But at all events, whether school credit be given or not, the stimulus of interest in home tasks may be given strength by the teacher’s wise suggestion, and thoughtful consideration of the matter in teachers’ and mothers’ meetings will insure cooeperation of the most helpful sort.  The tactful teacher will find ways to suggest to mothers that children be held up at home to the ideals of efficiency she has been at pains to put before them at school.

The suggestion has been recently made by several thoughtful educators that the noon hour, in schools where children do not go home for dinner, be made use of for the simplest of cooking lessons.  The children who at seven are quite content to play house soon pass into the stage where they wish to see results from their work.  They want to “make things,” real things, that they or some one can use.  Children of nine or ten can learn to cook cereals and eggs in various ways, to make cocoa, and to prepare other simple dishes.  Their pride and delight in these accomplishments are intense.  These activities are equally suited to the small rural school and to the consolidated schools which are happily taking the place of the one-room buildings.  In both, the teacher may find the lunch hour a real educational force if it is used aright.  If the teacher allows and guides these efforts in the schoolroom, she must keep in mind her “ideal of efficiency.”  Accurate measurements, logical processes, elimination of awkward and unnecessary movements, care in following directions, neatness, and precision are the real lessons to be learned.

[Illustration:  Photograph by Brown Bros.  A school garden.  The possibilities for good through school-garden work are numberless]

School gardens are perhaps already too familiar to require more than a word.  Their possibilities for good are numberless.  In them many children get their first insight into the joys of making things grow and are led by this joy to undertake the care of a home garden and to beautify the home surroundings as they had never thought of doing before.  School-garden work leads to beautifying the school grounds, with resulting pride and interest in the school.

Accompanying the activities we have suggested, teachers will find a wide field in attractive stories of helpful cooeperative home life.  Extracts from many of Miss Alcott’s stories, the Cratchits’ Christmas dinner from Dickens’ Christmas Carol, and many other delightful glimpses of home life can be read, or, better, dramatized, with little effort and with good results.

It may seem that the homemaking training here suggested for younger children is too desultory, too slight, in fact, to affect the situation much.  But let us consider.  Homemaking is an art, coming more and more to be based on a foundation of science.  For it is undoubtedly true that, while the pessimists are telling us that the home is doomed, we who are optimists see coming toward us a great wave of homemaking knowledge which if seized upon will put the homemaker’s art upon a surer foundation than it has ever been.