life.  It may be of the greatest value in determining the force of her influence in this direction for the children to catch intimate little glimpses of her domestic accomplishments, of her sewing, or of her cooking, or of her quick knowledge and deft handling of emergency cases.  The teacher whose influence is felt most and lasts longest is the one whose “motherliness” supplements her academic acquirements and supplies a sympathetic understanding of the child.

[Illustration:  Canning tomatoes at the Montavilla School.  In such a class the mothers of future citizens are given training in one of the fundamental needs of the home—­scientific cooking]

[Illustration:  Lunchroom where children benefit by the scientific cooking of the vegetables they grow]

With innate motherliness as a basis, the teacher must build up a careful understanding not only of child nature, but of man and woman nature as the developed product of child growth.  She must be a student of the “woman question” as a vital problem, always recognizing that the whole social structure inevitably depends upon the status of woman in the world.  She must face without flinching her responsibilities in sex matters.  She may, or may not, be called upon to furnish sex instruction to the girls under her care, but no rules can free her from her moral responsibility in striving to keep the sex atmosphere clean and invigorating.  The “conspiracy of silence” on these subjects is broken, and we must accept the fact that modesty does not require an assumed or a real ignorance of the most wonderful of nature’s laws.  “The idea that celibacy is the ‘aristocracy of the future’ is soundly based if the Business of Being a Woman rests on a mystery so questionable that it cannot be frankly and truthfully explained by a girl’s mother the moment her interest and curiosity seek satisfaction."[4] And what the mother should tell, the teacher must know.

Practical use of the teacher’s carefully worked-out theories will be made all along the line of the girl’s, and to a certain degree the boy’s, education.  The indirect teaching of the primary grades will give place in the higher grades to more direct dealing with the science, or, better, sciences, upon which homemaking rests.  The classroom becomes a “school of theory.”  The home stands in the equally vital position of a laboratory in which the girl sees the theory worked out and in time performs her own experiments.  The finest teaching presupposes perfect cooeperation between school and home.

[Illustration:  Photograph by Brown Bros.  Mothers’ and daughters’ meeting on sewing day.  Cooeperation between the home and the school makes for the best teaching of domestic science]

The first duty of the mother, like that of the teacher, is to preserve always a right attitude toward home life.  The girl who grows up in an ideal home will be likely to look forward to making such a home some day.  Or, if the home is not in all respects ideal, the father or mother who nevertheless recognizes ideal homes as possible may show the girl directly or otherwise how to avoid the mischance of a less than perfect home.