Golden Age, February 11, 1925
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Contents of the Golden Age
Labob and Economics The Employment Situation
Social and Educational
“Teaching the Young idea How to Shoot”
■ Illiteracy in the United States............
Educational Rights of Children
Compensating the Teachers
Maintenance of Discipline
Hazing Is a Complete Disgrace • .
■ Physical Training vs. Professional Athletics . . .
, Religion In Education
The Bible In the Schools '
The Objects of Education . . ,
. Repression of Liberty . .
What Education Accomplishes ............. 300
Education of Women
Consolidation of Schools . . ......
Industrial Universities .............. .
Education and Big Business
Education In Foreign Lands . . - ...... .
Eruptions in Christian Science ...... .....
Broadcasting Sacred Programs « . « . s • . . • s <> . 318
Science and Invention
A Boon to the Housewives .
Travel and Miscellany
The Armadillo..... , , , 308
“The Switzerland op America** . . ; s s . , « ,
Religion and Philosophy
“Five Mental Hysterias”
The Two Great Salvations c ...... . 314
Saved from What?
The Church First
Knowledge Essential to Salvation........ „ . . 316
Restoration Their Hope
Studies in “The Harp or God” . ..
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o/w Golden Age
Volume VI
Brooklyn, N.Y., Wednesday, February 11, 1925
Number 141
“Teaching the Young
FROM earliest times the Hebrews have been the best educated people in the world. “Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7:22), and he seems to have instilled thoroughly into his followers the desirability of education.
The command to write the words of the Law “upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates” (Deuteronomy 6:9) implies a general knowledge, an ability to read and write at a time when the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons were' naked savages and cannibals. Moses’ instructions to the elders of Israel that after his death they should, on Mount Ebal, “write upon the stones all the words of this law very plainly” (Deuteronomy 27:8), is an assurance that the elders could write and that the people could read; and it shows a desire that the people should have opportunity to study their laws.
The natural adaptability of the Hebrews to instruction, and the Lord’s blessing upon their efforts to learn, are seen in the superiority of Daniel and his companions over their heathen comrades, and also in the wisdom of Solomon which “excelled the wisdom of all the children of the east country, and all the wisdom of Egypt.”—1 Kings 4: 30.
The schools of the prophets are often mentioned, and there are references to teachers and pupils. (1 Chronicles 25:7,8) Tradition had it that every synagogue was used as a school, with a teacher over every twenty-five children; and that colleges were maintained in every country in which the Jews resided. Gamaliel conducted one of these, at Jerusalem. Teachers were treated with great respect, and both pupils and teachers were exhorted to respect each other.
Unlike some so-called religious teachers of today, the teachers in the days of Nehemiah “read in the book of the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to under-
Idea How to Shoot4
stand the reading.” (Nehemiah 8: 8) Our Lord was the greatest teacher that ever lived. He caused men to think. The true Christian Church is a teaching organization, an organization of Bible Students.
History of Secular Education
WHILE we have had continuous religious education from the days of Moses, the history of secular education has been broken. Many diverse schools have risen and fallen among the same nationalities. The Greeks spread education over the ancient world. A painting on an ancient Greek vase shows one boy reciting, another fingering a lyre, and a third working with an abacus calculating machine, with a teacher supervising all three.
The oldest existing university is that of Cairo, Egypt, founded in the year 988, and still attended by 9,000 students. The students in this university give frequent concern to the British empire. They want Egypt for the Egyptians. Forty of the leading universities of Europe were established coincident with the discovery of America and the dawn of the Reformation.
In the United States, Harvard University is the oldest institution of learning, having been founded in 1636. Yale University was founded in 1701. As far back as 1642 a compulsory law was enacted in Massachusetts, inflicting penalties on parents for the neglect of education.
It is rather humiliating to find that in the matter of education the United States occupies the ninth place on the list, with most of the civilized nations of the earth ahead of us. The United States has the shortest school day, the shortest school week, and the shortest school year of any country. This is not to its glory, but to its shame.
During the World War twenty percent of the men drafted into the army were illiterates. In the first selective draft there were 700,000 of these; and according to Secretary of the Interior Lane, the Government had to spend millions of dollars in teaching men the meaning of the words “forward” and “halt”. In view of the fact that in the United States ninety-three percent of all the federal revenues are for war seemingly it might pay, even from the war standpoint alone, to spend a little less for war and more for education. In the German army there was only one illiterate in 5,000.
Up to the year 1911 there were two illiterates per thousand of the population in Denmark, two in Norway, three in Sweden, one hundred twenty-two in Ireland, one hundred sixty-one in France, two hundred forty-eight in Belgium, four hundred twenty-nine in Austria, six hundred fifteen in Italy, six hundred thirty-seven in Spain, six hundred thirty-seven in Serbia, seven hundred twenty-five in Russia, seven hundred ninety-two in Portugal, and eight hundred three in Rumania. Germany may be said to have no illiterates. Germany, Denmark, Norway and Sweden are Protestant countries, and Ireland is partly Protestant. The other countries named are either Roman Catholic or Greek Catholic.
Illiteracy in the United States
IN THE United States there are forty-six illiterates in each one thousand native whites, and one hundred twenty-eight illiterates in each one thousand foreign-born whites. New York City’s illiterates amount to 281,121, with 425,022 in the state unable to read or write.
On account of the fact that the United States have some 5,000,000 illiterates, George Bernard Shaw, the famous London critic, gets huge enjoyment from repeating the observation that the United States are not a civilized country. However, there is some encouragement in the fact that from 1910 to 1920 the percentage of illiteracy in the country as a whole dropped from 7.7 percent to 6 percent.
