Lake School

“ The inside of the houses are taken care of in the same way by the students. Each boy looks after his own room, and the work in the corridors and schoolrooms is attended to by changing shifts. There is a lake for swimming and canoeing, and plenty of time for the conventional athletics. Most of the boys are preparing for college, but this outdoor and manual work does not mean that they have to take any longer for their preparation than the boy in the city high school. ”

“ On the usual small map of a school-book, Lake Superior looks quite commonplace and harmless, but no man can stand on its shore without feeling the overwhelming power and mystery of this sea in the heart of a continent. It is different from every other lake on earth. ”

“ This is the rock upon which many a fair venture in story-telling has suffered shipwreck. Great mountains always carry one upward, but those of the Lake District are not great, nor is there anything great in the region. All is very sweet and pleasing and has its own peculiar charm, like the school of Lake Poets. 228
At Bowness, about midway of the lake, we left the coach for the first time for any other kind of conveyance. After enjoying a rare treat in a sail up and down the lake in the pretty steamer, we rejoined the coach at Ambleside, where we had ordered it to await us. ”

“ The people of East Lake are comparatively prosperous and progressive, and to no man are they more indebted for this condition of things than to Deacon and Professor Hawkins. As church officer and as school teacher he has long and faithfully served his church and his community, and his spirit and labors have been like the leaven which the woman hid in the meal. ”

“ On Saturdays the bigger boys went to town if they so desired, or took long tramps through the woods, or rowed to the upper end of the lake.
If the smaller fellows wanted to go out of bounds, usually a teacher went with them. There was a picnic of the Lower School on one of the islands in the lake, however, that Bobby and Fred were not likely to forget for a long time.
Pee Wee and Mouser got it up. They first got permission to take a cold dinner on Saturday and row to the island. There was a farmer whose land joined the school property on the east. ”

“ Buchtell College, of the Universalist denomination, has its seat here, with 20 instructors and 300 students, while there are good public school facilities, a public library, a hospital and efficient police and fire protection. In the neighborhood, reached by train service, are a number of attractive lake resorts. ”

“ Contrast the curriculum in those school districts with the rich curriculum offered in the Fort Smith School District, where advanced courses are offered and where specialty courses such as German, fashion merchandising, and marketing are available. The inequality in educational opportunity is self-evident.
The same holds true for buildings and equipment. Whether a school district has rainproof buildings, sufficient bathrooms, computers for its students, and laboratory equipment that functions is all a matter of money. ”

“ I am just half-way through the school. This is a very large school; it has twenty rooms in it. There is a building in Chicago that is eleven stories high. We will have vacation in a few days, and then all the school-children will be glad. We boys go down to the lake and bathe ourselves, and have a jolly time. We are allowed to fish in Humboldt Park on Saturday; I go there almost every Saturday. It has a very clear lake; there are sunfish, trout, and bull-heads in it.
Alvin H.
Of course you are now in the full tide of vacation. ”

“ A beneficed grammar school receives the children of the inhabitants, and sends, we believe, some to an University. Bishop Gibson received his education at it. Bishop Law, who was born at Bampton, went daily across one, or two of the rudest fells on the lake to another school, at Martindale; an exercise of no trifling fatigue, or resolution; for among the things to be gained by seeing the lakes is a conception of the extreme wildness of their boundaries. You arrive with a notion, that you can and dare rove any where amongst the mountains ”

“ LAKE, WILLIAM CHARLES (1817–1897) , dean of Durham, born in London on 9 Jan. 1817, was the eldest son of Captain Charles Lake of the Scots fusilier guards. Educated at Rugby under Dr. Arnold, he became the lifelong friend of his school-fellow, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley [q. v.] From Rugby he went to Oxford as scholar of Balliol in November 1834, and was a fellow-pupil under Archibald Campbell (afterwards archbishop) Tait of Sir Benjamin Brodie, Edward Meyrick Goulburn, and Benjamin Jowett. In 1838 Lake was elected fellow of his college at the same time as Jowett, and became tutor four years later. ”

“ There is a party of engineer fellows, or something of the sort, just come to camp out up by Rooster Lake,—sort of a summer school, I guess, for there are some older men along that they call professors. ”

“ There were all sorts of scenes, including some which were very funny and made the boys and girls shriek with laughter. One was a boy on a donkey, and another two fat men trying to climb over a fence. Then came a number of pictures made from photograph negatives, showing scenes in and around Lakeport. There were the lake steamer, and the main street, and one picture of the girls and boys rushing out of school at dinner time. ”

“ Affiliation.—In some states, notably in Minnesota, an excellent plan is in vogue by which the schools surrounding a town or a city are affiliated with the city schools in such a manner as to receive the benefit of the instruction of certain special teachers from the city. These teachers—of manual training, domestic science, agriculture, etc.—are sent out from the city to these rural schools two or three times a week, and in return the country children beyond a certain grade are sent to the high school in the city. ”

“ It has long been a favourite notion with me that if, instead of general guides to, or descriptions of all the Lake country comprised in single volumes, of which we have a superabundance, we could have each distinct locality treated of fully and minutely in a work devoted exclusively to itself, and written by some one whose long residence in, and intimate knowledge of the district described would secure its accuracy, we should possess a series of Lake books much more comprehensive, more useful, and more amusing than any we can yet boast of. ”

“ In Westmorland and Cumberland, thanks to the piety and local attachments of our ancestors, endowed, or, as they are more commonly called, free, schools abound. Grammar schools were established on the verge of, and even within, the lake district, prior to the dissolution of monasteries. From these institutions a host of learned and valuable men were distributed over England; many of them rose to great eminence in the literary world ”

