Mrs. Straus Seeks to Develop Cultural Aspects of Education

Poor Ponce de Leon who searched all over Florida to find his magic Fontaine de Jouvence, the Fountain of Youth, and died in the end a disappointed man—if he had only lived in our time and known our modern women, he would have learned from them the secret that this fountain bubbles in our own heart and works its wonders through our own mind.

Take as an example Mrs. Nathan Straus Jr., one of the most interesting and most charming women of our metropolis. Picture her in her library, early in the morning, when one would imagine a wealthy society leader would be still resting if not asleep. Mrs. Straus, however, sits trim, dressed with unobtrusive elegance at her desk, a desk which despite its small size and the flowers on it, looks very business-like. She is ready for the manifold duties that are awaiting her. And they are very real and very important duties. Mrs. Straus, a past president of the Council of Jewish Women, is vitally interested in all educational problems. Her Council work was and is done mainly in this direction. In addition, she is a board member of the Education Committee of the Women’s City Club, where she is at present leading a study about the truant children in our public schools, and she is also a member of the Mayor’s committee making a survey of the schools of our city.

No wonder, then, that the early morning hours see her alert and on the job. Even while she speaks to her chance visitor she is demanded on the telephone, and in another few minutes she will have to attend an important board meeting. Despite all this she tells most interestingly and unhurriedly about her early work with school-children, a work which today has been universally adopted as essential in any educational program, but in which Mrs. Straus was a pioneer.

AN EARLY INTEREST

“Nineteen years ago,” she says, “as a quite young girl and woman, I was already deeply interested in educational work, and being with children and vitally influencing their development seemed to me of paramount importance. I led groups of girls at the YWHA, I took children to the Museum—now, of course, every teacher does it, but at that time it was an innovation—and taught them an art appreciation which must have been of value in their later life. Beginning with the costumes of bygone times, which naturally delighted the girls, leading them through the Egyptian Department with the ever fascinating mummies and papyri, I finally made them see the rich gifts of beauty and delight which art may bring into even a drab and commonplace life.

I took my girls also to the library and made them at home in the world of books. That, too, is now commonplace and a matter of course, but in those times it had not been done before. Yet I felt that extra-curricular cultural influences of such a type were necessary for the harmonious, rounded development of the child-mind.

HAS FOUR SONS

Mrs. Straus has four sons of her own, one of them already in college, though to look at her one can hardly believe it. In addition to her work in the field of education, a work which she considers her vocation, she has pleasant avocations which refresh her physically and intellectually. She loves to read and she is an enthusiastic horse-woman. Even in winter she finds time to go to the country and, in a quick canter through the bracing air, to feel all the exhilaration a noble sport brings to its true lovers.

And in leaving her, one sighs for poor Ponce de Leon and his vain quest. Women like Mrs. Straus, who work selflessly and enthusiastically for a great cause, could have taught him the lesson that the Fountain of Youth bubbles in our own heart, that it works its wonders through our own mind.