As an illustration of the appalling illiteracy which prevails in such great industrial states as Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois, the Nashville Tennessean relates an incident which happened at the trial of Pluckham and Kavanaugh, in Brooklyn, for erecting a theatre which collapsed, causing the death of seven persons. Asked, “Did you build this theatre in a haphazard manner?” Mr. Kavanaugh said: ‘‘Yes”; and had to have it explained to him that “haphazard” does not mean “All right”, as he had supposed.
Uncle Jerry Rusk, first American Secretary of Agriculture, when acknowledging the gratitude of the people of Wisconsin, whom he served well and long, not only in Washington but in the gubernatorial chair of Wisconsin, made the modest and truthful, if not altogether grammatical, statement: “I only seen my duty and went and done it.”
Loss in productive power because of illiteracy is said to cost the United States $825,000,000 annually.
Standing of the States
HE most progressive section of the United States in the matter of education consists of the seventeen states which lie to the north and west of Missouri, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. The average educational efficiency of these states is rated in the “Literary Digest’’ at 60.0 percent.
The next most progressive section in the matter of education consists of the sixteen states lying to the north and east of Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky. The average educational efficiency of these states is rated in the “Literary Digest” at 55.6 percent. The average standing of Hawaii, Porto Rico, and the Canal Zone is 49.3 percent.
Next on the list is the Southwest, consisting of Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. The average educational efficiency of these states is rated at 42.0 percent; and the balance of the country at 33.4 percent.
Kansas and South Dakota, though listed in the first section, have standings of 55.2 percent and 55.0 percent respectively.
New Jersey, District of Columbia, and Massachusetts, though listed in the second section, have an efficiency of over 60 percent each.
The four states with excess of Negro population, South Carolina, Mississippi, North Caro-lini and Alabama, have an average of but 30.1 percent.
In the Appalachian mountains, covering parts of Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky, are about 5,000,000 native-born Americans, the descendants of English, Scotch, and Irish pioneers, who are now illiterates. It was poverty that drove them to this condition. In some counties in Kentucky there are people who have never seen a railroad; and in Round, Caney Creek and Knott counties only ten years ago there were no schools at all. This condition is being gradually corrected, however.
Educational Rights of Children
O READ some of the court decisions one would think that the principal right of a child is to go to work in a factory during the years when he should be in school. But children do not come into this world by accident; and every generation owes to its children a decent education, as preparation for the duties which the State will impose upon them.
There are twenty million boys and girls in the elementary schools of the United States, but only ten percent to twelve percent of them go beyond those grades. The moment the law permits them to do so 66 percent leave school for work. Only 14 percent finish high school. In many districts the laws are not enforced, and not more than half of the children required by law to be in school are actually there.
In 1800 the average citizen of the United States got along with eighty-two days of schooling. In 1900 he had 1,046 days, and it is none too much. There is far greater need of education now than then. The problems of the average man are much greater.
The child is father to the man. When the child leaves school, he takes his education along with him into business. Sometimes what he takes is very small, as the following answers to questions put to children reveal:
“In 1620 the Pilgrims crossed the ocean, and this is known as Pilgrim’s Progress.” “A vacuum is a large empty space where the Pope lives.” “Shakespeare founded ‘As You Like It’ on a poem previously written by Sir Oliver Lodge.” “Benjamin Franklin produced electricity by rubbing cats backward.” “Woodrow Wilson wrote Sherlock Holmes.” “In India a man out of a cask may not marry a woman out of another cask.” “The salaries of the teachers are paid from the dog tax.” “A man who looks on the bright side of things is called an optimist, but a pianist looks on the dark side.’ “Shakespeare was a great writer, only he used too many familiar quotations.” “Gender shows whether a man is masculine, feminine or neuter.” “An abstract noun is something you can’t see when you are looking at it.” “The eyes are located in the obituary cavity.” “The brain is a soft bunch covered with wrinkles.” “Gravitation is that which, if there were none, we should all fly away.” “I don’t know anything about the Constitution, as I was born in Kansas.”
The college boys do not do so much better. One of them spelled difficult as “defulliculi”; another made senate read “cinirnt”; agreement came out “arogremt”, while heir appeared as “eare”. Few, relatively, can spell “which” and “separate” correctly. “Privilege” is a sticker for many in college and out of it.
At the entrance examinations the students of Newcomb College made it known that “climate is caused by the emotion of the earth around the sun.” “Armageddon is a language composed of cords.” “Genesis is a character in Booth Tarkington’s novel entitled ‘Seventeen’.” “The Beatitudes are the first ten books of the Bible.” “Methuselah is the oldest city in the world, 3,-000 years old.” “Esperanto is a ship about which there was some trouble during the World War.” “Luther Burbank started the Lutheran faith.”
The Rush for Education
O ONE can deny that there is an intense longing for education on the part of mil
lions of the American people. Even in spite of the unsatisfactory results obtained, it is yet true that more is spent in this country for educational purposes, per capita, than elsewhere on the planet.
In New York city the enrollment of students in 1923 amounted to 20,379, in New York University and 32,769 in Columbia University; and the figures were still larger in 1924. From 1914 to 1920 the number of college students in the country as a whole increased from 187,000 to 294,000. One city is planning for a single college that will have 60,000 students.
In the public schools in 1900 the average daily attendance was 10,632,772; and the total cost for that year was $212,964,6.18, or $20.22 per pupil. In the same schools in 1920 the attendance was 16,248,997; and the expense was $1,039,385,055, or $63.96 per pupil.
This looks very encouraging, and it is encouraging. Yet in South Carolina, in 1920, the expense per pupil was only $19.99; and the total hill of $1,039,385,055 looks very small for a nation that has an annual luxury bill of $22,000,000,000.
