Strange to
relate, an interest in school came in at the front door with Mr.
Voorhes' new plan for applied education. The wild boys and dishevelled
girls of the West End, who had erstwhile hated school, came now to
participate in school activities with an interest seldom surpassed in
public or private schools.

"You see," Mr. Voorhes remarked, "a day a week in the shop or
laboratories is just about enough to keep down the high spirits of the
older ones, and at the same time give them an applied education of which
they feel the value. That one day of practical work did the trick. It
made the other four days of academic work taste just as good as pie."

Mr. Voorhes' plan arrived. It won the interest of the children and later
with the assistance of the Mothers' Club and the kindergarten it won the
sympathy of the community.

VII The Mothers' Club

Like all of the other school centers in Cincinnati, Oyler has a
kindergarten and a Mothers' Club, around which the change in community
feeling has centered, until Mr. Voorhes describes them as "the most
important influence that ever came into our school." Yet the
kindergarten here, as elsewhere, has had a life and death grapple for
existence. In the West End, dominated by its conservative, German
atmosphere, the pleas for kindergartens fell on deaf ears. At last,
after much preparation, a meeting of mothers and children was held for
the purpose of forming an organization; at the meeting there were
thirteen children and five mothers, and all antagonistic, or at best
suspicious.

"I went around and played with every one of those children," said Mr.
Voorhes, "talking to the mothers, and trying to persuade them that this
was not failure, but merely the forerunner of success. The next day I
went into every grade, saying to the children:

"'What was the matter? Mother did not come to the Mothers' Meeting
yesterday.'

"'Oh, she couldn't leave the baby.'

"'Leave the baby! Why, of course not. No one expected her to leave the
baby. Tell her to come and bring the baby along.'"

So another meeting was held, and another to which the babies were
brought--some women bringing as many as three, who were too young to go
to school. At one Mothers' Meeting, after the club had been well
organized, there were twenty women, listening, discussing and nursing
babies, all at once.

If the beginnings of the experiment were discouraging the results have
more than offset the original disappo