Rivercliff School

“ For, after all, Beth was a real girl and loved jewelry and the like just as much as any other girl.
This hope, however, was not the first thought in her mind. She neglected none of her senior class tasks for the sake of earning more money. She had even passed a good deal of her work over to another girl in a lower class, who needed to help herself through school. The doctrine of independence was beginning to be established at Rivercliff School in spite of such girls as Laura Hedden.
Social affairs were always of more importance to the senior class than to any of the other girls. ”

“ Just because I happen to be in a school for wealthy girls, should make no difference. What will be the odds, whether they like me or not, a hundred years from now?
“Nor will I sport the willow,” declared Beth, “nor wear the martyr’s crown!
“That Maude Grimshaw is half right on another point, too. I must do anything—anything that is decent—for money. I can’t be too particular.
[154] “I won’t dawdle around here like an abused chicken, looking for sympathy. I don’t need sympathy. What did I come to Rivercliff School for, anyway? ”

“ She was a plain, rather unattractive girl who seldom asserted herself; but now she was quite indignant.
“Stop, Maude Grimshaw. You are the meanest girl in Rivercliff School—I don’t care if you are the richest. This is my room and I declare I’ll never invite you into it again.”
She turned swiftly to Beth and put a protecting arm about her. “You are a girl I am proud to have for a friend, Miss Baldwin—I don’t care what others may say. I know I wouldn’t have the pluck to try to work my way through school, providing I could get an education in no other way. ”

“ Resolved, as before, to earn all the money possible, Beth did not neglect her studies. Even Miss Hammersly had to admit that her standing averaged better and better as the months went on. She was among the few first students in the so-called freshman class.
In Easter week Beth made seventeen dollars by mending and repairing lace and silk hose. The news that one of the girls did fine mending spread outside of the school. Between Rivercliff School [178] and the town of Jackson City was a suburban district occupied by many wealthy and well-to-do people. ”

“ Miss Hammersly would be the last to know about the friction in the senior class; but she must know in time, and she would then call the class president to account.
Long as the time seemed to June, the days passed only too swiftly. The senior class of Rivercliff considered itself, of course, quite a wonderful body of young ladies. And Miss Hammersly did all in her power to inspire them with the belief that the whole world lay open before them to be conquered.
Beth kept busily at work with both her books and her needle. ”

“ Baldwin,” Mr. Lomax said to Beth’s mother, “you must push Elizabeth on. She must continue her course at Rivercliff. Why! it will be a distinct loss to the educational community if she does not become a teacher.”
“I do not know how that may be,” said Mrs. Baldwin, quietly; “but I do know that I want Beth to continue at the school. At first, when Mr. Baldwin was taken ill, I did not see how we could accomplish it. But now, by her own exertions, she has proved that it is possible. Why! she has already in hand enough to pay the first half of next year’s expenses.” ”

“ Beth said, laughing, though rather ruefully, for she found the system followed at Rivercliff entirely different from that at the Hudsonvale high school. Larry had been right. Three years at this establishment—if she could keep up—would put her a long lap ahead in education.
Her own end of the table was piled high with books, for the two chums studied each evening together—and preferably in Number Eighty. Eighty-one was too apt to be the Mecca of girls who desired to scamp their work and barely get through on the monthly reports “by the skin of their teeth.” ”

“ One doesn’t get something for nothing in this world—I have found that out!” and she laughed rather scornfully.
“I do not understand you,” said Beth, sharply.
“Why, you will do something or other for money to help pay your tuition here. I don’t suppose it much matters what as long as it is not too hard. We have had girls like you at Rivercliff before, Miss Baldwin. Miss Hammersly rather prides herself upon having about so many each year, I believe,” she added, carelessly. ”

“ Beth was aware that Miss Rice was frequently in Maude Grimshaw’s company. The lesson to be drawn was obvious.
All the girls of Rivercliff were not followers of “Princess Fancyfoot.” Yet it was plain enough before the day of the game between the school’s first team and the one from Jackson City, that Beth was not a favorite on the basket-ball team.
Whether Miss Crossleigh, the instructor, noticed it or not, she said nothing. Teachers cannot always take note of girlish feuds and rivalries. ”

“ That summer Beth found that she was more popular than ever in her home town. Mr. Lomax asked her to meet his class of girls who would graduate from the high school the next year, and tell them something about what it meant to attend a boarding school. It was at a lawn party, and a good many older people were present.
Beth did her best to inspire the girls with a desire to do as she had done. Some of them would have to follow her methods to a certain extent, for their parents were too poor to pay their full tuition at any school or seminary. ”

“ Fortunately, she had obtained the patronage of wealthy people from the start. Without sacrificing her standard of excellence that put her graduates considerably above those from other preparatory schools of the State, Miss Hammersly managed to satisfy the parents of girls on whom much more money than was good for them was spent. ”

“ Rivalries always will exist where youths congregate—in school, or elsewhere. The very system of education followed at Rivercliff fostered rivalries. And a healthy competition between students is always of benefit. ”

“ Although the majority of the scholars in the Rivertown High School lived in Rivertown, there were a goodly number who came from adjacent villages, and for the benefit of these, as well as to give a greater school life to those who lived at home, the trustees of the high school had sanctioned the use of several halls as society rooms. ”