In New York state the annual bill for gasoline is more than for teachers’ salaries; and the investment in automobiles is three times as great as the investment in schoolhouses. The total expense of educating the average child is only $360 per annum.
There is great difference in what certain localities can do in the matter of maintaining schools. There is- one county in Arkansas where the school term is only 77 days, but in another county in the same state the school term is 168 days. The average teacher’s salary varies from $256 in the lowest state to $1,012 in the highest state.
Compensating the Teachers
IN THE grand rush of the one hundred percent profit Americans during and immediately after the World War, there was a year or so in which the teachers were almost completely overlooked. As a result 120,000 of them gave up teaching, through necessity, and went into other work.
The United States Bureau of Education compiled a statement of what happened to some of these. A commercial teacher at $2,400 left to take up accounting work at $5,000; a dairying teacher at $2,750 is now getting $16,000; an expert mining engineer at $3,000 is now in commercial work at $10,000; a teacher in medicine at $2,250 is now in manufacturing at $6,000; one in engineering at $2,500 is now with an illuminating company at $4,000; a teacher of English at $1,500 is nowan advertising manager at $5,000; a geologist at $1,800 is now in the oil business at $10,000; and so on.
At Lancaster, Pa., eighty-two of the teachers, after futile appeals to the school board for a living wage, joined the American Federation of Labor, and lost their positions. Probably they should have been willing to teach patriotism free of charge, or for $1 a year, like some of the patrioteers thqt served us during the war. .
A writer in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who had not yet lost his sense of humor, published the following advertisement in that paper in 1920:
“Wanted—A young lady teacher for room of thirty to forty pupils of all descriptions, capable of making shining lights out of every one of them, prepared to teach all branches, instruct in matters of health, wealth and wisdom, possessing all the virtues of a first-class policeman, watchman, fireman, bulldog and minister, be a good musician, a social leader, active in community welfare, an all around church member, teach Sunday school class, sing in the choir, attend lodge, make friends with everybody and ruffle the feathers of nobody, and other things too numerous to mention. Will be required to attend state and county conventions at her own expense, given two weeks’ vacation during the holidays without pay, also summer months to attend more school and absorb more ‘latest ideas’ in peda-gogism. Board can be had for $8 and room at $3 a week; church, charity and lodge dues reasonable; laundry, railroad fare and all sundry expenses expensive. Send in about ten pounds of recommendations, college and normal certificates, and other credentials; also handsome photograph, and postage for their return when we are through mussing them up. Come and make a personal exhibit of yourself. Board will consider all competitors and reserves the right to choose ad libitum. Position will pay $60 a month till another teacher can be found who will take it for less.”
The college professors were hit hard, too, not only in America but everywhere. There are twenty-two vacant chairs in the University of Vienna, once the Mecca of students from every quarter of the globe. A former professor of one of the German universities is selling newspapers on the streets of Berlin, not being able to live on the salary now offered a professor.
Two noble-minded college presidents in America are known to have refused increases of their own salaries because they knew of professors on their staffs that did not have sufficient incomes to five in comfort.
There are Negro teachers in the South that receive as little as $95 a year salary for their work.
Requirements of Teachers
THER people may grow old, but a teacher has no moral right to do so. Other people may grow dull and stupid, but not the teacher. Chalk dust causes considerable laryngitis and acute bronchitis, and there is i some predisposition to tuberculosis and heart; disease among teachers, but taken as a whole the teacher’s lot is an enviable one.
It is a grand privilege to be in constant contact with the young, to guide, encourage and help the most ardent, enthusiastic and ambitious among us, to stimulate them, to repress them, to partake of their hopes and their spirit, to be a comrade and a confidant of boys and girls, the most interesting things in the whole wide world.
Money is not all there is to life. Teachers do not get any too much of that, but they get something which is better. They have three months’ rest in summer, two weeks at Christmas time, one week at Easter, two days out of every seven, and two hours out of every day. This leisure time gives them opportunity for self-improvement which others spend in labor. Of course they must have this time, because of the rush of new sciences, with which they are at all times expected to keep abreast.
In Princeton University professors can retire on half-pay after they reach the age of fifty-five, or they may continue to teach until the age of sixty-eight, if they wish, after which time retirement is automatic.
In 1920 a teacher in New York City, Miss J. Fash, reached the age of seventy years and was placed on the pension list by the Board of Education after fifty-two years continuous service as a teacher in the Bronx. In 1922 a teacher in Long Island City was pensioned after having taught fifty-four years in the same school which she herself had attended as a child.
A professor-at-large is Railroad Jack, who has hoboed in thirty-eight states, lecturing on historic characters from curbstone corners. He knows 10,000 dates about 5,000 famous characters in history and answers any historical question offhand. Whenever he visits Ann Arbor, the site of Michigan State University, the students assess themselves five cents apiece for each lecture, and say that they get one thousand percent on the investment.
Over a million children in the country are taught by mere boys and girls, who have but elementary educations themselves, and who have had no training for their important work. No civilized country has teachers who, as a group, are less educated and less well trained professionally. Of the teachers of Massachusetts 85 percent have had normal school training, while only 25 percent of the teachers of Kansas have had such training.
New York State has 60,000 teachers, 8,000 of whom retire each year. The growth of population calls for 1,500 more teachers, so that there are openings every year for 9,500 teachers in this one state.
Maintenance of Discipline
CENTURY ago, and even less in some districts, the schoolmaster was expected to flog recreant children as a matter of course. Indeed, it is much less than that since the Editor, with twenty-five others, was flogged by one of the finest teachers and one of the best men he ever knew, for engaging in a snowball battle in an area forbidden for that purpose. Just to see that teacher once more, and to shake his faithful hand, would be worth a dozen floggings such as he gave.
