Annual School Festivals

Schools in advanced countries are accustomed to hold, at the close of each year, a general festival in which the students' works of every kind are put on display, showing the visitor the degree of their excellence in handcrafts. There appears, for example, the hall of artistic drawings made by the pupils' own hands and signed with their names — then the rooms of embroidered silk garments — the sewing rooms — the making of hats — furs — woolen work — the weaving of cloth — the making of carpets and artificial flowers — carpentry — sweets of every kind — preserved and dried fruits — hairdressing — varieties of chocolate and caramel — cooking — and all the many arts which the students prepare with their own hands and efforts, and which will help them in their future lives, since they train them to overcome difficulties in productive, useful work.

During this exhibition some of the free institutions — and most of them are such — resort to selling some of the displayed items at prices lower than those of the known markets, so as to help meet the institution's essential needs.

This is what I have known of school festivals in the lands of the West.

Here, however, everything is strange and wondrous, provoking astonishment and regret at once. At the end of the year the institutions compete in holding the festivals they call "kermesse" — but not at their own expense; rather at the expense of the merchants and the parents, for whom what they pay during the year for their children's schooling is not enough, so that the final tax comes to them: the preparation of the festival out of their own pockets. The schools vie boastfully in displaying the merchandise of the markets instead of the children's work, and squander the parents' money to add it to their enormous profits. Instead of confining their pride to displaying the pupils' products, showing the degree of their excellence and progress, they contrive for them paths of amusement and entertainment at others' expense, and they compete against the free charitable institutions, which alone are worthy of benevolence and mercy.

These festivals have multiplied this year to a degree troubling to all manner of establishments, with no distinction between the institution that raises the orphan, shelters the vagrant, and educates the poor — and the institution that collects exorbitant fees without pity or mercy.

How I wish that the government first, and the merchants second, would stand up to these profiteering institutions: forbid them to beg and to snatch the morsel of bread from the mouth of the orphan and the destitute; compel them to display the pupils' products, not the products of the markets; and curb their greed to the point of contenting themselves with what they collect in exorbitant fees, leaving the field to the purely charitable enterprises, which alone deserve the public's sympathy.

And how greatly we need the industrial school for girls, which would guarantee the safeguarding of our girls' future by paving the way to honorable work that shields them from life's stumbles.

May the women's associations make the realization of this noble project the first of their aims, for woman knows best woman's need — morally, culturally, and materially.

Let woman persevere in demanding this right until she attains her desire, for no right can be lost so long as there is someone to demand it.