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CHILDREN DO NOT STUDY GRAMMAR NOW; THEY ARE GIVEN 'LANGUAGE WORK

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at home, I keep him out of school. It punishes him more than anything else, because he loves to go to school."

Another aspect of the subject presented itself to my mind. "I should think he would fall behind in his studies," I commented.

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"Oh, no," she replied; "he doesn't. Children don't fall behind in their studies in these days," she added. They don't get a chance. Every single lesson they miss their teachers require them to make up.' When my boy is absent for a day, or even for only half a day, his teacher sees that he makes up' the lessons lost before the end of the week. When I was a child, and happened to be absent, no teacher troubled about my lost lessons! I did all the troubling! I laboriously made them up;' the thought of examination days coming along spurred me on."

Those examination days! How amazed, almost amused, our child friends are when we, of whose school days they were such large and impressive milestones, describe them! A short time ago I was visiting an old schoolmate of mine. "Tell me what school was like when you and mother went," her little girl of ten besought me.

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my friend broke in. "We had one in the morning and another in the afternoon."

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Yes," I went on. "One morning we would have a grammar examination. Twenty questions would be written on the blackboard by our teacher, and we would write the answers-in three hours. On another morning, or on the afternoon of that same day, we might have an arithmetic examination. There would be twenty questions, and three hours to answer them in, just the same."

"Do you understand, dear?" said the little girl's mother. "Well, well," she went on, turning to me before the child could reply, "how this talk brings examination days back to my remembrance! What excitement there was! And how we worked getting ready for them! I really think it was a matter of pride with us to be so tired after our last examination of the week that we had to go to bed and dine on milk toast and a softboiled egg!"

The little girl was looking at us with round eyes. "Does it all sound very queer?" I

asked.

"The going to bed does," she made reply; "and the milk toast and the egg for dinner, and the working hard. The examinations sound something like the tests we have. They are questions to write answers to, but we don't think much about them. I don't believe any of the girls or boys go to bed afterwards, or have milk toast and eggs for dinner-on purpose, because they have had a test !"

She was manifestly puzzled. "Perhaps it is because we have tests about every two weeks, and not just in January and June," she suggested.

She did not seem disposed to investigate further the subject of her mother's and my school days. In a few moments she ran off to her play. When she was quite out of

"What did you do on them?" inquired the hearing her mother burst into a hearty laugh. little girl.

"Will you listen to that?" demanded her mother. "Ten years old-and she asks what we did on examination days! This is what it means to belong to the rising generation-not to know, at ten, anything about examination days!"

"What did you do on them?" the little girl persisted.

"We had examinations," I explained. "All our books were taken away, and we were given paper and pen and ink—”

"And three hours for each examination,"

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"Poor child !" she exclaimed. "She thinks we and our school were very curious. I wonder why," she continued more seriously, we did take examinations, and lessons too, so weightily. Children don't in these days. The school days of the week are so full of holiday spirit for them that, actually, Saturday is not much of a gala day. Think of what Saturday was to us! What glorious times we had! Why, Saturday was Saturday, to us! Do you remember the things we did? You wrote poems and I painted pictures, and we read stories, and acted' them. Then, we

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had our gardens in the spring, and our experiments in cake-baking in the winter. girls do none of these things on Saturday. The day is not to them what it was to us. I wonder what makes the difference."

I had often wondered; but these reflections of my old schoolmate gave me an inkling of what the main difference is. To us, school had been a place in which we learned lessons from books-books of arithmetic, books of grammar, or other purely academic books. For five days of the week our childish minds were held to our lessons; and our lessons, without exception, dealt with technicalities parts of speech, laws of mathematics, facts of history, definitions of the terms of geography. Small marvel that Saturday was a gala day to us. It was the one "week day when we might be unacademic!

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But children of the present time have no such need of Saturday. They write poems, and paint pictures, and read stories, and "act "" them, and plant gardens, and even bake cake, as regular parts of their school routine. The schools are no longer solely, or even predominantly, academic. As for technicalities, where are they in the schools of to-day? As far in the background as the teachers can keep them. Children do not study grammar now; they are given language work." It entails none of the memorizing of "rules," exceptions," and " cautions that the former study of grammar required. History would seem to be learned without that sometime laying hold of "dates." Geography has ceased to be a matter of the "bounding" of States and the learning of the capitals of various countries; it has become the "story of the earth." And arithmetic-it is "number work" now, and is all but taught without the multiplication tables. How could Saturday be to the children of to-day what it was to the children of yesterday?

