Teaching Sobriety With ‘The Bottle’
Somewhere in 1950s Georgia, a teacher brought a whiskey bottle and a Bible to her classroom. She stood in front of her elementary-school students and asked, “What do you think of that, do they belong together?” A firm “no” was the teacher’s eventual reply. She then moved the two objects farther apart, prompting a second question, “Now, that is all right, isn’t it?” Students, now implicitly understanding the lesson, were expected to respond with another resounding “no.” The teacher explained further, “Now, [they don’t] need to be close together or on the same table to be out of place. They don’t belong in the same life, the same home, the same community or same nation. Now which will you choose?”
This scene was gleaned from a lesson plan written by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). The WCTU provided instructors around the country with step-by-step lessons like this one, teaching schoolchildren to eschew the consumption of alcohol and to recognize liquor as
