Emmy Lou's road to grace

Front matter

I

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT.

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Preface

Some years ago a collection of short stories under the title, “Emmy Lou: Her Book And Heart,” was offered to the American public as a plea for and a defense of the child as affected by the then prevailing stupidity of the public schools.

The present series of stories is written to show that the same conditions which in the school make for confusion in the child’s mind, exist in the home, in the Sunday school and in all its earlier points of contact with life; the child who presents itself at six or even at five, to the school and teacher, being already well on the way in the school of life, and its habits of mind established.

It is the contention of these new stories that the child comes single-minded to the experience of life. That it brings to this experience a fundamental, if limited, conception of ethics, justice, consistency and obligation. That it is the possessor of an innate conscience that teaches it to differentiate vii

Preface between right and wrong, and that the failure to find an agreement between ethics and experience confronts the child long before its entrance at school.

Not only do its conceptions fail to square with life as it finds it, but the practices and habits of the persons it looks up to fail to square with what these elders claim for life. Further, the child meets with an innate stupidity on the part of its elders that school cannot surpass, a stupidity which assumes knowledge on the child’s part that it cannot possibly have.

These conditions make for confusion in the child’s mind, and a consequent impairment of its reasoning faculties, before it presents itself to the school.

Given the very young child struggling to evolve its working rule out of nebulse, how do its elders aid it? The isolated fact without background or connection, the generalization with no regard to its particular application, the specific rule that will not fit the general case — these too often are its portion, resulting in lack of perspective, no sense of proportion, and no grasp of values. The child’s conceptions of the cardinal virtues, the moral law, the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of Christ, viii

Preface the human relation, are true, garbled, or false, in accordance with the interpreting of its elders.

The child thus has been in the training of the home, the neighborhood, and the Sunday school, for approximately four, three, and two years respectively, before it comes to the school of letters.

One of the intelligences thrashing out the problems of the school today, says:

“Education begins at the age of two or sooner, whether the parent wills it or not. The home influence from two to six, for good or ill in determining the mental no less than the moral status, is the most permanent thing in the child’s life. Even at the age of five, the difficulty for the teacher in making a beginning, lies in the fact that the beginning already has been made.”

In the original stories portraying the workings of the schoolroom on the mind of the child, the physically normal, mentally sound but slow type was used, in the child called Emmy Lou, and in now seeking to show that the conditions making for more or less permanent confusion in the child’s mind antedate the schoolroom, it has seemed wise to make use of the same child in the same environment.

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Out of God’s Blessing into the Warm

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