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My old schoolmate's little girl had spoken of "tests.' In my school days we called such minor weekly or fortnightly matters as these, "reviews." We regarded them quite as lightly as my small friend looked upon her "tests." Examinations they were different indeed. Twice a year we were expected to stretch our short memories until they neatly covered a series of examination papers, each composed of twenty questions, relating to fully sixteen weeks' accumulation of accurate data on the several subjectsfortunately few-we had so academically

been studying. It is little wonder that children of the present day are not called upon to "take" such examinations; not only the manner of their teaching, but the great quantity of subjects taught, make "tests" of frequent occurrence the only practicable examinations.

"Children of the present time learn about so many things !" sighed a middle-aged friend of mine after a visit to the school which her small granddaughter attended. "What an array of subjects are brought to their notice, from love of country to domestic science! How do their young minds hold it?"

I am rather inclined to think that their young minds hold it very much as young minds of one, two, or three generations ago held it. After all, what subjects are brought to the notice of present-day children that were not called to the attention of children of former times? The difference would seem to be, not that the children of to-day learn about more things than did the children of yesterday, but that they learn about more things in school. Love of country-were we not all taught that by our fathers as early and as well as the children are taught it to-day by their teachers? And domestic science-did not mothers teach that, not only to their girls, but to their boys also, with a degree of thoroughness not surpassed even by that of the best of modern domestic science teachers? The subjects to be brought to the notice of children appear to be so fixed; the things to be learned by them seem to be so slightly alterable! It is only the place of instruction that has shifted. Such a quantity of things once taught entirely at home are now taught partly at school.

It is the fashion, I know, to deplore this. "How dreadful it is," we hear many a person exclaim, "that things that used to be told a child alone at its mother's knee are now told whole roomfuls of children together in school!"

Certainly it would be "dreadful" should the fact that children are taught anything in school become a reason to parents for ceasing to teach them that same thing at home. So long as this does not happen, ought we not to rejoice that children are given the opportunity of hearing in company from their teachers what they have already heard separately from their fathers and mothers? A boy or a girl who has heard from a father or a mother, in intimate personal talk, of the

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My old schoolmate said that Saturday had lost the glory it wore in her school days and mine; but it seems to me that what has actually occurred is that the five school days of the week have taken on the same glory. The joys we had only on Saturday children have now on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday!

It is inevitable, I suppose, that they should handle our old delights with rather a professional grasp. One day recently a little girl, a new acquaintance, came to see me. I brought out various toys, left over from my childhood, for her amusement-a doll, with the trunk that still contained her wardrobe an autograph album, with "verses'" and sketches in it; and a "joining map,' such as the brother of Rosamond of the Purple Jar owned. My small caller occupied herself with these for a flattering length of time, then she said: "You played with these-what else did you play with?"

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"My teacher," answered the small girl. "We all do it, in my room at school, every Friday."

They do so many things! Their grownup friends are hard put to it to find anything novel to do with, or for, them. Not long ago a little boy friend of mine was ill with scarlet fever. His "case" was so light that the main problem attached to it was that of providing occupation for the child during the six weeks of quarantine in one room. Remembering the pleasure I had taken as a child in planting seeds on cotton in a glass

of water and watching them grow at a rate almost equal to that of Jack's beanstalk, I made a similar "little garden" and sent it to the small boy. "It was lots of fun, having it," he said, when, quite well, he came to see me. "It grew so fast-faster than the others."

"What others?" I queried.

"At school," he explained. "We have them at school; and they grow fast, but the one you gave me grew faster. Was that because it was in a little glass, instead of a big bowl ?"

I could not tell him. We had not, had them at school in my school days in a big bowl. They had been out-of-school incidents, cultivated only in little glasses.

They have so many things at school, the children of to-day! If many of these things have been taken from the home, they have only been taken that they may, as it were, be carried back and forth between the home and the school.

I have a friend, the mother of an only child, a boy of eight. Her husband's work requires that the family live in a section of the city largely populated by immigrants. The one school in the vicinity is a large public school. When my friend's little boy reached the "school age," he, perforce, was entered at this school. "You are an American," his father said to him the day before school opened; "not a foreigner, like almost every child you will find at school. Remember that."

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'He doesn't understand what you mean when you talk to him about being an American," the boy's mother said the next morning as we all watched the child run across the street to the school. "How could he, living among foreigners?"

One day, about two months later, the small boy's birthday being near at hand, his father said to him, "If some one were planning to give you something, what should you choose to have it?"

"A flag," the boy said instantly; "an American flag ! Our flag!"

"Why?" the father asked, almost involuntarily.

"To salute," the child replied. "I've learned how in school-what to say and what to do. Americans do it when they love their country-like you told me to," he added, eagerly. "Our teacher says so. She's taught us all how to salute the flag. I told her I was an American, not a foreigner like the

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