"Twice," she replied. "I told my teacher that mother had taken me, so she took all of us in my room at school on the next Saturday."
Perhaps the most significant influence of the American home upon the American school is to be found in the regular setting apart of an hour of the school-day once, or twice, or even three times a week, as a story hour; and the filling of that hour with the stories, read or told, that in earlier times children never so much as heard mentioned at school by their teachers. It is indeed a pleasant thought that in school-rooms throughout the land boys and girls are hearing about the Argonauts, and the Knights of the Round Table, and the Crusaders; to say nothing of such famous personages in the story world as Cinderella, and the Sleeping Beauty, and Hop-O'-My-Thumb. The home story hour is no less dear because there is a school story hour too.
The other afternoon I stopped in during the story hour to visit a room in the school of my neighborhood. The teacher told the story of Pandora and the tale of Theseus and the Minotaur. A small friend of mine is a member of the "grade" which occupies that room. At the end of the session she walked home with me.
"Tell me a story?" she asked, when, sitting cozily by the fire, we were having tea.
"What one should you like?" I inquired. "The story of Clytie, perhaps, or--"
"I'd like to hear the one about Pandora--"
"But you have just heard it at school!" I exclaimed.
"I know," she said; "but I'd like to hear you tell it."
When I had told it, she begged me to tell another. Again I suggested various tales in my repertory. But she refused them all. "Tell about the man, and the dragon, and the ball of string, and the lady--" she began.
And once more when I interposed, reminding her that she had just heard it, she once more said, "Yes; but I'd like to hear it again."
Some of the children whom I have in mind as I write go to private schools and some of them go to public schools. It has not seemed to me that the results obtained by the one type of school are discernibly different from those produced by the other. In the private school there are fewer pupils than in the public school; and they are more nearly alike from the point of view of their parents' material wealth than are the pupils in a public school. They are also "Americans," and not "foreigners," as are so many of the children in city public schools, and even in the public schools of many suburbs and villages. Possibly owing to their smaller numbers, they receive more individual attention than the pupils of the public school; but, so far as my rather extensive and intimate acquaintance with children qualifies me to judge, they learn the same lessons, and learn them with equal thoroughness. We hear a great deal about the differences between public and private schools, and certainly there are differences; but the pupils of the public and the private schools are very much alike. It is considerably easier to distinguish a public from a private school than it is to tell a public- school child from a private-school child.