CHAPTER XLVII. LIFE'S PROBLEMS

Mooseheart is at once a farm, a school and a town. The boys help handle

the crops and herds under the guidance of the experts who teach the

classes in agriculture. For extra work in the fields the boys receive

pay. They save their money to buy the tools of their trade. The bandsmen

when they graduate go out with fine instruments bought with their own

earnings during their school years. “Preparation for life” is the

one aim of Mooseheart. Therefore at Mooseheart the boy or girl will

encounter every problem that he will encounter in his struggle in the

wider world. Nothing is done for him that he can do for himself. He is

taught no false theories. But every fact of life is placed before him

in due time. The first wealth of facts comes to these city-bred children

when they are set down in the middle of this great, busy, beautiful

farm. John Burrows says: “No race that does not take to the soil can

long hold its country. In the struggle for survival it will lose its

country to some incoming race that loves the soil.” Already the Japanese

farmers in California have shown that if we should let them in they

would take this whole country in a few years. They drive the American

farmer out because they have a passion for the soil, and they turn their

whole families in to till it. What is the answer? Teach our young to

love the soil and to till it well, or else an alien race will take away

their heritage. The first lesson in Mooseheart is to till the soil.

But in addition to being a farm, Mooseheart is a town. The young folk

live in cottages and do their own cooking and house-keeping. There are

no great dormitories where hundreds sleep, and no vast dining-room where

they march in to the goose-step. We are preparing them for a free life,

and the only place they use the goose-step is in the penitentiary.

Mooseheart is a town instead of an institution. All “institutionalism”

is cast away. In each cottage is a group of boys or a group of girls

living under family conditions. They are not all of the same age; some

are big and some are little, and the big ones look after the little

ones. Each cottage has its own kitchen and orders its own supplies from

the general store. The girls' cottages have each a matron (sometimes a

widow who with her little ones has been admitted to Mooseheart), and she

advises the girls how to do the buying and the cooking.

In the boys' cottages there is a proctor to advise them and usually a

woman cook. The boys who care to can learn cookery and household buying

under her supervision. All the boys do their own dishwashing, sweeping

and bed-making. Once three boys about fourteen years old went on strike

because the proctor asked them to scrub the dining-room floor on their

knees. They thought this work would degrade them, and they started

toward the superintendent's office. On the way they met me and told me

their troubles.

“I think it is all right for a young man to scrub a floor on his

knees,” I said. “I've done it for my mother many a time. I have been

a bootblack. But it didn't hurt my character. You are going to the

superintendent for his opinion. He is a Harvard man, but he worked his

way through school and one of his jobs was bellboy in a hotel. Had

he been too proud to work as a servant he would never have gotten the

education that makes him head of this great school. Didn't you ever

scrub a floor on your knees? You can see the dirt come out with the

suds and you can watch the grain of the wood appear, where before it

was hidden by dust and grease. If you never saw that, you have missed

something that I have seen many a time. To know how to scrub a floor is

as much a part of your education as to know how to sandpaper a floor and

varnish it. We could hire this work done better than you can do it,

but that wouldn't be giving you a chance to learn the work. Now I'm not

telling you boys to go back and do the work if you don't want to. Use

your own judgment. But fellows that balk on a job never go far. A balky

man is like a balky horse, everybody gets rid of him as quickly as they

can. A quitter is never given a good job. They always keep him in a

place where it doesn't make any difference whether he quits or not.”

The leader of the boys said: “Aw, piffle, cut it out. We might as well

be scrubbing the floor as listening to this talk. Come on, fellows.” He

led them back, one of them protesting that he would never scrub a floor

for any man. He went ahead and scrubbed the floor still saying that he

wouldn't. That lad was weaker than the leader. He went wherever he was

led. The leader was a boy who made his own decisions. He was ashamed

of calling off the strike, but he did it because he felt the strike was

wrong.

This is the Mooseheart idea of education. Every boy must use his own

judgment. He faces every fact that he will face in life, and by the time

he is eighteen his judgment is as ripe as that of the much older average

man. The Mooseheart boys are not selected students. They come from the

humblest families, from homes that have been wiped out early. But the

training at Mooseheart is so well adapted to human needs that these

orphans soon outstrip the children of the more fortunate classes.

They become quick in initiative, sturdy in character and brilliant in

scholarship. Visitors who come from boys' preparatory schools where the

children of the rich are trained for college are amazed to find these

sons of the working people so far ahead of the young aristocrats. The

Mooseheart boys as a group have the others beaten in all the qualities

that go to make a young man excellent. We have prepared them for life.