Every child should be washed.
Every child should be educated. The only question
is how to get there. The “why’s”
of life interest chiefly the academic mind. The
“how’s” interest every one.
It is a pleasure sometimes to be out in dirty weather
on a lee shore; it permits you to devote all your
energies to accomplishing something. When secretary
for our hospital rowing club on the Thames, a fine
cup was given for competition by Sir Frederick Treves
on terms symbolic of his attitude to life. The
race was to be in ordinary punts with a coxswain “in
order that every ounce of energy should be devoted
to the progress of the boat.”
That is the whole trouble with the
Newfoundland Labrador. All moneys granted for
education are handed to the churches for sectarian
schools. It is almost writing ourselves down as
still living in the Middle Ages, when the Clergy had
a monopoly of polite learning. In more densely
populated countries this division of grants need not
be so disastrous. Here it means that one often
finds a Roman Catholic, a Church of England, a Methodist,
and a Salvation Army school, all in one little village and
no school whatever in the adjoining place.
The denominational spirit, fostered
by these sectarian schools and societies, is so emphasized
that Catholic and Protestant have little in common.
Some preferred to let their children or themselves
suffer pain and inefficiency, rather than come for
relief to a hospital where the doctors were Protestant.
This has in some measure passed away, but it was painfully
real at first so much so that once a rickety,
crippled child, easily cured, though he actually came
to the harbour, was forbidden to land and returned
home to be a cripple for life.
The salaries available offer no attraction
to enter the teaching profession in this island; and
there is no compulsory education law to assist those
who with lofty motives remain loyal to the profession
when “better chances” come along.
Gauged rightly, there is no such thing as a better
chance for fulfilling life’s purposes than an
education; and modern conditions concede the right
of a decent living wage to all who render service
to the world in whatever line.
In the little village where are our
headquarters there was already a Church of England
and a Methodist school when we came there, and a Salvation
Army one has since been added. Threats of still
another “institution of learning” menaced
us at one time almost like a new Egyptian
plague, with more permanency of results thrown in.
If the motor power of the school boat
is dissipated in sectarian religious education, not
to say focussed on it, the arrival of the cargo must
be seriously handicapped. The statistical returns
may show a majority of our fishermen as “able
to read and write”; but as a matter of fact
the illiteracy and ignorance of North Newfoundland
and Labrador is the greatest handicap in the lives
of the people.
My first scholar came from North Labrador,
long before we aspired to a school of our own.
He was a lad of Scotch extraction and name, and came
aboard the hospital ship one night, as she lay at anchor
among some northern islands, with the request that
we would take him up with us to some place where he
could get an hour’s schooling a day. He
offered to work all the rest of the time in return
for his food and clothing. To-day he holds a
Pratt certificate, is head of our machine shop, has
a sheet-metal working factory of his own which fills
a most valuable purpose on the shore, is general consultant
for the coast in matters of engineering, as well as
being the Government surveyor for his district.
He is also chief musician for the church, having fitted
himself for both those latter posts in his “spare
time.” The inspiration which his life has
been is in itself an education to many of us a
reflex result which is the really highest value of
all life.
As each transferred individual has
come back North for service, desire has at once manifested
itself for similar privileges in young people who
had not previously shown even interest enough to attend
our winter night schools. This is the best evidence
that inroads are being made into that natural apathy
which is content with mediocrity or even inferiority.
This is everywhere the world’s most subtle enemy.
Even if selfishness or envy has been the motive, the
fact remains that they have often kindled that discontent
with the past which Charles Kingsley preached as necessary
to all progress. Nowhere could the pathology
of the matter be more easily traced than in these concrete
examples carrying the infection which could come from
no other quarter into our isolation. It has been
in very humble life an example of the return of the
“Yankee to the Court of King Arthur.”
There was a time when Lord Haldane
proposed that every English child, who in the Board
schools had proved his ability to profit by it, should
be given a college or university education at the expense
of the State as a remunerative outlay for
the nation. This proposal was turned down as
being too costly, though the expenditure for a single
day’s running of this war would have gone a long
way to provide such a fund. We now know that
it can be done and must be done as a sign manual of
real freedom, which is not the leaving of parents or
forbears, incompetent for any reason, free to damn
their country with a stream of stunted intellects.
