86 FLIGHT FROM THE CITY 



won his cooperation. In fact, he decided that the sort 

 of education our boys would receive under the plan 

 we outlined would more than meet the requirements 

 of the law. Our plan was to use the regular textbooks, 

 to follow the state procedure in teaching as laid down 

 in the syllabus of each subject, and to have one of the 

 public-school teachers who lived in the neighborhood 

 come in once each month to put the boys through an 

 examination which would insure their finishing up 

 each year precisely as well as did the boys attending 

 public school. This plan, we believed, would prepare 

 them for high-school even though they had none of 

 the "benefits" of class work for a few years. 



Thus began our experiment in domestic education. 

 And again, individual production proved its superi- 

 ority to mass production. Mrs. Borsodi found it pos- 

 sible to give the boys, in two hours' desk work, all the 

 training which they were supposed to get, according 

 to the state, in a whole school day plus the work which 

 they were supposed to do at home. One of her first 

 discoveries was that the training of the boys on such 

 sheer fundamentals as addition, subtraction, multipli- 

 cation, and division had been so poor that mathemati- 

 cal progress and understanding were almost impos- 

 sible. She made the boys retrace their steps. Some 

 conscientious drilling on the A, B, Cs, and they were 

 then able to gallop through the more difficult parts of 

 arithmetic. Working closely with them, she knew 

 whether or not they really understood. She did not 

 have to rely upon an examination to find out an 



