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How often we hear of the Prodigal Son
Who wanders ’neath sorrow and shame,
Os the hands ever ready to welcome him
home,
Os the hearts all forgiving again;
But go where you will, o’er land, o’er sea,
All over this wide, wide world,
And never you’ll hear in kind sympathy,
A word for the Prodigal Girl.
Though pure hath she been from her in
fancy up,
An angel of beauty and grace,
With never a sorrow from life’s bitter cup
To sadden her young sweet face,
Gompers Calls for Change.
Samuel Gompers, the great labor leader,
says:
“While the public schools and colleges aim
only at teaching professions, the greatest need
of America, educationally, is the improvement
of industrial intelligence and working efficiency
in the American youth. We need an educa
tional uplift for the good of the boy who will
work with the hands, and we not only need to
give an educational uplift to craftsmanship, but
the school needs the help of the workman and
his better work in education. We should real
ize better the dependence between our com
mon education and our common industries.
This can be effectuated only by a system of
industrial schools, differentiated from the man
ual training schools, which shall actually train
workmen for the trades and at the same time
give them a broader mental culture.”
As we have seen before, vocational educa
tion has not as yet been taken up as a national
movement, but here and there, scattered at
great distances over this country, we find the
large cities taking into their regular school sys
tems, industrial and vocational training schools,
“in which the children study from books, as
other boys and girls study, but in addition,
they are engaged in work that growing chil
dren like —sawing, planing, painting, printing,
dress-making, cooking, sweeping, dusting, book
binding and typewriting.”
New York state has taken the lead in estab
lishing vocational schools for “hand-minded”
children of the upper grammar grades. With a
longer school day they complete a course of
instruction that qualifies for entrance to the
technical high school.
Mr. Frank Lawrence Glynn, principal of the
vocational school of Albany, N. Y., says: “It
is a novel sight which greets you on enter
ing this new sort of institution. You may see
the time-keeper reading his time board, hear
the clank of the anvil, or see a little girl
hardly in her teens fitting a dress on another.
After you have visited the boys’ department
you ask: “What is the nature of the girls’
work, and you are shown into the sewing room
where you see a number of little ladies happy
amidst a profusion of sewing machines, cutting
tables, needles, thimbles and lingerie of various
sorts and kinds.”
Many cities in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania,
Illinois, and away out in Oregon, are making
rapid strides in this practical idea of education.
As an example of this, in the city of Gary,
Ind., the schools have changed completely over
to the new idea. Mr. Mearns, who is writing
a series of articles in the Saturday Evening
Post, tells us that —
THE PRODIGAL GIRL
“All the schools of Gary are what elsewhere
are sometimes called special schools. Six years
ago Gary was an uninhabited sand dune; at
present the population is forty thousand and
growing. It has risen magically from a wil
derness of sand and scrub-oak to a city with
metropolitan features —enormous producing
plants; extended thoroughfares of cement lined
with office and commercial buildings, superior
residences, modern school houses, churches, ho
tels and clubs. Industry settled here —the In
diana Steel company, the American Bridge com
pany, the American Sheet and Tinplate com
pany—and the town appeared like an Aladdin
esque creation.
There were no traditions; therefore Gary
schools under Superintendent William A. Wirt
resemble the school of tomorrow father than
the school of yesterday. The child is the cen
tral thing in these schools; how to educate
him so that he will be a better informed, a bet
ter disciplined and a healthier creature is the
sole aim. Programs of study, traditional sub
jects and conventional methods of teaching
have only this reason for existence. If on test
they do not give satisfactory results, out they
go. Therefore the whole child is educated
here —in his study, in his play, in his amuse
ments, in his work. Naturally the schoolday
is long—from eight-thirty to four-thirty, eight
hours; but the new spirit of harnessing the
child’s interests has been so splendidly caught
that beys and girls are eager to get into the
school house, even on Saturdays and during
the summer vacation.
Explaining and Doing.
Each individual is constantly diagnosed and
watched for improvement. There is no look
step of classes —quick pupils in any subject are
advanced, slow pupils are placed where they
can go their pace; foreign children who need
English are put where they can get it, but are
not necessarily retarded in arithmetic and the
other branches; physically backward children
are put into outdoor games that bring them up
to standard; good workers are allowed to ex
press their best at the workbench; and there
are no abstract studies —all school subjects are
made to relate to the daily life of the child.
The changing elementary schools are discov
ering the blessedness of work and its great value
as an educational motive. Fortunately children
love work —if they are caught young enough;
and as most of us, rich or poor, must find our
happiness eventually in labor, there is no good
reason for avoiding it. The saddest thing that
can happen to the thousands of fortunate
youths who stay in the present-day school un
til young manhod and womanhood, is the
achievement of permanent physical ineptitude
The Golden Age for June 19, 1913
Yet soon as the Tempter hath laid his foul
net,
Mid pleasure’s gay fashion and whirl,
And captures his victim, the world is there
set
Against the poor Prodigal Girl.
A wanderer from home and a stranger
abroad,
An outcast where’er she may go,
With no one to pity or speak a kind word
To lighten life’s burden of woe;
And though she hath fallen, yet who’s
without sin
’Neath yonder’s fair city of pearls?
But Jesus is ever the guilty one’s friend
He’ll save the poor Prodigal Girl.
Oh, would you be willing to throw a glad
arm
Around her who wanders away,
And tell her that Jesus will shield her from
harm,
To love Him and trust Him today?
The angels are watching from yonder
* bright home,
Oh, let us love’s banner unfurl,
And rescue the wanderer where’er she
may roam,
Some mother’s poor Prodigal Girl.
—W. F. Price.
Griffin, Ga.
if not physical indolence. Twelve to fourteen
years of sitting at a desk means almost a sure
atrophy of the work instinct. Really healthy
ycung persons are bored to indifference, if not
disgust, by the unnatural demand upon them.
That is one of the obvious attitudes of high
school children and of the overgrown boys and
girls of the upper grammar grades. Besides
which, the mass of really valuable information
seems not to hit. It bears so little relation to
the things near a youngster’s interests; there
is so much explaining, so little doing. ,<
“What is a Caucus-race?” said Alice.
“Why, said the Dodo, “the best way to ex
plain it is to do it.”
And thus we see to quote from the “School
and Home,” that—
“ Education is ceasing to be a luxury for a
fortunate few, and is becoming a necessity for
all. It is ceasing to be an accomplishment for
aristocracy, and is becoming the mainstay and
ultimate guarantee of democracy. Os neces
sity, therefore, it has had to seek a medium of
attainment—a course of study—of more univer
sal appeal, of more general applicability, than
that which it used to employ.
“The leaders of educational thought, who
have sought long, and not in vain, for the
wealth of culture in an educational Eldorado,
are returning in numbers now and finding a
richer wealth in bounless quantities in the
homely interests of every day life. Without
denyinr questioning the great value in the old
school subjects, we are coming to accept as
a cardinal principle of education the poetical
vision of Wordsworth:
“ ‘Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—-but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all
I should know what God and Man is.’ ”
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