shall have a knowledge of the daily needs of life.
The interest awakened in the school will surely react upon the home.
It is like an expedition going out to make discoveries and to bring
back knowledge to its own land. The directive work of the school will
thus become a practical realization in the home. Then the cycle will
be complete, for while the school has separated the child from his
natural environment for many hours and weeks, it is sending him back
better equipped through knowledge and experience to fulfill his place
there.
How shall the ends be gained artificially by devices of the school?
For gained they must be, if civilization is to be maintained.
To quote from Isabel Bevier:
"As the home is so inseparably connected with the house, and our
comfort and efficiency are so greatly influenced by the kind of houses
in which we live, much of interest and importance centers in the study
of the house."
Moreover, with the house, its evolution, decoration, and care, may be
associated much that is interesting in history, art, and
architecture, as well as much that has a direct bearing on the daily
life of the individual.
The philosophers have struggled for centuries, each contributing
according to his experience and vision to determine what is the
purpose of life. America's thought could be translated into the word
efficiency. Yes, we might almost say she worships efficiency. If,
then, efficiency is to be the goal, what are the means to develop it?
Efficiency depends chiefly upon good health, and to maintain this we
must first consider in the scheme of education the physical
aids--food, air, water, clothing and shelter, exercise and rest--and
with this goal in view must come also recreation, play or amusement,
and beauty to develop the mental and the spiritual. In relating our
scheme of work to this ideal we will consider first the shelter.
The children of ten or twelve years of age have passed the
"make-believe" stage of play; they want the "real," but of their own
kind and age. After little children have made and played with toys and
foreshadowed the needs of the actual home, the time has come for the
youth to have his demands, which are not yet the demands of man and
manhood.
At the Tuberculosis Congress, held in Washington in 1908, a sanatorium
in England, which won a prize, presented among many good features a
system of graded work with graded tools, almost childlike implements
for the weak an
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