America has already honoured herself
forever by being a pioneer in this movement for the
higher education of the people. Religion surely
need not fear mental enlightenment. The dangers
of life lie in ignorance, and after all is not true
religion a thing of the intellect as well as of the
heart? Can that really be inculcated in “two
periods of forty minutes each week devoted to sectarian
teaching,” which was one of the concessions
demanded of us in our fight for a free public or common
school at St. Anthony? My own mental picture of
myself at the age of seven sitting on a bench for
forty minutes twice every week learning to be “religious”
made me sympathize with Scrooge when the Ghost of
the Past was paying him a visit.
One thing was certain. The young
lives entrusted to us were having as good medical
care for their bodies as we could provide; and if we
could compass it, we were going to have that paralleled
for their minds. The parents of the village children
could do as they liked with those committed to them and
they did it. There is nothing so thoroughly reactionary
that I know of as religious prejudice well ground
in. As regards the treatment of physical ailments
the prejudices of what Dr. Holmes called “Homoeopathy
and Kindred Delusions” always are strong in
proportion as they are impregnated with some religious
bias.
Our efforts to combine the local schools
having failed, we had to provide a building of our
own. This we felt must be planned for the future.
For some day the halcyon days of peace on earth shall
be permitted in our community, and the true loyalty
of efficient service to our brothers will, it is to
be hoped, become actually the paramount object of
our Christian religion. Perhaps this terrible
war will have convinced the world that the loftiest
aspirations of mankind are no more to save yourself
hereafter than here. Is it not as true as ever
that if we are not ourselves possessors of Christ’s
spirit, ourselves we cannot save?
The only schoolhouse available, anyhow,
was not nearly so good a building as that which we
have since provided for the accommodation of our pigs!
Fat pork is considered an absolute essential “down
North”; and it was cheaper and safer, according
to Upton Sinclair, to raise pigs than buy the salted
or tinned article. So we had instituted what
we deemed a missionary enterprise in that line. (Pace
our vegetarian friends.)
As soon as a sum of three thousand
dollars had been raised, architect friends at the
Pratt Institute sent down to us competitive designs,
and one of our Labrador boys, who had studied there,
erected the building. Having at the beginning
no funds whatever for current expenses, we had to
look for volunteer teachers. One denomination
helped with part of its harbour grant, but the Government
would not make any special donation toward the union
school project. Even the caput grant, to which
we had hoped that we were entitled for our own orphanage
children, had by law to go to the denomination to which
their parents had belonged. This was not always
easy to decide correctly. On the occasion of
taking the last census in Labrador, a well-dressed
stranger suddenly visited one of our settlements on
the east coast. It so happened that a very poor
man with a large and growing family of eight children
under ten years, who resided there, was not so loyal
to his church as we are taught we ought to be.
When the stranger entered his tilt a vision of material
favours to be obtained was the dominant idea in the
fisherman’s mind. He was therefore on tenterhooks
all the while that the questioning was going on lest
some blunder of his might alienate the sympathy on
which he was banking for “getting his share.”
At length it came to the momentous point of “What
denomination do you belong to?” a
very vital matter when it comes to sympathy and sharing
up. In some hesitation he gazed at the row of
his eight unwashed and but half-clad offspring, whose
treacly faces gaped open-mouthed at the visitor.
Then with sudden inspiration he decided to play for
safety, and replied, “Half of them is Church
of England, and half is Methodist!”
Being an unrecognized school, and
so far off, some years went by before the innovation
of bringing up scholars from our northern district
entered our heads. We realized at length, however,
that we should close one channel of criticism to the
enemy if we proved that we could justify our school
by their standard of annual examinations. Our
teachers, being mostly volunteers, had to come from
outside the Colony. Having no funds to purchase
books and other supplies, we made use of books also
sent us from outside. The real value of the local
examination becomes questionable as a standard of success
when far more highly educated teachers, and at least
as cleverly laid-out study books, prevented the children
in our school from passing them.
Moreover, further to waken their faculties,
we had included in our facilities a large upper hall
of the school building and a library of some thousands
of books collected from all quarters. The former
afforded the stimulus which entertainments given by
the children could carry, and also space for physical
drill; the latter, that greatest incentive of all,
access to books which lure people to wish to read
them. In summer the parents and older children
are busy with the fisheries day and night, and the
little children run more or less wild, so this form
of occupation was doubly desirable.
The generous help of summer volunteers,
especially a trained kindergartner, Miss Olive Lesley,
gave us a regular summer school. All the expensive
outfit needed was also donated. Eye and hand were
enlisted in the service of brain evolution; while a
piano, which it is true had seen better days, pressed
the ear and the imagination into the service as well.