To be caught on the street after nine at night, or smoking, or using bad language, or doing any one of a dozen other things such as a more or less bad boy might do, meant to get a strapping the next day in the library, coupled with some fatherly advice.
In some schools in the country there are still closets under the chimney where bad boys may think it over and decide when they will be good and on what terms. In certain English schools a large wicker cage is preserved in which the delinquent was fastened, the cage being then drawn by a pulley to the ceiling, where it remained until the ill-doer was supposed to be ready to be received back into society.
Now all that has passed, although we do read in the papers of a teacher in Minnesota who tried to soften the ardor of some of his pupils by shocking them in a modified electric chair; and of another in New York, who beat up a little Negro' girl with a piece of rubber hose.
What we see in the papers now is on the other side of the question. The students of Syracuse University demand time off to celebrate a football victory; they go on strike, handle professors roughly, and are fined $2 each. At Hudson Falls 250 high school students refused to enter the school building, and paraded through the streets, demanding the resignation of the principal because he slapped a girl’s face.
At Cape May the students went on the warpath and locked all the teachers in the restroom. 'At Gloucester City they went on strike because they resented the suspension of a teacher who had talked to them too plainly on sex matters. At Oakland they went on strike because the class honors were won by a brilliant young Japanese girl.
Hazing is a Complete Disgrace
A AT HEN the so-called greatest men of our so-’ • called civilization resort to the law of the jungle every few years to settle their differences, it is not to be wondered at that their sons resort to the same law; but it is to be regretted.
The Marquis of Salisbury, who three times became premier of the British Empire, writing from the school at Eton, at the age of fourteen, said: “I am bullied from morning to night without ceasing. I am obliged to hide myself all the evening in some corner to prevent being bullied; and if I dare venture from my room, I get it directly. When I come in to dinner they kick and shin me, and I am obliged to go away from dinner without eating anything.” Anybody that sees anything cute or boyish about such devilish practices is welcome to his joy. Such conduct is worse than heathenish, worse than barbarous. No heathen nor barbarian ’would do such things.
Youths with all the hopes of their parents locked up in them have been killed in hazings at Cornell, Syracuse, Northwestern, and many other universities; and yet hazings continue in institutions all over the country. Only two years ago the sophomores of Rutgers College broke up a freshmen’s dinner at a local hotel, destroying a dinner that had cost $404.50 to prepare and causing damage to the hotel to the amount of $1,500. At a freshman-sophomore class fight at the University of Wisconsin, eight students were severely injured as a result of bombs made of sulphuric acid and other chemicals. Even at such institutions as Princeton and Lafayette the upper classmen impose restrictions as to how the freshmen must dress.
The foolish theory of hazing is that it teaches the freshmen to be manly, and that it will cause them to stick together, so that when they get »ut in the world they will more or less cling to one another and be a help in business or professional life. Hazing is a thing of the past at the great university at Cambridge, England, and at Harvard University.
What-may happen where students are permitted to attack one another was revealed in an investigation of the truant school at Chicago, where it was brought to light that one of the boys at the school was beaten to death by other boys in the presence of a teacher and upon his instructions. In the same school another lad of fourteen was tied with a clothes-line, and beaten almost into insensibility for a minor infraction of the rules.
Physical Training vs. Professional Athletics
TO HE average college student does not get too much physical training, but too little.
The trouble at present is that a few men virtually represent the college as professional athletes, while the average student sits on a bench and yells, not as a participant in outdoor sports, but merely as an observer.
Several of the great universities have seriously considered the abandonment of all athletic contests. They are costly and wasteful of academic energy, necessitating the maintenance of young navies and other battalions; and they do not promote health. The coaches of the teams get more money and are more honored than are the teachers and professors.
Under the close supervision of naval authorities, the athletes at Annapolis have slightly better standings in their studies than the other midshipmen; and they show a far greater permanence in the service. The president of the University of Illinois has proposed that athletic records should count for degrees.
One of the subjects in the curriculum of Stanford University is yell leading. This is ridiculous, of course, but there is a certain philosophy back of it. See how the American people were rah-rah-rah’d into the World War, and uttered no word of protest.
Religion in Education
AN EDUCATION without any religion in it, or without any religious basis, is no education at all. The world has not yet recovered from the shock caused by Leopold and Loeb, the two highly educated youths in Chicago who murdered a neighbor’s son because they wanted a new sensation. One of these young men was a brilliant linguist. Both were sons of millionaires.
The way the matter stands today in the higher institutions of learning in the United States, eighty-five percent of the students enter with a definite belief in God; but when they reach their senior year less than fifty percent have such a belief. A splendid Christian woman bemoaned the fact that every one of her boys went away to college believers in Christ, and came back to her an infidel.
A college student wrote to his parents: “If I had been a Chinaman or a Hindu attending the university, I would not have known from any remarks in the class room that I was living in a nominally Christian country. Very many hours have been given to discussions of heathen philosophers, but not a single moment to the teachings of Christ.” We feel like adding in the words of the Master: “Whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words, of him shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he shall come in his own glory, and in his Father’s and of the holy angels.”—Luke 9: 26.
Tests have been taken in some of the universities to see how much the students do actually know about the Bible. In the University of Nebraska one hundred thirty-nine students were quizzed. Seven percent could not name a single book of the Old Testament; eight and one-half percent could not name a single book of the New Testament; less than half of the students could name ten books altogether. Similar results were obtained in the University of North Dakota. In the latter institution certain books were identified as follows: Deuteromy, Deuter-omoty, Deuteromeny, Deuterominy, Goshut, Salms, Nehimiah, Joob and Jobe, while Hezekiah was named as one of the books of Moses.
