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Well, they lasted about a month. Of course us fellers kind of kept things lively for 'em; that there buckin' affair was only one of the things happened to 'em. But they was good-natured kids, once they got took down a ways. We liked 'em real well. And when their families sent 'em the money to come home with, I think they come pretty near being sorry to leave, bad as they wanted to go. So me and another feller there fixed up that song to tell their story. They come all the way from Brooklyn, New York, if I remember right; used the money they was s'posed to go off to school with. But they got plumb tired of the wild West."

Charlie smiled reminiscently.

"Of course that song did n't just foller the same trail as they took. And

of course they could n't of told it that way, because they did n't know none of the words right. But it hits the main points, anyhow. It was sure some horse we put 'em on to. If I was green like them, I would n't of rode her for thirty cents, bad as I need the money."

When jazz music and the radio win the West and when Charlie is the stout father of a family on a comfortable homestead, that song may find honorable burial in the pages of a thick book, with the name of the author and the date of its composition all complete. But Charlie will say that such a fate is far ahead; that for many a day the West will belong to him and the cattle and the mountain sheep, and that the cow-boy songs will still be made and sung.

Bonnet Sonnet

BY JACQUELINE Embry

What lady knows a hat as well as I?
Let her come forward with a finer flair!
I like them small, sophisticated, spry,
Or gravely drooping with a trustful air;

I like them lined with white and rather pure;
Or dangerous, and dark as any crow;

I like them reckless, mocking, never sure;

I like a sailor-strictly yes or no.

A pirate turban 's priceless for a talk;

A rose-wreathed leghorn when one 's feeling vain;

I fancy tricornes for the morning walk,

And a little leather London slouch for rain; Wide, wistful tulles for tea; for windy weather, A tam o'shanter with a wicked feather.

I

The Schools of the Future

What Sort of Schools Are We Likely to Have in 1950?

BY SARAH N. CLEGHORN

VENTURE the guess that by 1950 the common schools of the world will be history schools in a far more fundamental sense than they ever were Latin schools, or, as we are still oldfashioned enough to call them, grammar schools. And just as now, in the United States, a child's advance from grade to grade depends on his understanding of arithmetic, so in the schools of the future I think the willingness of a maturer group to admit any young person to its intellectual adventures will depend largely on the range and vividness of that young person's historical perceptions. By talking about historical perceptions, I mean quite concrete things. For one thing, I mean his power to discover fresh and meaningful analogies between the present and the past; I am thinking of such an analogy, for instance, as Mr. Leiserson's when he called the rising labor-unions the "new House of Commons"; only I suppose I mean a younger, less embracing comparison.

Much more, though, I am thinking of a person's power to feel the present flowing on in a stream of change like the past; to feel history moving along under us, carrying us along,

And, finally, when I say "historical perceptions," I am thinking of the perception that history consists of a blend of cultures-a skein of major human interests as international as arithmetic.

For these future schools will spend, I believe, little or no time on compartmental history. These divisions and subdivisions which we call "English history," "French history," "ancient history," will begin, I am sure, to look quite old-fashioned by 1950. Or if the national histories are still in use, I am sure they will have been completely re-scaled, all their proportions overhauled and subordinated to those of earth history as a whole. Of course there is nothing to prevent our descendants from using national histories like pieces of a picture puzzle, fitting them together into that whole, in which a meaning and coördination can be discerned. Our own history, for example, might afford a clue to the other pieces in its neighborhood. But we should then find the French Revolution taking up more room than the American one; we should find the discoveries of Darwin bulking larger than the Missouri Compromise.

So, in a well proportioned English history, the discoveries of Copernicus

"Freshening its current, and spotted would take up most of the room now accorded to the fourth, fifth, and sixth

with foam."

wives of Henry VIII; St. Francis would be featured in more detail than Thomas a Becket. In short, I believe the view of history which our grandchildren will take is essentially just that blend of cultures with which, when it is considered simply and innocently, nationalism has comparatively little to do. It seems to me that they will be thrillingly aware of the romantic trail through history which every art and science has blazed. While they are still learning the alphabet, they will hear its long adventurous story, and will trace for fun the Egyptian birds and lions which our letters so deviously derive from. They will draw and paint Phenician galleys, having aboard the immortal account-books which spread our alphabet. How releasing to those robust imaginations which belong to very little children to learn how many times a baby was born and died a grandfather and left a baby grandson to grow up and die a grandfather, while the alphabet was being carried to and fro between the shores of Asia and Africa, before it ever came as far as England or America! As soon as children can count ten and write two-digit numbers, they can enjoy hearing how long nobody on earth had thought of needing a number sign for "nothing," and how, only a few grandfathers ago, none of our people had ever conceived of such a thing as a zero. Learning to read the clock will take them into Babylonia, to the measuring-unit of threescore, that sixty by which we still reckon hours and minutes. Their first tastes of geography and astronomy will be accompanied by curious looks at ancient maps, and at the notions the antique sailors had about boiling oceans and magnet mountains and sunken cities and the shoulders of Atlas.

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Some future schools may very well diffuse all history thus through the other studies, and have no history department at all in the sense of our history departments. The technic of such a plan would not perhaps be so hard to work out as it seems on first acquaintance. For think what has been done in a few schools to make the teaching of the mother tongue and its literature a part of all departments instead of a department by itself! Only our descendants do seem likely to need some coördinating line, such as now usually collects the diffused study of English into a school magazine or arranges it round a printing-press. This focusing device might be merely shelves of reference-histories in a general-study laboratory, where the different strands of culture might be traced back, and related to one another, by the help of a consulting teacher.

