CHAPTER XLVI. THE MOOSEHEART IDEA

The majority of the Moose are men in the mechanical trades. But the

primary trade, the one on which all others rest, is agriculture. The

men knew this, and so they founded Mooseheart on the soil. It is an

agricultural school. It occupies more than a thousand acres in the

richest farming region of Illinois. The first thing the students learn

is that all wealth comes out of the earth. The babies play in the

meadows and learn the names of flowers and birds. The heritage of

childhood is the out-of-doors. I heard of some children in the city

who found a mouse and thought it was a rabbit. But when the city-born

children come to Mooseheart they come into their own. They trap rabbits

and woodchucks, fight bumblebees' nests, wade and fish in the creek and

go boating and swimming in the river and the clear lake.

When a boy gets old enough to leave the kindergarten and start in the

primary school he mixes agricultural studies with his books. First he

plants a small garden and tends it. Then he is taught to raise chickens.

Next he learns swine husbandry and then dairying and the handling of

horses. The girls learn poultry-raising, butter-making, gardening,

cooking, dressmaking and millinery.

After the boy has had a general course in all the branches of

agriculture he is permitted to specialize in any one of them if he wants

to. He can make an exhaustive study of grain farming, dairying, stock

breeding, bee culture, horticulture and landscape gardening.

After this grounding in agriculture, which all the boys must have,

the student gets an introduction to the mechanical trades. Then he may

select a particular trade and specialize. The usual grammar-school and

high-school courses are taught to all the students, also swimming and

dancing and music, both vocal and instrumental. The kindergarten has a

babies' band, and both the girls and boys have their own brass bands and

orchestras.

Students are graduated when they are eighteen. Up to that time they are

permitted to stay and learn as many trades as they can. Learning comes

easy in such a school as Mooseheart, and many of the boys go out with

two or more finished trades. Music is one of the trades that the boys

double in. We have graduated many fine musicians, but none who didn't

know a mechanical trade as well and, on top of it all, he knew how to

run a farm. Such a boy can serve his country in peace or war. Before men

can eat they have to have food, and he knows how to raise it. To enjoy

their food they must have a house to live in, and he knows how to build

it. After a house and food comes music. This lad can play a tune for the

cabaret.

One of Mooseheart's earliest graduates made a high record in his

academic studies and mastered the trade of cook, pastry cook,

nurseryman, cement modeler, cornetist, saxophone player and landscape

gardener. He was brilliant in all these lines and ready to make a living

at any one of them. And if all these trades should fail, he was yet a

scientific farmer and could go to the land anywhere and make it produce

bigger crops than the untrained man who was born on the soil.

What other school in the world will give a boy at eighteen an equipment

like that? I ask this, not to disparage the old-fashioned schools, but

to call their attention to what the new are doing.