“ For instance, the Minnesota Department of Education reports for 1915–16 that approximately 70 per cent of the country children do not go beyond the elementary grades. Only 5,532 out of 215,427 children in rural schools graduated from the eighth grade for the year. Those who do enter high schools, and, later, colleges, are indeed lost to the rural population, for the college-trained boys and girls seldom return to the soil. The children who do not enter high school remain on the farms, but they have secured almost no practical training for rural life, either as farmers or farm laborers. ”

“ Outdoor sports were made much of at Lakeview Hall, not only in the catalogue designed for the perusal of parents, but in actual fact. "A sound mind in a sound body" was Dr. Beulah Prescott's aim for her pupils, and exercise was as obligatory as lessons. None was excused without an adequate reason, and the group upon the hill grew in numbers until it seemed as though all the members of the school were present except the smaller girls, who had a slide of their own. ”

“ Some of the schools are situated on steep hillsides, some in the great pine woods, some beside the beautiful Asotin Creek. Some of the pupils ride to school on horseback, some come in autos, some in sleds through the deep snow, some cross the wide Snake River every day in row boats, some are brought in by school wagons. ”

“ The pupils in the Lincoln School, situated in the suburbs of Burlington, Iowa, feel no restraint from want of room to play, for the school grounds are as large as a small park, and stretches of prairie land roll before and behind the building. Beautiful oaks and elms form tiny forests round about, a brook rushes through the outskirts, and in each season nature calls so loudly to the boy that it requires all the ingenuity of teachers and truant officers to keep him in school. ”

“ The schoolhouse was much like any country school—but smaller and more cheaply built. It had long wooden benches and a rusty stove and in fine weather a dozen or more pupils, who ranged in age from very young children to great farm boys, who towered over Ida Mary, but whom, somehow, she learned to manage effortlessly in that serene fashion of hers. In bad weather, when it was difficult to travel across the prairie, her class dwindled until, at times, she had no pupils at all. ”

“ More than money, they esteemed the educational opportunities, and the normals afforded what would otherwise have been available. The great need of secondary educational institutions is shown by the fact that the legislature subsidized the Lakeview high school by an appropriation of $5,000, and by the rapid rise of the high school after district and county high schools were authorized in 1901. With the growth of high schools, the demand for normals to perform so varied and complex a function disappeared, and they began to spe- cialize in the training of teachers the original design. ”

“ Leading educators pointed out that the way to better schools was through better teachers. These called for normal schools for their training.
The first expression of the need came from the county super- intendent of Yamhill, J. D. Robb, in his recommendations to the state superintendent, Sylvester C. Simpson, in 1874. Mr. Robb said :
"There is a want of thoroughly qualified and competent teachers. I deem it of vital importance that the state should establish a normal school and sustain it liberally ; that it should not be connected with any college but purely distinctive as a normal school." ”

“ According to the above survey of South Dakota, 31 per cent of the rural teachers were teaching their first school, and only 9.6 per cent had taught as many as four schools. Few teachers, the report showed, have taught more than one or two years in a school, while the average teaching life of a rural teacher is three and three quarters school years. ”

“ It is an unusual institution of learning with a campus equally unique, for in its 25,000 acres are a forest, a mountain, and a lake and more than one hundred buildings which were not only erected by Berry students, but built from materials also made by them. Here mountain boys and girls express the fine spirit of independence inherited from their forbears. Once they enter the Gate of Opportunity, they earn their education. ”

“ The town and college of Plato disturb the expanse of prairie scarce more than a group of haystacks. In winter the walks blur into the general whiteness, and the trees shrink to chilly skeletons, and the college is like five blocks set on a frozen bed-sheet—no shelter for the warm and timid soul, yet no windy peak for the bold. The snow wipes out all the summer-time individuality of place, and the halls are lonelier at dusk than the prairie itself—far lonelier than the yellow-lighted jerry-built shops in the town. The students never lose, for good or bad, their touch with the fields. ”

“ Toward Fond du Lac, on the south, the horizon is the lake. South-southwestward, Black Wolf Point runs out, just over the verge, and the tops of the tall trees upon it peep up into view, like shadowy pile-work. Westward are the well-kept hospital grounds, fringed with stately elms overhanging the firm, gravelly beach, studded with ice-heaved bowlders, which extends northward to Neenah. The view to the north and northeast is delightfully hazy, being now dark with delicate fringes of forest which cap the occasional limestone promontories, and again losing itself in a watery sky-line. ”

“ In some states the agricultural colleges have inaugurated a movement to this end. In such colleges, agricultural high schools, and institutions of a similar kind in every state, a three-year course for teachers above the eighth year, specially designed to prepare them for rural school teaching, should be established. Such a school would furnish the proper atmosphere and the proper courses of instruction to suffuse the minds of these prospective teachers with appreciation and love of country life and rural school work. ”

“ The buildings belonging to the institution are capable of accommodating more than one hundred pupils. Six hours are devoted to study and recitation: they cook their own food, and a portion of time intended for relaxation is occupied in practical utility—chiefly agricultural pursuits, or as the mission report of the young ladies' school under Miss Ogden, at the east end of Maui, states, "the time from four to five they devote to exercise with the hoe." ”

“ State of North Dakota, for example, requires professional equipment of every teacher within its borders—no, not quite, it does not require it of its teachers in the special schools—the reform school, the schools for the deaf, blind, and the feeble minded—nor in its institutions of higher education, including the normal schools and the University. ”

“ Singing-schools and debating clubs were quite a common thing in the rural schools forty years ago, and there are many rural schools today that are doing work of this very kind. Is there any reason, for example, why the country schoolhouse should not offer an evening school during a portion of the winter, where the older pupils who have left the regular work of the school can carry on studies, especially in agriculture and domestic science? ”