Worldwide Calveri

A whooping-cough epidemic in 1908 quarantined Baltimore school children at home. The faculty of Calvert School mailed lessons to its whoopers, later developed a Home Instruction Division for grades from kindergarten to first year high school. Thanks to this necessity-mothered beginning, children can get a standard U.S. education anywhere the U.S. mails can reach.

Calvert School today has some 300 day pupils. Its unique service goes to 3,000 shut-in or isolated children in all of the 48 states and such odd spots as Poona, Ruanda-Urundi, Juneau, Waialua, Horta, Haiti. It is constantly expanding: last week Calvert was taking on U.S. children who will study as a group in Nicaragua's torrid Managua.

For $55 a year (except for the preprimary and postgraduate years), Calvert provides a teaching manual, textbooks, tests, charts, maps, scrapbook, pads, pencils, ruler and other materials. For an additional $16 the pupil may send work in for criticism by regular Calvert teachers. The school gives certificates, neither seeks nor earns profit from its absentee students.

Learn at Home. Calvert home courses concede nothing to slowpokes. In two to four hours a day, 160 lessons a year, parents can put children through eight elementary grades in six years. Parents get their teacher-training from Calvert manuals, which are almost parent-proof. Though some find pedagogy tough going, most of their pupils do very well. Mothers with kindergarten children get instructions on how to teach, play games, punish, tell stories, test intelligence, deal with lefthandedness, lying, disobedience, sex problems, how to develop morals, neatness, courtesy, concentration, imagination. Sample instruction: "Obedience ... is the first requisite for ... proper instruction . . . the first habit to be inculcated. . . . Both willingness and ability [to obey] may be made a habit . . . the child should never be allowed to argue, dispute or question orders. . . . Say 'I want to see if you can do what I tell you, instantly, when I tell you and just the way I tell you.' Then give the order: 'Stand up. . . .' " A Calvert specialty is the Royalroad Course, somewhere between kindergarten and first grade. It covers the 3Rs unadorned, gives the child elementary equipment needed to do first-year work without delays. The first year includes subjects which most schools put off until later: history (famous stories, biographies, national holidays), nature study, picture study (famous paintings). Second-year pupils get geography, science (animals without backbones). In the fifth year comes physics out of a text (What Makes the Wheels Go Round) by a Calvert teacher, Lieut. Colonel Edward G. Huey, who is now in England.

Learn in Asia. Calvert methods are a mixture of many traditions. Earnest, friendly Headmaster Edward Woodman Brown (Princeton '23) is no "progressive" educator. A tall and talented tennist, he looks older than his 42 years. He stresses discipline and English composition in a special Calvert up-&-down script. Brown is proud that Calvert has helped make life bearable for U.S. children in crowded Jap concentration camps like that in Shantung's Wei-hsien. The Calvert method was used there for six months by Rochester's Mrs. Frederick G. Scovel, wife of a medical missionary. Repatriated on the Gripsholm last winter, she wrote:

"We took our Calvert books ... a Catholic nun taught the children. . . . Jim is now in 8th grade--doing beautifully. . . . Carl is in 7th and his teacher comments often on his excellent foundation. Anne is in 4th. . . . All books had to be censored . . . [one] told of little Japanese children pointing at Americans and saying 'Look at their big noses. . . .' The Japanese were incensed, [said] Japan was not such a backward nation. . . . [When we sailed] we left everything there for the children in camp."

Some other Calvert students: a trailer-housed family of professional rollerskaters; a child on a Montana Indian reservation; a Vermont spastic; an Oregon child with a speech defect; a missionary's child on the Congo-Nile watershed; an Alaskan reindeer rancher's child; the governess-taught child of a Newport socialite.-

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