The Schools I Want and How to Get Them

by GRACE WILLIAMSON

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WHEN I was seventeen, I started teaching in a rural school of Alabama. That was thirty years ago, but like Thomas Hood, “I remember, I remember.” There were eighty children to be taught in one room and they ranged from the A-B-C class to the eighth grade. I still remember how hard the seventh-grade arithmetic was and how scared I was that some day I’d come across a problem I couldn’t work. And I remember my salary — $45 a month.

I can close my eyes and see the muddy road that I walked upon every morning to school, a mile and a half of it. On extremely cold mornings I would forget to feel important and gay and invincible. I would even cry a bit when I reached the schoolhouse, because my fingers were so cold and because I had such a hard time getting the fire to burn — there was no janitor. I remember the pothellied stove that finally took a notion to get red-hot, and the steady stream of children going to and from it all day. They were all either too hot or too cold.

I remember the room where I did “light housekeeping.” It wasn’t ceiled. On one unusually cold night I piled clothes, my umbrella, and a suitcase on the bed in a futile attempt to keep warm. The following morning everything was frozen as hard as a rock. I couldn’t make any biscuit because the lard was frozen. I had no loaf bread because the creek had been up all the week and nobody could get into town to get supplies. Being cold doesn’t keep you from being hungry. I remember eating boiled turnips for breakfast — and eating them while wearing my woolen gloves!

I still remember with a shudder what the chairman of the school board told me about dismissing school for a funeral. “Turn out school when a funeral comes along. Everybody wants their young’uns to go.” And go we did. There were two churches close to the school, and it seemed to me there was always a line of children tiptoeing to look into a coffin.

Oh, yes, I haven’t forgotten the water that we drank while at school. We were supposed to get water from a cistern but it needed cleaning out. Therefore, we drank from a branch that ran through the schoolyard. In the spring the branch always got full of tadpoles. It was hard to get a dipper full of water without scooping up tadpoles.

Thank goodness, spring not only brought tadpoles but blue hyacinths upon which I could feed my soul, and dogwood and peach blossoms and big bunches of rooster-head violets that the children picked in the woods and brought to me; the smell of newly plowed earth and newly washed bodies; the promise of summer coming on, with surcease from my labors.

Well, in thirty years we’ve come a long way even in Alabama, and this state is, as you know, pretty close to the bottom when it comes to educational status. At present there are few one-teacher schools left. In one county twenty-five years ago there were forty one-teacher schools. Today in this same county there are none. In the majority of the few that are left, only the first three grades are taught.

Thanks to the clubwomen of the state, to the education-minded editors, and to interested parents, as well as to teachers, many children have the privilege of being in well-equipped buildings and are getting the benefit of hot lunches, health clinics, recreational facilities, trained teachers and supervisors.

As for teachers, we have a retirement system, tenure, and the best salaries we have ever had, although they are still insultingly low. Teachers are beginning to talk about their rights. Nobody has ever thought we had any right to rights heretofore! One teacher in another state has been bold enough to prepare “An Evolving Bill of Rights for Teachers, ” including “the right to adequate compensation for the full year of 52 weeks” and “the right to the same personal liberties which other respectable citizens assume for themselves as a matter of course.”

Right now all over the country we are going through a leavening process. The editorials, the magazine articles, the sermons, the talk of the common people — all these things are in the yeast. Thirty years from now the schools will make the schools of today archaic — just about like comparing present-day aviation achievements with the Wrights at Kitty Hawk. The emphasis will be on the kind of schools that will make people happier, more comfortable, healthier, and more tolerant.

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STARTING at the very beginning, I believe there will be schools for the newly wedded where wives and husbands are taught how to get along with each other and with their children-to-be. Of course, in some communities a start has already been made in this direction. This type of school would help to do away with many broken homes and unhappy children. I now have children in my room who speak of “my real mother and my other mother,” who say, “ My real father doesn’t want me to pay any attention to what my stepfather tells me to do, and I don’t know which one to mind.”

Next, I’d say do some changing of courses in teachers colleges. I have had only two or three courses that were practical, that really helped me to help the children in my care. To me, it is important to know how to teach the children to get along with others, how to appreciate the things they have, how to make a good living, how to make a sick member of the family more comfortable. I can still rattle off the names of the nerves: oculomotor, trochlear, trigeminal, glossopharyngeal, hypoglossal, and all the rest, but what good does this knowledge do me? It has never helped me out in any way; but I have needed to know how to shake down a thermometer, to give an enema, to make a dress that does not look homemade.

By all means, I’d like to have special schools for problem children. Here the teachers would have very special training to cope with the intricate mazes of the minds of children who steal, annoy others, show complete indifference. These special teachers should have only a very few children. This arrangement would then allow the regular teachers more time to spend with a normal group. There should also be schools for the gifted children, the unusually bright children. They would be a challenge to one another, just as the Quiz Kids are, and would have to work to their capacity. Too often today, in our zeal for taking care of the average children, we neglect the bright.

I want schools with the best equipment possible. This would include comfortable seats for all children. Today in many schools we are Procrustean in our ideas. We expect big children to fit in small desks and little children to pull themselves out to fit large desks. The lighting arrangement should be adequate. There are too many rooms making out with the scanty provision of one or two drop cords with small bulbs. If the building is steam-heated, the furnace and radiators should be in good working order. Furnace heat is not much good to you unless you can depend on it to keep you warm. There should be plenty of books, maps, globes, visual aids of all kinds. Today there is a dearth of maps especially.

I believe, in a few more years, there will be a psychiatrist in every school. They need to be there to help children who are obsessed with fears of death, of the end of the world coming; to help those who are handicapped by inferiority complexes. She could also help decide what children should be sent to the school for problem children.

I want every school to have the free services of a doctor, a nurse, and a dentist. In a check-up, if it is found that a child has malocclusion, it will not merely be noted on his card and then the card filed away. Something will be done about it.

I want to see the time come when teachers will be paid very high salaries. The profession will then attract the most capable boys and girls, who will be willing to spend eight years of their lives getting ready for teaching. It will be they who can teach children to create the beautiful and to admire the beautiful that others have created, to help a child to think well of himself, to know that if he “cannot carry a forest on his back, maybe he can crack a nut!”, to respect the rights of others, to “do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.” Perhaps then the majority of our teachers will be able to inspire their pupils, make these pupils want to do something line and wonderful and big, in the same manner that Mrs. J. M. Roberts inspired the writer Thomas Wolfe.

In the schools I want, there will also be a firstclass bookkeeper. Her salary will be good, too. Her job will be to look after the pennies, nickels, and dimes that the children contribute every year to the Red Cross, Junior Red Cross, the Community Welfare, the Cancer Drive, the Crippled Children, and other worthy drives. Giving to worth-while causes is part of a child’s education. However, teachers take up many hours each week keeping track of this money. It belongs in the province of a bookkeeper, not that of a teacher.

Where are we going to get the money for all these things? Right now this may be the $64 question. In a few years nobody will ask this question. The leavening process will be finished. Education will be an accepted fact, just as good roads are now an accepted fact. Do you ever hear anybody ask where we are going to get money to build roads? We’ll get money for schools from the same place that we get money for roads, for government buildings, for pensions, for dams, and dikes, FBI employees, for crime, for war, and all the rest.

Angelo Patri has said, “There is only one way to live in peace and comfort in any land and that is the way of brotherhood, of kindliness, good will toward all men. When one knows a man, one can only like him, feel with him, and wish him well. Let us try to know each other that way.”

Then when we have educated ourselves to live in peace with the rest of the world, maybe we can take the money that we would have spent on war and use that on education.