Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Picturing School Activities
While directing the filming of the educational, vocational, and recreational activities of the country schools of Alameda county, to produce four reels for daily free exhibition in the Palace of Education at the Panama Exposition, I was requested to direct also the taking of artistic photographic views of the best of the county's school buildings, from which types might be selected for the architectural exhibit in the Palace of Education.
That experience in scurrying over the county in quest of live pictorial matter is not an adequate excuse, but it is a reason for my intruding upon pages ordinarily consecrated to more conventional discussion of pedagogical subjects.
In the long ago, when my trousers were short, I began school and lingered briefly, with my trousers, in the old Lincoln school in Oakland. And then I betook myself and my trousers back into southern California and attended a country school with almost adult Indians, and later a town school where my trousers were daily dusted with more than one thrashing administered by a robust teacher who sought vainly to suppress my whispering loquacity.
Remembering what Oakland was in those early days and what the school disciplinary methods were in my boyhood, I have viewed the present school developments of Alameda county with keen interest.
Recently I went round to the Lincoln school, my first visit there since the days when part of Oakland east of Lake Merritt was known as the town of Brooklyn, when the lake was all open to the estuary, when a dinky horsecar line ran lonesomely out to Berkeley and its scattered population of less than a thousand people in a forlorn pasture-land, when Oakland itself was a country town with a few horsecar lines and the squatty old Boggs Hotel its proudest architectural pile, when gypsy camps used to cluster near Lake Merritt by the weeping willows and terrify small children, because parents were freshly alarmed then over the eastern abduction of little Charlie Ross, whose disappearance is still a deep mystery, although his wealthy parents spent a fortune upon the search.
I found the Lincoln school grown to a modern brick building teeming with 800 children, 250 of them Chinese and probably the brightest assemblage of Oriental pupils anywhere in America, children of wealthy local merchants and sons of Chinese families in the old country sent hither to make swift development after a term or a year or so at the English language.
Where I had had to fight my way after school, for no reason except that I was a new boy and a little country jake and because after-school fights were the custom of the times, I have found modern Alameda county no longer running to fist fights. Primitive brutality has passed as a school habit in California.
When I went to school with big Indians our chief game was a war of stones and clods from behind the doubtful shelter of improvised brush forts set up at close range. We ran out to the edge to peg the enemy as he emerged for more ammunition or for a shot at us. And we got plentifully bruised. Because I was little and awkward I got mine early and often, until my father, as head of the school board, abolished that form of innocent amusement and exercise. But I still have scalp scars as evidence of my participation in "Indian wars." The biggest scar was inflicted by the biggest Indian girl. She playfully slammed me off the porch rail, and I landed crown down upon a conical rock that was firmly established ten feet below and there to make an impression. When they got me inside and the blood mopped off the children were delighted, not because I was still alive, but because school was dismissed.
During the recent tour of Alameda county, we filmed activities and scenes at nineteen schools, selecting those that had the features that would best make up the story of what these schools are doing in the newer fields of vocationa