“ After all it was jolly to be a junior collegiate at Greycliff instead of a college freshman somewhere else. The senior collegiates were paying them a great deal of attention because of the society “rushing” which began at once. Most of these girls in the upper class they knew very well, because they had been senior academy students when some of our Lakeview corridor girls first entered as juniors in the academy. ”

“ In a reply to a resolution from the Council of the County of Norfolk, in 1851, Dr. Ryerson thus referred to this subject:—
"There is no poetry in the establishment and development of a public school system; it is a matter-of-fact-work from beginning to end; and its progress, like the growth of body and mind in an individual, is gradual, and is the joint result of time and labour. I am happy, however, to know that our school system has already become so far developed in its principles, objects and character as to command the attention and almost unanimous approbation of the country. ”

“ But the chief rights of such an institution are derived from the founder, and the facilities for their easy exercise and quiet enjoyment are derived from the state.
Such schools are sometimes, upon a superficial view, supposed to be public, because they receive [Pg 189] pupils upon terms of equality, and no rule of exclusion exists which does not apply to all. And especially has it been assumed that a free school thus founded, as the Norwich Free Academy, which makes no charges for tuition, and is open to all the inhabitants of the city, is therefore a public school. ”

“ I suppose that no person who has undertaken the management of the young people of any school in all the history of education, ever did so much work of this sort before his school opened. Really, though Jennie Woodruff did not see how such doings related to school work, Jim Irwin’s school was running full blast in the homes of the district and the minds of many pupils, weeks and weeks before that day when he called them to order on the Monday specified in his contract as the first day of school. ”

“ Still there was silence.
"This is a very good and a great school," said Miss Ravenscroft. "It gives for a very trifling sum an education worthy of the very best and most expensive schools in England. It was founded some hundred years ago, by those who thought much and in advance of their time. In an age when girls were almost uneducated, when nothing further was required from them than a smattering of reading and writing, these wise and far-seeing people said that they would give the girls of the future a chance. ”

“ The academy and college take young men from the district and high schools, and furnish them with additional aids for the business of life; but the Normal School is truly the helper of the common schools. It receives its pupils from them, fits these pupils for teachers, and sends them back to superintend where a few months before they were scholars. ”

“ He came at a time when there was only a collection of boys with no unity and no sound traditions. He left it united and loyal. He came to a rich endowment, which was spending its resources with little visible result. He left the School prosperous, and possessed of a reputation all over England. He had been among the first Headmasters to acknowledge the value of a training in Natural Science, and he showed men that a thorough and efficient training in modern subjects could be given in one of the oldest of England's Public Schools. ”

“ A few years later, parents were compelled by law to send their children to school; and, very recently, steps have been taken to make the education of a child in the Public Schools nearly as free as in Ontario. Religious tests, too, were done away with, in 1871, in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin, so that all classes and creeds can attend these great seats of learning and get the advantage of a university education. ”

“ The Universities of Ontario owe much to the painstaking care of the late Dr. Ryerson over the development of Public and High School education. The efficiency of the University and its possible influence depend on a sound and thorough system of elementary education. The High School depends on the Public School and the University on the High School. Our Universities have made tremendous strides during the last ten years, and without a doubt the cause of this has been due to the fact of the elementary schools putting forth the fruit of the good seed sowed thirty years ago. ”

“ 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." ”

“ In the summer of 1822 “Public Education” was published. Every effort had been made to work up the school to a high degree of excellence. “I am perfectly aware,” Rowland Hill wrote, “that much must be done before our school is fully prepared to stand the minute, and, perhaps, in many cases, invidious inspection which will take place in consequence of our inviting attention. ”

“ You’re just making individual fights for your favorite teachers.”
Jim Irwin made a somewhat lengthy speech after the awkwardness wore off, so long that his audience was nodding and yawning by the time he reached his peroration, in which he abjured Bronson, Bonner and Peterson to study his plan of a new kind of rural school,—in which the work of the school should be correlated with the life of the home and the farm—a school which would be in the highest degree cultural by being consciously useful and obviously practical. ”

“ His work marks the real beginning of free primary instruction in the vernacular in France. In addition to elementary schools, a few of what we should call part-time continuation schools were organized for children engaged in commerce and industry. Realizing better than the Jesuits the need for well-trained rather than highly educated teachers for little children, and unable to supply members to meet the outside calls for schools, La Salle organized at Rheims, in 1685, what was probably the second normal school for training teachers in the world. ”

“ It was henceforth to be applied to the payment of the tuition fees of such boys as had for not less than three years been educated at one or other of the Public Elementary Schools in the Ancient Parish of Giggleswick, and who should be deserving of it. These boys were to be called Shute Exhibitioners. The change has limited the numbers of boys from the neighbourhood who have been educated at the School, but the results have been excellent. ”

“ Miss Heerwart took charge of a training college for Kindergarten teachers in connection with the British and Foreign School Society; the Froehel Society was founded, and Madame Michaelis took the Kindergarten into the newly established High Schools for Girls. For the children of the well-to-do Kindergartens spread rapidly, but for the children of the poor there was no such happiness; the Infant School was too firmly established as a place where children learned to read, write and count, and above all to sit still. Infants' teachers received no special training for their work ”