One of the great gaps in child development
in Labrador had been the almost entire lack of games.
The very first year of our coming the absence of dolls
had so impressed itself upon us that the second season
we had brought out a trunkful. Even then we found
later that the dolls were perched high up on the walls
as ornaments, just out of reach of the children.
In one little house I found a lad playing with some
marbles. For lack of better these were three-quarter-inch
bullets which “Dad had given him,” while
the alley was a full-inch round ball, which belonged
to what my host was pleased to call “the little
darlint” a hoary blunderbuss over
six feet in length. The skipper informed me that
he had plenty of “fresh” for the winter,
largely as a result of the successful efforts of the
“darlint”; though it appeared to have
exploded with the same fatal effect this year as the
season previous. “I hear that you made
a good shot, the other day, Uncle Joe,” I remarked.
“Nothing to speak on,” he answered.
“I only got forty-three, though I think there
was a few more if I could have found them on the ice.”
The pathos of the lack of toys and
games appealed especially to the Anglo-Saxon, who
believes that if he has any advantage over competitors,
it is not merely in racial attributes, but in the
reaction of those attributes which develop in him the
ineradicable love of athletics and sport. The
fact that he dubs the classmate whom he admires most
“a good sport,” shows that he thinks so,
anyway.
So organized play was carefully introduced
on the coast. It caught like wildfire among the
children, and it was delightful to see groups of them
naively memorizing by the roadside school lessons in
the form of “Ring-of-Roses,” “Looby-Loo,”
“All on the Train for Boston.” To
our dismay in the minds of the local people the very
success of this effort gave further evidence of our
incompetence.
Our people have well-defined, though
often singular, ideas as to what Almighty God does
and does not allow; and among the pursuits which are
irrevocably condemned by local oracles is dancing.
The laxity of “foreigners” on this article
of the Creed is proverbial. At the time there
were two ministers in the place, and realizing that
the people considered that our kindergarten was introducing
the thin edge of the wedge, and that our whole effort
might meet with disaster unless the rumours were checked,
I went in search of them without delay. Three
o’clock found us knocking at the kindergarten
door. The teacher and source of the reputed scandal
seemed in no way disconcerted by the visitation.
The first game was irreproachable every
child was sitting on the floor. But next the
children, were choosing partners, and though the boys
had chosen boys, and the girls girls, the suspicions
of the vigilance committee were aroused. No danger,
however, to the three R’s transpired, and we
were next successfully piloted clear of condemnation
through a game entitled “Piggie-wig and Piggie-wee.”
Our circulation was just beginning to operate once
more in its normal fashion when we were told that
the whole company would now “join hands and
move around in a circle” to music. The entire
jury sensed that the crucial moment had come.
We saw boys and girls alternating, hand held in hand and
all to the undeniably secular libretto of “Looby-Loo.”
It was, moreover, noted with inward pain that many
of the little feet actually left the ground.
We adjourned to an adjacent fish stage to discuss
the matter. I need not dilate on the vicissitudes
of the session. It was clear that all but “Looby-Loo”
could obviously be excluded from the group of “questionables” but
the last game was of a different calibre and must
be put to vote. My readers will be relieved to
learn that the resultant ballot was unanimously in
favour of non-interference, and that from the pulpit
the following Sunday the clergy gave to the kindergarten
the official sanction of the Church.
Other outsiders now began telling
the people that we could not pass the Colony’s
examinations because we wasted our efforts on teaching
“foolishness”; and the denomination which
had hitherto lent us aid withdrew it, and tried again
to run a midget sectarian school right alongside.
The first occasion, however, on which this institution
came seriously to my attention was when the minister
and another young man came to call during the early
weeks of our winter school session. The stranger
was their special teacher. He was undoubtedly
a smart lad; he had passed the preliminary examination.
But he was only sixteen, and in temperament a very
young sixteen at that. He was engaged at a more
generous salary than usual, and was perfectly prepared
to revolutionize our records. But, alas, not
only was their little building practically unfit for
habitation, but after a week’s waiting not one
single scholar had come to his school. The contrast
between the two opportunities was too great except
for frothing criticism. Gladly, to help our neighbours
out of a difficulty, we divided a big classroom into
two parts, added a third teacher to our school, and
were thus able to make an intermediate grade.
