THE MOOSEHEART IDEA
The majority of the Moose are men in the mechanical trades. But the primary trade, the one on which all others rest, is agriculture. The men knew this, and so they founded Mooseheart on the soil. It is an agricultural school. It occupies more than a thousand acres in the richest farming region of Illinois. The first thing the students learn is that all wealth comes out of the earth. The babies play in the meadows and learn the names of flowers and birds. The heritage of childhood is the out-of-doors.
I heard of some children in the city who found a mouse and thought it was a rabbit. But when the city-born children come to Mooseheart they come into their own. They trap rabbits and woodchucks, fight bumblebees' nests, wade and fish in the creek and go boating and swimming in the river and the clear lake.
When a boy gets old enough to leave the kindergarten and start in the primary school he mixes agricultural studies with his books. First he plants a small garden and tends it. Then he is taught to raise chickens. Next he learns swine husbandry and then dairying and the handling of horses. The girls learn poultry-raising, butter-making, gardening, cooking, dressmaking and millinery.
After the boy has had a general course in all the branches of agriculture he is permitted to specialize in any one of them if he wants to. He can make an exhaustive study of grain farming, dairying, stock breeding, bee culture, horticulture and landscape gardening.
After this grounding in agriculture, which all the boys must have, the student gets an introduction to the mechanical trades.
Then he may select a particular trade and specialize. The usual grammar-school and high-school courses are taught to all the students, also swimming and dancing and music, both vocal and instrumental. The kindergarten has a babies' band, and both the girls and boys have their own brass bands and orchestras.
Students are graduated when they are eighteen. Up to that time they are permitted to stay and learn as many trades as they can.
Learning comes easy in such a school as Mooseheart, and many of the boys go out with two or more finished trades. Music is one of the trades that the boys double in. We have graduated many fine musicians, but none who didn't know a mechanical trade as well and, on top of it all, he knew how to run a farm. Such a boy can serve his country in peace or war. Before men can eat they have to have food, and he knows how to raise it. To enjoy their food they must have a house to live in, and he knows how to build it.
After a house and food comes music. This lad can play a tune for the cabaret.
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.
