Lockwood Legends Project--preserving the history of Lockwood School and community
Beginnings
The birth of a great movement in the mind of one human being never ceases to be amazing. There is in it the everlastingly repeated wonder of the mustard seed-- so much out of so little. Before that wonder our best knowledge is confounded.
The if’s of history; they are a strange and fascinating company. If a third little girl had not been born to Mrs. Theodore Bernie in Washington DC, if at the birth of the child a certain compelling thought had not joined itself in the mother's mind with another compelling thought, if the mother had been a woman of mere brilliant intentions but little power to push them through (and the ifs could be indefinitely multiplied) there might indeed by now be something akin to the great movement that she started. But when and how would it have come into existence?
At the birth of that third little girl Alice Birney, like many a mother before her, felt deeply the obligation of motherhood that were from then for the third time upon her ”Filled as my mind was with the great mystery of birth” she later wrote on a few short sheets torn from a notebook, “the solemn responsibilities of parenthood, and the utter helplessness of the little being by my side, I built in imagination a new world, such as it seemed to me might be a reality if each newborn Soul might enter into life and happy, uplifting environment.”
“ There was no novelty and such an idea,” she admitted. “Hundreds held it beside myself.” But she did not let the idea go.”
To promote the welfare of Children and Youth in home, school, church, and community.
To raise the standards of home.
To secure adequate laws for the care and protection of children and youth.
To bring into closer relation the home and the school, that parents and teachers may cooperate intelligently in the training of the child.
To develop between educators’ and the general public such united efforts as will secure for every child the highest advantages in physical, mental, social, and spiritual education.
Official Magazine: National Parent-Teacher. The P.T.A. Magazine
Together 7,219,165 P.T.A. members are building a national headquarters in Chicago, Illinois.
Our founder, Alice McLellan Birney, with her daughter Alonsita, now Mrs. Harold Walker of Washington, D. C. The Following words, spoken by Mrs. Birney when the National Congress of mothers was only one year old, sound as though they had just been uttered yesterday:
“ May we not cultivate in our children the spirit of brotherly love, of that patriotism which lives for its country, which... set itself the task of bringing about a better condition of things?...Let us teach our children that if there be an unpardonable sin it is the misuse of power-- intellectual, political, or social; that the highest development of any faculty is obtained only through use, and that life means service-- glad, joyous service-- for mankind and the world.”