The great majority of the whole reconstruction
and work of the school was made possible by the generous
and loving interest of a lady in Chicago. Added
to the other anxieties of meeting our annual budget,
we did not feel able to bear the additional burden
for which this venture called. One cannot work
at one’s best at any time with an anxious mind.
The lady, however, was generous enough to give sufficient
endowment to secure two teachers among other things,
though she absolutely refused to let even her name
be known in connection with the school. Our consolation
is that we know that she has vision enough to realize
the value of her gift and to accept that as a more
than sufficient return.
Seeing that some of our older scholars
were able to find really useful and remunerative employment
in teaching, and as only for those who held certificates
of having passed the local examinations were augmentation
grants available, we decided to make special efforts
to have our scholars pass by the local standards.
We, therefore, thanks to the endowment, engaged teachers
trained in the country, and instituted the curriculum
of the Colony. These teachers told us that our
school was better than almost any outside St. John’s.
Four scholars have passed this year; and now we have
as head mistress a delightful lady who holds the best
percentage record for passing children through the
requirements of the local examinations of any in the
country.
So much more deeply, however, do idle
words sink into some natures than even deeds, that
one family preferred to keep their children at home
to risk sending them to our undenominational school;
and there is no law to compel better wisdom with us
here in the North.
On the other hand, we had already
obtained a scale of our own for grading success.
For a number of our most promising boys and girls we
had raised the money for them to get outside the country
what they could never get in it, namely, the technical
training which is so much needed on a coast where
we have to do everything for ourselves, and the breadth
of view which contact with a more progressive civilization
alone can give them. The faculty of Pratt Institute
gave us a scholarship, and later two of them; and
with no little fear as to their ability to keep up,
we sent two young men there. The newness of our
school forced us to select at the beginning boys who
had only received teaching after their working hours.
Both boys and girls have always had to earn something
to help them on their way through. But they have
stood the test of efficiency so well that we look forward
with confidence to the future. A girl who took
the Domestic Economy course at the Nasson Institute
told me only to-day, “It gave me a new life
altogether, Doctor”; and she is making a splendid
return in service to her own people here.
The real test of education is its
communal effect; and no education is complete which
leaves the individual ignorant of the things that
concern his larger relationship to his country, any
more than he is anything beyond a learned animal if
he knows nothing of his opportunities and responsibilities
as a son of God. But though example is a more
impelling factor than precept, undoubtedly the most
permanent contributions conferred on the coast by the
many college students, who come as volunteers every
summer to help us in the various branches of our work,
is just this gift of their own personalities.
Strangely enough, quite a number of these helpers who
have to spend considerable money coming and returning,
just to give us what they can for the sole return
of what that means to their own lives, have not been
the sons of the wealthy, but those working their way
through the colleges. These men are just splendid
to hold up as inspirational to our own.
The access to books, as well as to
sermons, may not be neglected. Our faculties,
like our jaws, atrophy if we do not use them to bite
with. The Carnegie libraries have emphasized
a fact that is to education and the colleges what
social work is to medicine and the hospitals.
We were running south some years ago on our long northern
trip before a fine leading wind, when suddenly we
noticed a small boat with an improvised flag hoisted,
standing right out across our bows. Thinking
that it was at least some serious surgical case, we
at once ordered “Down sail and heave her to,”
annoying though it was to have the trouble and delay.
When at last she was alongside, a solitary, white-haired
old man climbed with much difficulty over our rail.
“Good-day. What’s the trouble?
We are in a hurry.” The old man most courteously
doffed his cap, and stood holding it in his hand.
“I wanted to ask you, Doctor,” he said
slowly, “if you had any books which you could
lend me. We can’t get anything to read here.”
An angry reply almost escaped my lips for delaying
a steamer for such a purpose. But a strange feeling
of humiliation replaced it almost immediately.
Which is really charity skilfully to remove
his injured leg, if he had one, or to afford him the
pleasure and profit of a good book? Both services
were just as far from his reach without our help.
“Haven’t you got any books?”
“Yes, Doctor, I’ve got
two, but I’ve read them through and through
long ago.”
“What kind are they?”
“One is the ‘Works of
Josephus,’” he answered, “and the
other is ‘Plutarch’s Lives.’”
I thought that I had discovered the
first man who could honestly and truthfully say that
he would prefer for his own library the “best
hundred books,” selected by Mr. Ruskin and Dr.
Eliot, without even so much as a sigh for the “ten
best sellers.”
