THE DREAM COMES TRUE
What kind of school is Mooseheart? That can not be answered by making comparisons, for it is the only school of its kind. When the Moose committee met to decide what sort of school it would build, somebody suggested a normal school, a school to teach the young how to become teachers.
I objected. "The world is well supplied with teachers," I said.
"Everybody wants to teach the other fellow what to do, but nobody cares to do it. Hand work will make a country rich and mouth work make it poor. All the speeches I have ever made have never added a dollar to the taxable value of America. But the tin and iron Iwrought with my hands have helped make America the richest country in the world. The Indians were philosophers and orators;they could outtalk the white man every time. But the Indians had no houses and no clothes. They wouldn't work with their hands. Arace that works with its hands has run the Indian off the earth.
If we quit working now and try to live on philosophy, some race that still knows how to work will run us out of this country. The first law of civilized life is labor. Labor is the giver of all good things. Let us teach these orphans how to apply their labor, and after that all things will be added unto them."And so we established a pre-vocational school where the young people are taught farming, carpentry, cement construction, blacksmithing, gas engine building and dozens of other fundamental trades that nourish our industrial life, a life that draws no nutriment from Greek or Latin. I am not opposed to literature and the classics. I make no war on the dead languages.
The war that killed them did the business. Why should I come along and cut off their feet, when some one else has been there and cut off their heads? But as an educator I promote the industrial trades, because they educated and promoted me. I have done well in life, and if you ask me how I did it, I'm telling you. Industry first and literature afterward. And if you wish to see that kind of school in action, you can see it at Mooseheart, Illinois.
There is a school with more than a thousand students, boys and girls of various ages, ranging from one month to eighteen years.
Some of the students were born there, the mother having been admitted with her youngsters soon after the loss of the father.
Each lad will get an introduction to a dozen trades, and when he selects the one that fits him best, he will specialize in that and graduate at eighteen, prepared for life. This education is the gift of more than half a million foster fathers. The Moose are mostly working men, and so they equip their wards for industrial life, and then place them on the job.
A boy that knows how to build concrete houses will not have to sleep in haystacks. If every high-school boy in America was a carpenter and cement builder how long would the housing shortage last? "The birds of the air have their nests," says the Bible.
And we know why they have them. Every bird knows how to build its nest. Nature teaches them their trade. But men must learn their trades in school. I visited a college once and saw how Greek was taught. They showed me a clay model of ancient Athens and pointed out the house that each philosopher and poet lived in thousands of years ago. "Where are the houses," I asked the graduates, "that you are going to live in to-morrow?" "Heaven only knows,"they said. "We'll have to take our chances in the general scarcity; our fate is on the knees of the gods." The luck of the Mooseheart boy is not on the knees of the gods; it is in his own hands.
I visited the Latin department and heard of Rome's ancient grandeur. "The Romans," they told me, "were not philosophers, but builders. They built concrete roads to the ends of the earth. But their soldiers brought back malarial fever from Africa. It destroyed the builders and their secret perished with them.
Eighty years ago concrete was rediscovered." I asked the students: "Do you know how to make concrete?" "I'll say we don't," they answered. And that's how much good their Latin education had done them.
The Mooseheart boys know how to make those concrete roads and how to build the motor-trucks that travel on them.
"Transportation is civilization." We teach civilization at the Mooseheart school. We teach art, too. But what is art without civilization? The cave men were artists and drew pictures on their walls. But you can't eat pictures. There is a picture on every loaf of bread. You always slice the colored label off the loaf and eat the bread and throw the art away. The Russians quit work a few seasons ago, and now they are selling their art treasures cheap to the roughneck nations that stuck to the pick-ax and the plow. The moral is: Keep working and you'll get the chromo. This truth was taught at Mooseheart long before the Russians saw the point and awarded us their picture gallery.
What I want to emphasize is that we are not opposed to art and literature. All men want them; need them. We teach how to get them.