So exasperated was one parent at these conditions that he made the statement: “If I had an unconverted son or daughter, I would rather he go to the penitentiary that the university; for at the penitentiary he would receive religious training, and at the university none.” This parent, Rev. F. P. Dennison, D.D., does not see where the trouble really lies. It really lies with the clergy themselves. They have done all possible to discourage Bible Study.
The Bible in the Schools
EMEMBERING the time when it was the custom to read a portion of the Holy
Scriptures in the public schools before beginning the school work of the day, there has been at various times considerable agitation to continue or to restore this practice.
There are now eleven states, with a population of 70,000,000, that prohibit Bible reading in the public schools; thirty, with a population of 14,000,000, where the Bible may be read in the schools; and seven states providing by law that it must be read. In California the courts have just prohibited the King James Version, on the ground that it teaches a particular creed.
A writer in The Fellowship Forum states:
“I was active some years ago in helping to pass the Bible reading bill in New Jersey—a law brought into being by the activities of the Junior Order of United American Mechanics and other patriotic orders. This law provided for the reading of ten verses from the Old Testament without comment, in order that the Bible reading should be completely unsectarian. Shortly after the law went into effect, it became known that some teachers would take the same ten verses and read them day after day; others would select objectionable verses from Deuteronomy to read to the children. Needless to add that these teachers were opposed to reading the Bible, and that they were possibly under instruction to make the law ludicrous or useless.”
The Pittsburgh Gazette Times voices a generally accepted and growing view when it says that “there is a time and place for everything; a time and place for education, and for religious instruction. The school is no place to teach the Bible or religion, and the pulpit is no place to teach geography or politics.”
There are spasmodic efforts by clergymen in various localities to try to bring about the allotment of certain hours each week to religious instruction, within which hours the children would be assorted according to the wishes of their parents and turned over to clergymen for instruction. This idea was imported from Quebec. The plan is being tried out in Oregon.
Roman Catholic Influences
GREAT political force working day and night, and always under ground, to destroy the public school system of the United States is that institution of the earth, earthy, which is called the Roman Catholic Church. It has six lines along which it works to bring about this ruin, listed by The Fellowship Forum as follows:
“(1) By bringing the public school into contempt by characterizing it as 'godless,’ 'vicious,’ 'a sink of corruption,’ etc. (2) The securing for the Catholid parochial school the largest possible share of the public school tax funds. (3) The encouraging of other Beets to start sectarian schools and to demand public moneys in payment for the secular education of the children. (4) The securing of a Catholic majority on school boards and on the teaching staff of the public schools in the hope of being able thereby to lower the tone of instruction and discipline in the public schools.
(5) Securing the employment of monks and nuns as public school teachers. (6) The prevention of normal training of public school teachers.”
The public school system of Maryland is entirely in the hands of the Roman Catholic Church, not a single school official in that state being elected by the votes of the people.
Yale University has a chaplain assigned for the religious instruction of Roman Catholic students in that institution, while a Catholic professor has been appointed to the chair of scholastic philosophy at Harvard.
Prison records show that in spite of friendly Roman Catholic police and magistrates the parochial schools have furnished sixty-five percent of the criminals of this country, and the public schools five percent.
It is freely admitted in the public debates on immigration in the House of Representatives and the Senate that the least desirable citizens of the United States come from countries where the domination of the Roman Catholic Church is most complete and effective.
The average illiteracy in the seven solidly Roman Catholic countries of Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Spain, Brazil and Guatemala is 61.86 percent. These facts tell their own story.
Morals and Education
r. Nicholas Murray Butler recites six traits which distinguish the educated man
from his fellows: “Good English, refined manners, correct standards of feeling and appreciation, power of reflection, power of growth, and ability to do efficiently without nervous agitation.”
It will be noted that Dr. Butler said nothing about morals. He is a well-posted man and knows that there are now 7,000 college-bred persons in American prisons; and that back of every gigantic fraud, every public crime, every perversion of the law, are the educated brains of college men. Dean Jones of Yale believes that we are approaching a moral crisis, and he does not think it can be avoided by education. Dr. Fitch, of Amherst, says: “The average undergraduate is nothing more or less than a very complicated ass.” He ought to know what he is turning out.
It is a well-known fact that the blame for the World War is justly laid at the door of the educational methods of European universities. War is the greatest of all crimes, because it is murder raised to the nth power. Here is reason enough not to anticipate any great moral development to result from secular education. It is merely a polishing process. It does not and can not change the material that is being polished. A polished diamond remains a diamond; a polished cobble-stone is still a stone.
A writer in “The World Tomorrow”, after studying the moral complex of hundreds of school children, sets forth the following code as representing that of ninety percent of America’s youth. It is not a pleasant picture. Over half of the children are found to cheat, lie and steal; and their whole outlook on life is unmoral:
“(1) Stealing physical property is always wrong. (2) Cheating in the state regents examination is wrong. (3) Cheating in local examinations and forging a parent’s name are ideally wrong, but excusable under stress of circumstances. (4) Misrepresentation in business is normal, except as directed against one’s partner or employer. (5) Cheating in daily school work, such as copying of another’s composition or problem and handing it in as original, does not stamp a boy or girl as dishonest and is occasionally indulged in by all but saints or eccentrics. (6) A lie is wrong only when it is told to injure some one. Everyone tells lies to save himself or others from unpleasantness.”