He was soon bounding away over the
seas in his little craft, the happy possessor of one
of our moving libraries, containing some fifty books,
ranging from Henty’s stories to discarded tomes
from theological libraries.
Each year the hospital ship moves
these library boxes one more stage along the coast.
As there are some seventy-five of them, they thus
last the natural life of books, since we have only
rarely enjoyed the help of a trained librarian enabling
us to make the most use of these always welcome assets
for our work. Later, some librarian friends from
Brooklyn, chief among whom was Miss Marion Cutter,
came down to help us; but our inability to have continuity
when the ladies cannot afford to give their valuable
services, has seriously handicapped the efficiency
of this branch of the work. This, however, only
spells opportunity, and when this war releases the
new appreciation of service, we feel confident that
somehow we shall be able to fill the gap, and some
one will be found to come and help us again to meet
this great need.
The cooperation of teachers and librarians
more than doubles the capacity of each alone, and
we believe sincerely that they do that of doctors,
as they unquestionably do that of the clergy.
All the world’s workers have infinitely more
to gain by cooperation than they often suspect.
And indeed we who are apostles of cooperation, as essential
for economy in distribution and efficiency in production,
realize that groups of workers pulling together always
increase by geometrical progression the result obtained.
None of our methods, however, tackled
the smallest settlements, hidden away here and there
in these fjords, especially those unreached by the
mail steamers and devoid of means of transportation.
Mahomet just could not come to the mountain, so it
had to go to him. A lady and a Doctor of Philosophy,
Miss Ethel Gordon Muir, whose life had been spent
in teaching, and who would have been excused for discontinuing
that function during her long vacations, came down
at her own cost and charges to carry the light to
one of these lonely settlements. She has with
loyal devotion continued to carry on and enlarge that
work ever since, till finally she has built up a work
that the clergyman of the main section of coast affected,
and also the Superintendent of Education, have declared
is the most effective branch of our Mission.
Her band of teachers are volunteers. They come
down to these little hamlets for the duration of their
summer vacations. They live with the fishermen
in their cottages and gather their pupils daily wherever
seems best. Lack of proper accommodation and pioneer
conditions throughout in no way deter them. We
expected that their criticism would be, “It
is not worth while.” That has never been
the case. Before the war they came again and
again, as a testimony to their belief in the value
of the effort. Some have given promising children
a chance for a complete education in the States.
Indeed, one such lad, taken down some years ago by
one of the students, entered Amherst College last
year; while several were fighting with the American
boys “Over There.”
The only real joy of possession is
the power which it confers for a larger life of service.
Has it been the reader’s good fortune ever to
save a human life? A cousin of mine, an officer
in the submarine service of the Royal Engineers, told
me a year or two before the war that he was never
quite happy because he had spent all his life acquiring
special capacities which he never in the least expected
to be able to put to practical use. This war
has given to him, at least, what possessions could
never have offered.
It almost requires the fabulous Jack
to overcome the hoary giants of prejudice and custom,
or the irrepressible energy of the Gorgon. It
has been helpful to remember away “down North”
the stand which Archbishop Ireland took for public
schools. When the Episcopal clergyman for Labrador,
whom we had been influential in bringing out from
England, decided to start an undenominational boarding-school
on his section of the coast, we began to hope that
we might yet live to see our sporadic effort become
a policy. Laymen in St. John’s, led by
the Rev. Dr. Edgar Jones, a most progressive clergyman,
sympathized in dollars, and we were able to back the
effort. A splendid volunteer head teacher will
arrive in the spring to begin work. The effort
still needs much help; but I am persuaded that a chain
of undenominational schools can be started that will
react on the whole country. Already a scheme
for a similar uplift for the west coast is being promulgated.
In a letter written to my wife some
years ago I find that my convictions on the subject
of education were no less firm than they are to-day.
One came to the conclusion that “ignorance is
the worst cause of suffering on our coast, and our
‘religion’ is fostering it. True,
it has denominational schools, but these are to bolster
up special ecclesiastical bodies, and are not half
so good as Government schools would be. The ‘goods
delivered’ in the schools are not educational
in the best sense, and are all too often inefficiently
offered. Instead of making the children ambitious
to go on learning through life, they make them tired.
There is no effort to stimulate the play side; and
in our north end of the Colony’s territory there
are no trades taught, no new ideas, no manual training it
is all so-called ‘arts’ and Creeds.”