MCAS Practice Test 10

Letter to the School Committee of Brackett Falls, October 4, 1887

¹Gentlemen: I write to ask your consideration of a matter which I believe concerns the future of this town as nearly as any question that will come before you this year. It is the matter of those young people of Brackett Falls who have left our schoolrooms for the mills, and who, having left, have no road back.

²You will know the circumstances as well as I. Each spring a number of my oldest pupils—boys and girls of thirteen and fourteen, many of them among the brightest I have taught—come to tell me that they will not return in the fall. Their families need their wages; the mills need their hands. I do not blame the families. A household with a sick father and five children to feed cannot be lectured about the value of grammar. But I have watched these young people go, and I have watched what becomes of their learning afterward. It does not stand still. It runs out of them, like water from a cracked jar, until a girl who once read poetry aloud to the class can scarcely write a letter to her cousin.

³I propose, therefore, that the Committee open the Grove Street schoolhouse three evenings each week, from half past seven until nine o'clock, for the instruction of any young person of the town who is employed during the day. I ask no new building and no great expense: only fuel for the stove, oil for the lamps, and a modest sum for books. I will teach the classes myself, without additional salary, for the first winter, so that the Committee may judge the experiment by its results before committing any public money to its continuance.

⁴I anticipate the objections, for I have heard several of them already. It is said that young people who have worked ten hours at the looms will be too weary to learn. Some will be. But I have seen these same young people walk two miles after their shift to attend a dance, and I do not believe that their appetite for improvement is weaker than their appetite for pleasure; it has only been given less to feed upon. It is said, too, that the mill owners will not look kindly on the scheme, fearing that educated workers will grow discontented. To this I can only answer that an employer who fears his workers' learning has confessed something about his business that he would do better to mend.

⁵Consider, gentlemen, what we already spend. We pay to teach these children for seven or eight years, and then, at the very age when their minds are readiest, we let the whole investment slip away. Is that economy? A farmer who cleared and planted a fine field and then abandoned it before the harvest would be thought a fool. Yet that is what we do each spring, and we call it necessity.

⁶I do not pretend that three evenings a week will make scholars of mill hands. I hope for something more modest and, I think, more important: that a young woman may keep the habit of reading; that a young man may learn enough arithmetic to know whether his wages have been counted fairly; that both may continue to think of themselves as persons with minds, and not only as hands. A town that keeps those habits alive in its young people will be a better town in twenty years than one that does not. I am certain of it.

⁷I would be glad to appear before the Committee at its next meeting, and to bring with me several former pupils who have told me they would attend. I remain, with respect, Your obedient servant, Eleanor Hadley Teacher, Grove Street School