OOKING for Boys vs. the Fear of Ridicule. When Clarence Meleney organized in the New York City High Schools a committee of teachers and principals to outline a plan for more direct attention to character as an aim of public school education, he delivered an address to the committee. In it he said he was convinced that the greatest disturber of youth is fear. We inherit the dreads passed on to us from a line of ancestors running back through thousands of years of ignorance and savagery. We are afraid of the dark, afraid of the unknown, afraid of ridicule, afraid of danger, afraid of being hurt in body or in self-esteem, afraid of death, afraid of punishment thereafter. John Arthur Greene used to say that school men are more afraid of ridicule than any others are except politicians. William H. Maxwell once said that school boards made up of individuals personally uncowardly are more timid than school masters, thus creating the paradox that the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Many believe that in Maxwell's day the school board was afraid of its superintendent.

More than a generation has passed since cooking was introduced into public schools. During all this time there have been plenty of boys who desired to be taught how to cook. In 1892 a group of them petitioned the Pratt Institute of Brooklyn to organize a class to teach them the ancient and honorable art culinary. They were admitted. They were instructed in building a fire out of doors, in the skilful use of saucepan and pot, how to dress and cook fish,

fowl, and good red herring, and how to wash dishes. In every public school in which the girls were sent to the kitchen and the boys to the shop have been lads who hungered for the skill of the fire and oven, lasses who wished to wield the hammer and saw. On asking a number of school managers why these healthy appetites were denied, I get the common answer: fear-fear of the newspapers, fear of the fear of the school board.

Prin

William Bogan started a boys' class for bakers in the Lane Technical High School, Chicago. It is still baking. cipal Edward Wildeman, of the Shields School, acting up to his name, instituted "Exchange classes," putting such boys as wished it into the kitchen on designated days, and girls at the joiners' bench. Principal Ida Mighell of the John Hay School gave a few boys the run of the kitchen. It came about from a discussion of scout camps, of the life of the civil engineers and forest rangers. The other boys came, hat in hand, and begged to be let in.

"Cooking for boys," says Miss Mighell, "is distinctly popular.” In the annual report of the Chicago schools for the year ending June, 1925, is a brief account of the adventure, saying: "Did the boys like it? They ate it up. How about the girls? They want to keep on sawing wood!" Nine months have passed since the deed was, if I may use a favorite word of the Chicago newspaper chroniclers of school doings, "revealed." But the local press has not yet discovered it. But as soon as this number of the REVIEW appears we may expect the usual journalistic sensation: "it