One of Mooseheart's earliest graduates made a high record in his academic studies and mastered the trade of cook, pastry cook, nurseryman, cement modeler, cornetist, saxophone player and landscape gardener. He was brilliant in all these lines and ready to make a living at any one of them. And if all these trades should fail, he was yet a scientific farmer and could go to the land anywhere and make it produce bigger crops than the untrained man who was born on the soil.
What other school in the world will give a boy at eighteen an equipment like that? I ask this, not to disparage the old-fashioned schools, but to call their attention to what the new are doing.
Mooseheart is at once a farm, a school and a town. The boys help handle the crops and herds under the guidance of the experts who teach the classes in agriculture. For extra work in the fields the boys receive pay. They save their money to buy the tools of their trade. The bandsmen when they graduate go out with fine instruments bought with their own earnings during their school years. “Preparation for life” is the one aim of Mooseheart. Therefore at Mooseheart the boy or girl will encounter every problem that he will encounter in his struggle in the wider world. Nothing is done for him that he can do for himself. He is taught no false theories. But every fact of life is placed before him in due time. The first wealth of facts comes to these city-bred children when they are set down in the middle of this great, busy, beautiful farm. John Burrows says: “No race that does not take to the soil can long hold its country. In the struggle for survival it will lose its country to some incoming race that loves the soil.” Already the Japanese farmers in California have shown that if we should let them in they would take this whole country in a few years. They drive the American farmer out because they have a passion for the soil, and they turn their whole families in to till it. What is the answer? Teach our young to love the soil and to till it well, or else an alien race will take away their heritage. The first lesson in Mooseheart is to till the soil.
But in addition to being a farm, Mooseheart is a town. The young folk live in cottages and do their own cooking and house-keeping. There are no great dormitories where hundreds sleep, and no vast dining-room where they march in to the goose-step. We are preparing them for a free life, and the only place they use the goose-step is in the penitentiary. Mooseheart is a town instead of an institution. All “institutionalism” is cast away. In each cottage is a group of boys or a group of girls living under family conditions. They are not all of the same age; some are big and some are little, and the big ones look after the little ones. Each cottage has its own kitchen and orders its own supplies from the general store. The girls' cottages have each a matron (sometimes a widow who with her little ones has been admitted to Mooseheart), and she advises the girls how to do the buying and the cooking.