Somebody with a liking for statistics has dug out the fact that there are 11,000 young people studying Greek in the secondary schools of the country, while the aggregate total attendance of young people at the 786 licensed dance halls of New York City alone amounts to 6,113,604, with the average patron present sixty times a year. Of the Princeton students eighty percent use tobacco and two-thirds use alcohol.
Who among us has not been benefited by the wise counsels of really good teachers, who desired to make us good and useful men and women ? But who among us can doubt that the real place for boys and girls to be trained in manners and character is at home ? If the home influences are not right, the chance of the boy or girl turning out better than the parents is remote.
Bishop Candler, of the Methodist Church South, says truthfully:
"Enlightenment does not reduce crime. It increases many crimes, as for example, such crimes as forgery, embezzlement, and larceny after trust. There are not a few offenses which the educated only are capable of committing. . . . All history shows that licentiousness has been most prevalent in periods of greatest enlightenment. Such was the case with Babylon, with the Grecian republics, and with the Roman commonwealth. . . . We may easily have too much education unless that education is purified by religious faith and pervaded by moral principle. Otherwise we may bring to pass a high-powered world, and the power of its own mighty momentum will rush it to self-destruction.”
The Objects of Education
0 EDUCATE means to “draw out”; but it means to put in, too. Something can be drawn out of a barrel that has been filled, but not out of an empty one. The true object of education is neither to increase production nor to develop a governing class. It is to awaken in all the power to think logically, to develop powers of discernment and construction, to cultivate sympathy, generosity, large-heartedness and honesty in every direction.
A study of current literature betrays a desire on the part of some to curtail the education of the masses. They seem to think it has gone too far. Roman Catholicism is back of this desire. It foresees trouble for itself if the enlightenment of its supporters gets beyond the elementary stage.
The attitude of big business is revealed in the following from Commerce and Finance, one of itjS recognized mouthpieces:
“In stating that the cost of our public school system has increased from $140,000,000 in 1890 to $1,000,000,000 in 1920, it [The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching] seriously questions whether the country can afford to go on paying this great tax in view of the results such education is producing. It questions whether or not the expense of maintaining our high schools does not go merely to provide a useless smattering of culture for would-be students who are far better endowed to learn a productive trade than to absorb book knowledge.”
The New York Times also says:
“College theories are changing, or rather they have already changed, and at present, almost everywhere restriction in the number of students already has been effected or is in serious contemplation.”
Repression of Liberty
ONE of the objects of many American colleges would seem to be to repress the desire of youth to know the truth on all subjects. We have some illustrations of this:
Scott Nearing was giving an address in Worcester on “The Control of Public Opinion”. The president of Clark University dropped in and found several hundred students there. He dismissed the meeting, and followed it up by excluding from the library two magazines that commented unfavorably upon his act.
The president of the University of Michigan ordered the dismissal of a student for writing a favorable review of John Kenneth Turner’s book, “Shall it Be Again?” The University of California expelled a student for publishing an article by Upton Sinclair criticizing the head of * the institution.
During the war the students of this particular university beat into unconsciousness a newsboy, weak, frail and half starved, as well as almost blind, for selling papers they did not approve, and then had him locked up in jail for provoking the attack.
The Board of Education of Los Angeles refused to allow two of the most forward-looking periodicals in the country, “The New Republic” and “The Nation”, to have any place in the school libraries.
A professor in the University of Copenhagen made the statement to an American:
“You have no academic freedom in America. The students in our schools, no older than the students in yours, can listen to any speaker they choose for their clubs—anarchist, atheist, bolshevist, nihilist, communist or cannibalist.”
Sometimes the young people here resent the efforts to coddle them, as is revealed in the following resolution passed by the Barnard College Student Council:
“Resolved: That there is nothing gained in shielding students during four years from problems and ideas they must face during the rest of their life; that if they are considered incapable of rational judgment upon theories presented to them, the solution lies in further training in scientific method rather than in quarantina from ideas; that a reputation for fearless open-mindedness is more to be desired for an academic institution than material prosperity; that, therefore, we wish to go on record as opposing any form of censorship of the college platform.”
The teachers themselves often whimsically refer to these efforts to keep the minds of the young in strait-jackets. Thus Professor Witmer, of the University of Pennsylvania, defined education as “the device of civilization to keep us from encountering problems”; and Professor Overstreet, of New. York College, defines schools as “more or less harmful places of detention for children during their mothers’ busy hours”, and colleges as “merely places of detention during the more annoying period of adolescence”.
“The World Tomorrow,” longing «for a better world than we have today, and criticizing present tendencies in education, says:
“If education means the accumulation of facts, the memorizing of certain dates, the possession of certain knowledge at a certain age, then moulds will do. Children can be made to meet certain requirements each year of their school life; and if that be the goal, then our present scheme is working pretty successfully. But if education means growth of body, mind and spirit, the development of initiative, intellectual honesty, open-mindedness, freedom of thought, fearlessness, physical and moral courage, then our educational program can not be built around the mould idea.”
What Education Accomplishes
Mr. H. G. Wells says bluntly that “it is a modern error that education exists for the individual. Education exists for the community and the race; it exists to subdue the individual for the good of the world and his own ultimate happiness.”
In an address before the students and faculty of the New York Training School for Teachers the points were raised that no person is educated who can not use his education to support himself and three others; second, an educated person must be able to use the hands as well as the mind; third, an educated person must be a religious person; fourth, an educated person must be physically fit. As the matter now stands, most college men die twenty years before their time because they do not know enough about their bodies to give them decent care.
Aristotle claimed that the right use of leisure is the chief end of education. Dr. Samuel Johnson once said that the reason why so many men took to drink was because they were not interesting enough to themselves in their hours of leisure to go without it. An educated mind never needs to be amused. It can always amuse itself, while planning useful things for others.
