Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Day 3.268: Church and courting

(Or..."What I learned in school")

I know at least one of you spotted both the error and my deception yesterday.  In fact the pictures were from the Bennington Museum.  After our visit to Cohoes Falls on Saturday, we headed east, across the Hudson and then across the state line to Vermont.

Bennington is a very nice place to spend a sunny day and the museum was good too - the kids loved the period school-room and kitchen.


This is what I learned in school:
  1. There were books of "Hymns for Juvenile Deliquents"
  2. I may or may not be a dunce, but I can certainly rock the hat.
  3. The kids look super-cute in dress-up.
  4. Women teachers who got married would be dismissed just as surely as ones who engaged in 'improper conduct'.
  5. Men teachers who attended church regularly got an extra night to go out on the pull 'for courting purposes'.
I wonder if that rule swelled the ranks at church and why the rule-makers were so determined that children needed to be protected from the influence of a married woman!

2 comments:

  1. Hi there,

    I was wondering: how many of those hymns does that man in the hat know!? ;-)
    N

    ReplyDelete
  2. Although it was in a case and inaccessible to check, I suspect that they were all applied during my upbringing - I'll leave it to you to say how effective they were!

    ReplyDelete

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