The American Child | Page 3

are the threads of this cloth pink when you
unravel it one way, and white when you unravel it the other?"
The mother was busy; but she laid aside her sewing and explained to
the child about the warp and the woof in weaving.
"I don't quite see why that makes the threads pink one way and white
the other," the little girl said, perplexedly, when the explanation was
finished.
"When you go to kindergarten, you will," I suggested.
"But I want to know now," the child demurred.
The next day I got for the little girl at a "kindergarten supply"

establishment a box of the paper woofs and warps, so well-known to
kindergarten pupils. Not more than three or four days elapsed before I
took them to the child; but I found that her busy mother had already
provided her with some; pink and white, moreover, among other colors;
and had taught the little girl how to weave with them.
"She understands, now, why the threads of pink gingham are pink one
way and white the other!" the mother observed.
"Why did you go to such trouble to teach her?" I asked with some
curiosity.
"Well," the mother returned, "she will have to buy gingham some time.
She will be a grown-up 'woman who spends' some day; and she will do
the spending the better for knowing just what she is buying,--what it is
made of, and how it is made!"
It is no new thing for fathers and mothers to think more of the future
than of the present in their dealings with their boys and girls. Parents of
all times and in all countries have done this. It seems to me, however,
that American fathers and mothers of to-day, unlike those of any other
era or nation, think, in training their children, of what one might
designate as a most minutely detailed future. The mother of whom I
have been telling wished to teach her little girl not only how to buy, but
how to buy gingham; and the father desired his small boy to learn not
alone that his state had a board of health, but that he might hope to
become a member of a particular department of it.
We occasionally hear elderly persons exclaim that children of the
present day are taught a great many things that did not enter into the
education of their grandparents, or even of their parents. But, on
investigation, we scarcely find that this is the case. What we discover is
that the children of to-day are taught, not new lessons, but the old
lessons by a new method. Sewing, for example: little girls no longer
make samplers, working on them the letters of the alphabet in "cross-
stitch"; they learn to do cross-stitch letters, only they learn not by
working the entire alphabet on a square of linen merely available to
"learn on," but by working the initials of a mother or an aunt on a

"guest towel," which later serves as a Christmas or a birthday gift of the
most satisfactory kind! Perhaps one of the best things we do for the
little girls of our families is to teach them to take their first stitches to
some definite end. Certainly we do it with as conscientious a care as
ever watched over the stitches of the little girls of old as they made the
faded samplers we cherish so affectionately.
The brothers of these little girls learned carpentry, when they were old
enough to handle tools with safety. The boys of to-day also learn it;
some of them begin long before they can handle any tools with safety,
and when they can handle no tool at all except a hammer. As soon as
they wish to drive nails, they are allowed to drive them, and taught to
drive them to some purpose. I happened not a great while ago to pass
the day at the summer camp of a friend of mine who is the mother of a
small boy, aged five. My friend's husband was constructing a rustic
bench.
The little boy watched for a time; then, "Daddy, I want to put in nails,"
he said.
"All right," replied his father; "you may. Just wait a minute and I'll let
you have the hammer and the nails. Your mother wants some nails in
the kitchen to hang the tin things on. If she will show you where she
wants them, I'll show you how to put them in."
This was done, with much gayety on the part of us all. When the small
boy, tutored by his father, had driven in all the required nails, he lifted
a triumphant face to his mother. "There they are!" he exclaimed. "Now
let's hang the tin things on them, and