Thomas Edison claims that college men are the best we have but that they might be a great deal better; for his experience with them is that their curiosity has been paralyzed and their powers of observation destroyed. He objects that the colleges do not teach the boys to think.
Tests which have been made by the Teachers’ College show that not ten percent of what is heard in the class room can be reproduced by the pupil immediately afterward. But perhaps it is not to be wondered at that this is so. There is so much to learn, so much to do, that the mind of the average person seeks the easiest way of bearing the burden, by using a note-book.
Advantages of an Education
HE Manchester Guardian points out that the object of a college education is not merely to enable one to make a better living financially but to enjoy more as he goes along, getting a keener enjoyment out of letters, art and the physical sciences.
The total earnings of an untrained man up to the age of sixty are $45,000; that of a high school graduate $78,000; that of a college graduate $150,000. The professor is at his best at sixty years of age; the laborer has done his best work before he is fifty.
Less than one percent of the men in America are college bred; yet this small percentage has furnished fifty-five percent of the American presidents, fifty-four percent of the vice-presidents, sixty-two percent of the secretaries of state, fifty percent of the secretaries of the treasury, and sixty-nine percent of the supreme court justices.
In the business field the results are similar. One of the bulletins issued under the authority of the United States Department of Education gives a tabulation of the experiences of one hundred business houses over a short period of years. This showed that ninety percent of the college men rose to large salaries and responsible positions, as compared with twenty-five percent of non-college men.
Super-Normals and Sub-Normals
THE world's experience with prodigies has been unsatisfactory. Ed. Rochie Hardy, Jr., entered Columbia University as a freshman when he was but twelve years of age. This was in 1920. Two years later a Chicago girl eleven years of age entered the same institution, as a freshman. We do not know how these children have fared; but we do know that a few years ago we heard much of a brilliant young man in the vicinity of Boston who is said to be now a clerk in a drug store, cursing the day when he ever went to college at all, because he thinks it has sapped all his vitality.
Thomas Edison was never able to pass his school examinations; and when his teacher reported that it was a waste of time to try to educate him, he was taken out of school and never returned. General Ulysses S. Grant, one of the greatest military geniuses of history, was famous for his low standings while at West Point.
' Henry Ward Beecher had such powers of oratory that he could and did move to tears in a few minutes a great audience that was hostile when he first faced it. Yet he stood sixty-fourth in an examination in grammar, while the young man who ranked first became a barber in a Southern city.
President Andrew Johnson never went to any kind of school, his father having died when he was five years of age, and his mother being too poor to educate him. Abraham Lincoln had five months’ instruction all told, two months with one teacher and three months with another.
A New York business man gives the following report concerning a young fellow that flunked out of one of the principal colleges, being unable to pass certain required examinations. The man said:
“This boy is a corker, one of the keenest, most alert, and intelligent young chaps I ever saw. He has been with us only a few weeks, but he has invented some of the most valuable report-forms that we have. He has electrified the force with which he works. He exhibits concentration, tireless industry, ability to calculate, make cost estimates, compose interesting, exhaustive and informing reports. He is one of the most valuable and promising young men we have in our force.”
One college man in six flunks out, usually from unwillingness to study.
Working Their Way
IT IS quite a common thing for ambitious young men and women to work their way through college, and not infrequently these young men and women succeed remarkably well in after life. But as one of the boys put it, a boy who tries it “has most of the joy and all of the culture taken out of his college life”.
When a boy or a girl is working his way, time is necessarily stolen from meals and from sleep; and there is absolutely no time at all for recreation. Most educators do not take well to the idea, seeming to think that the education is not worth such an effort; and perhaps they are right.
Examinations—Vacations—Fraternities
PROFESSOR in the University of Chicago made the statement that “university examinations are barbarous and ridiculous survivals of the dark ages, and should be abolished.” Nevertheless the system of testing the student’s progress and his tenacity of purpose by examinations still meets with the general approval of educators, and is not likely to be changed.
Summer vacations are survivals of the days when farmer boys had to stay out of school to help with the tilling and harvesting of crops; but there is ho reason now why the young should be set adrift, especially in the cities. But the schools during the midsummer should be conducted in the parks, and the subjects changed. Educators say that the long summer vacations in cities make the boys bad.
Fraternities have been barred by law in eighteen states. Secret societies are supposed to encourage wider friendships in college, and this is generally held to be one of the greatest assets of college training. But it is not necessary to be in a secret society with a person to think well of him or to associate with him; and the general consensus of opinion is that it is not good for young people to be in secret societies together. Deviltry is easy under such conditions. Three Brooklyn schoolgirls were recently burned with acid in a secret-society initiation in that city.
Education of Women
HUNDRED and fifty years ago, if a woman was taught to read and sew it was considered that she was well educated. The wills made by women of property at that time show that few of them knew how to write. The schools were intended only for the boys. Women’s college were first founded a hundred years ago, and under strong opposition.
Co-education of the sexes is now widely practised in the United States, although it is admittedly unwise, having the effect of feminizing the men and masculinizing the women, and bringing too many hasty and forced marriages, resulting in great unhappiness to all concerned. In the high schools of Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, and New Orleans the sexes are separated; but in most other cities they are not. Economy is the motive in co-education.
Women study harder and have better memories than men. The men excel in science and mathematics; the women in literature, language and other studies requiring concentration. Plans are being made in New England to establish a woman’s college in which mathematics, Latin, Greek and pure science will give way to studies especially appropriate for those sensible women who expect ultimately to become mothers and the founders of beautiful and happy homes. But a good mother beats all colleges for that purpose.
