nditions unknown to her. It will also utterly do away with many of her
prejudices against the foreigner and it will make the "Let them eat
cake" attitude impossible.

And so the child, the parent, the teacher and the home-staying relative
are brought to feel their kinship with all the world through the agency
of the public school, but the teacher learns the lesson most fully, most
consciously. The value to the cause of peace and good-will in the
community of an army of thousands of educated men and women holding
views such as these cannot easily be over-estimated. The teachers, too,
are often aliens and nearly always of a race different from their
pupils, yet you will rarely meet a teacher who is not delighted with her
charges.

"Do come," they always say, "and see my little Italians, or Irish, or
German, or picaninnies; they are the sweetest little things," or, if
they be teachers of a higher grade, "They are the cleverest and the most
charming children." They are all clever in their different ways, and
they are all charming to those who know them, and the work of the public
school is to make this charm and cleverness appreciated, so that race
misunderstandings in the adult populations may grow fewer and fewer.

The only dissatisfied teacher I ever encountered was a girl of old
Knickerbocker blood, who was considered by her relatives to be too
fragile and refined to teach any children except the darlings of the
upper West side, where some of the rich are democratic enough to
patronize the public school. From what we heard of her experiences,
"patronize" is quite the proper word to use in this connection. A group
of us, classmates, had been comparing notes and asked her from what
country her charges came. "Oh, they are just kids," she answered
dejectedly, "ordinary every-day kids, with Dutch cut hair, Russian
blouses, belts at the knee line, sandals, and nurses to convey them to
and from school. You never saw anything so tiresome."

It grew finally so tiresome that she applied for a transfer, and took
the Knickerbocker spirit down to the Jewish quarter, where it gladdened
the young Jacobs, Rachaels, Isadors and Rebeccas entrusted to her care.
Her place among the nursery pets was taken by a dark-eyed Russian girl,
who found the uptown babies, the despised "just kids," as entertaining,
as lovable, and as instructive as the Knickerbocker girl found the Jews.
Well, and so they are all of them, lovable, entertaining and