Or it might be some sort of pictorial annal. Such a device a few teachers have tried, and various charts and scrolls are being sold, with paralleled events and persons, whiskered lawyers and generals mostly, appearing in a stiff galaxy; but the ideal scheme would seem to be for the children to draw and paint their own continuing scroll, selecting, by themselves chiefly, the parts that have caught their fancy in what has been read or told; or, as I believe our great-grandchildren will do, pictorially studied, out of a kind of book yet to be conceived, a serious book for children's pictorial research. Younger children take fairly well to symbolic pictures, and to the task of inventing them; and they take very readily indeed to painting and drawing scenes of

history that have impressed their fancy. Conceive, then, on such a pictorial annal, the contemporaneous civilizations of China and Rome, for example, respectively indicated, perhaps, by simplified pagodas and arches, a symbolic senator and mandarin. On such an annal would appear, in time, the fall of Rome, a child's own sketch or painting (whether or not after Van Loon's symbolic simplifications) of the barbarians swarming into the streets of Rome, while the pagodas and mandarins of China go on abreast along the scroll. And still the pagodas and mandarins would go on, abreast of the first little monasteries, abreast of the Crusaders going to Jerusalem, abreast of the Renaissance, and the two centuries of discovery of the Americas; abreast, finally, of the swarming machines of the industrial revolution. What a chance for the imaginations of children really to bite into the longevity of China! To see it as the second Egypt, the patriarch of present nations!

Such a pictorial annal would virtually obviate, of course, the learning of dates. Of what use dates except to converge events and coördinate periods? We used to learn that Magellan's ships sailed round the world between 1519 and 1522, and that Cortes conquered Mexico between 1519 and 1522. If we had painted pictures of their cruel and ambitious expeditions on a segment of a long roll of wrappingpaper thumb-tacked round our schoolroom wall (the segment our class had labeled "1500 to 1600"), we should have known, without bothering to learn it, that they set off simultaneously, about half-way between Columbus's first voyage westward and the rout of the Spanish Armada. We should have known it by merely letting

our eyes wander over our own and our schoolmates' paintings on the long panorama we were making round our school-room.

Incidentally, if a group expression of beauty and thought is properly to be spoken of as incidental to anything else, the children would have been practising art somewhat as, I suppose, Professor Cizek of Vienna would have it practised-by executing their own conceptions in such massive bulks of glowing color as children love, with, if they liked, that innocence of perspective which sometimes so magically conveys the boldness of their intellectual mood.

Will a little boy who has painted a rose window on the history annal forget how religion once flowered into heavenly churches?

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These joyful releases of spirit in art, which are coming a little of late into the schools, have something mystically valuable for our social future, many of us are sure. We know they will contribute to make the order under which our great-grandchildren live an order of grace and courtesy and freedom. I have never been able to set down in mathematical clearness why I for one so confidently look for this result. Perhaps some teacher less ignorant of the psychology of wishes can base my expectations in science, with all of its sanctions. Deeply bedded in our natures the reason lies hidden from eyes that look through workaday spectacles. Teachers, at all events, often see in the social relations of children such a miracle happen. Children are not grumpy, they are not sly, they are not quarrelsome, when they are creatively happy. "Not rejoicing," as Spinoza

said, "because they have quelled their lusts; but contrariwise, because they rejoice, quelling their lusts."

But there is something else for our grandchildren to do with history for their children if they mean to draw out its commanding powers over life and relate it strongly to the future. History is still too much conceived of as an informational study. It should be, I think, above all others dynamic. A socially hopeful teacher once went over the whole outline of United States history with a thoughtful boy without asking him, until the end of the year, to weigh all this busy movement, all these conflicts, whether armed or political, in the scales of the general happiness. When she did ask him to consider this, he mused for a few minutes, and then said he thought nothing had been accomplished for the general happiness no net result since Columbus had landed. His temperament, of course, entered into this answer. He might have answered differently. What impressed the teacher was the discovery that he and she had both conceived of history as "a thing you ought to know," instead of differentiating between events, and concentrating upon those which seemed to have raised some harvest of human happiness.

The study of history needs very much, I think, this simple, but sublime, criterion. It needs to be turned from a mere glittering pageant into a play. Posterity, I think, will orient history as a matter of course with its face toward the rising social sun, placing the common man, and his happiness, in the middle of the picture where governments now sit and bask. Instead of saying, "Five thousand tons of coal were mined," "Ten million bushels of

wheat were grown," we shall have learned to use the active verb, and to say, "These miners, in getting out five thousand tons of coal, lost fifty of their lives from fire-damp," "These farmers, while they raised so many thousand bushels of wheat to the square mile, lost their land in a percentage of twelve or fifteen a decade, and became tenants." And I can already think of a possible technic for this right-about face. I don't suppose it has ever been tried. Will any teacher of history who reads this let me know in case it has been tried, where, and with what results? It consists in beginning every course in history by a group sketch, arrived at by discussion, of the class's own original utopia-the world as their young spirits would like to have it. Plenty of time would be required, and a teacher quite nicely balanced between taking too much of a part in the discussion and taking too little. But surely any children who are old enough to study history at all would enjoy formulating such a big fairy-land, and would formulate a very interesting one, with vital points about it, indeed, which adult utopia-builders never would have thought of. Perhaps adult utopias have been the more neglected by the voting public partly because children, and the beautiful concreteness of children's minds, have taken no part in making them. For children's minds, like Tolstoy's, "go as straight to the concrete as a horse to a manger full of oats."

If such a notion as this should be taken up by our descendants, their children, as they move on from year to year, would lay out fresh and widening utopias. Perhaps they would keep many of their first specifications, but they would add new and important

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