people who suffer from it live out of doors; not only spend their days out of doors and walk around, but sleep out of doors; always remain in the open, where they will be accessible to fresh, nourishing, and revivifying influences.

I, for one, have the conviction that government ought to be all outside and no inside. I, for my part, believe that there ought to be no place where anything can be done that everybody does not know about. It would be very inconvenient for some gentlemen, probably, if government were all outside, but we have consulted their susceptibilities too long already. It is barely possible that some of these gentlemen are unjustly suspected; in that case they owe it to themselves to come out and operate in the light. The very fact that so much in politics is done in the dark, behind closed doors, promotes suspicion. Everybody knows that corruption thrives in secret places, and avoids public places, and we believe it a fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety. So, our honest politicians and our honorable corporation heads owe it to their reputations to bring their activities out into the open.

At any rate, whether they like it or not, these affairs are going to be dragged into the open. We are more anxious about their reputations than they are themselves. We are too solicitous for their morals, - if they are not,- to permit them longer to continue subject to the temptations of secrecy. You know there is temptation in loneliness

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