The women of Heidelberg University are said to be unhappy because they are not permitted to engage in dueling as do the men. Michigan College has sent home seventeen girls for smoking and staying out after hours.
British schoolmasters assert that women teachers are demoralizing the youth of America. They do not know what they are talking about. Women teachers, especially those that have been mothers, make the best of teachers in the elementary grades. Men should teach boys over twelve years of age.
Mrs. J. W. Shad, of Pittsburgh, mother of four, with a large house to keep up, found time to take an academic course in the night high school, where she was graduated with the highest honors of her class. Mrs. Amy Davis Winship, of Racine, Wisconsin, entered the University of Wisconsin as a student at the age of ninety.
Schools and Health
VERY year witnesses improvements in the means of caring for the health of children while at school. Every New York school has at least one room open to the weather, in which children with tubercular tendencies may be rendered robust. As a consequence tuberculosis is diminishing. .
With the same end in view, a mid-morning milk lunch has been provided for children in the lower grades. This also has proved its value, in Dallas the school officials feed 20,000 children at a profit, supplying a forty-cent chicken stew for five cents, and ice-cream and salad for five cents. For ten cents the student receives a meal that would cost seventy-five cents in a restaurant. If that is a good thing for the children of Dallas, why would it not be a good thing for the children of every city? How could any city make a better move?
To reduce the effects of malnutrition many German communities have established schools in the woods.
Modifications of the Dalton Laboratory Plan, first tried out in Dalton, Massachusetts, are in operation in three thousand English schools, and in some seventy schools in this country. Under this plan there are no classroom recitations, but the children are dealt with individually. In Winnetka, Illinois, half the time is given to the Dalton Plan and half to the old plan.
The Walden Plan makes geography the basis of everything. Babies are admitted as soon as able to walk. First they learn to go about the school, and locate their room with reference to the rest of the premises. Later they venture out into the streets and locate the schools, and subsequently the parks, markets, docks, bridges, public buildings, factories, etc. The paintings of the children of the Walden Plan schools are famous.
Reading is taught more rapidly than formerly by the use of cut-out pictures which must be fitted into certain places, designated by names. By the new method the child learns one hundred ninety words in the time usually spent in learning one hundred twenty-five. A. standardized stenography is hoped for sometime, that can be used in writing and printing, to take the place of the cumbersome letters and crazily spelled words' now in use.
Consolidation Schools
THE automobile is changing the country school, some say for the better, some for the worse. Now two or more districts combine in one larger graded school, conveniently located ; and the pupils are conveyed to and from the school at public expense. Since back in the seventies, Massachusetts has found it cheaper to carry the children from isolated districts to the larger centers in order to give them educational advantages. In some normal schools special courses are given, preparing superintendents to manage fleets of motor buses for the transportation of children to and from these consolidated schools.
The consolidation schools allow the children to remain at home until their education is finished, and are apparently doing away with the little red schoolhouse where one poor little woman tried to impart education to forty or more boys and girls of all ages.
The consolidation of schools is causing the construction of elaborate buildings in places where they would not ordinarily be looked for, and incidentally is providing the community with much-needed auditoriums for lectures, pictures, meetings and entertainments.
A school that does not need to be consolidated with any other to give it enough pupils is Public School No. 109, of East New York, where an average of 5,189 little children holds the record for daily attendance. This school is equipped with a garden, savings bank, hospital, dentist’s office, printing office, carpenter shop, millinery shop, and sewing room.
Unusual Schools
IT IS possible to study at college almost anything that anybody wishes to take up. In the Radcliffe Woman’s College there are four hundred five subjects. In some of the men’s colleges the number of subjects runs far greater. There is a college for blind girls twenty miles out of London. The State of Washington has a college for fishermen.
Cornell University has a course for women where, in a model apartment, sickly infants are graduated normal children. The first agricultural college in America (at Lansing, Michigan) was founded only about sixty-five years ago.
Scranton has a correspondence college which has upwards of two million students in all parts of the world, studying almost every known branch of science and art.
The Candler Floating School, financed by A'. G. Candler, Jr., of Atlanta, Ga., is an old army transport, fitted out as a university, which carries its students about the world, instructing them as they go.
The New York Times reports that degrees of all kinds and grades can be had at costs ranging from $100 to $200. But there never can be any effective way to stop that practice; for it is well known that many of the men that have never been through college are more capable than those that have. Why try to stop a man from using titles which he is better fitted to wear than are those who gained them in the usual way?
Two or three years ago the progressive papers*had considerable to say about workers’ schools or labor colleges, where workers could be taught those historical and scientific truths necessary to qualify them to be labor leaders. The movement is not dead, but has not created the stir expected. In 1922 it was estimated that there -were 200,000 workers in the classes, in twenty-six schools throughout the country.
Of the 200,000 schools in the country, about 6,000 are equipped to show motion pictures, which Edison is said to believe will constitute the chiefest means of instruction some time. Anything can be taught by movie that can be taught by the printed page.
There are ninety-seven colleges or universities imparting instruction Uy radio. One of the chiefest radio stations for imparting instruction is Watchtower WBBR, Staten Island, N. Y. Experience of radiocasters has shown that a twenty-minute lecture is about the right length. If longer, the effect is lost.
Revival of Classics
THE classics die hard. A few years ago there was a determined move to rid the young of the incubus of learning things they would never use. But the educators hate to give up their idols. They try to tell us that a man can plow better if he has studied Greek; that Latin affords excellent mental training, and is the key to art, science, and the languages of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Rumania. Latin and Greek have again been made compulsory in French schools.
Industrial Universities
T THE opposite end of the educational world lie the industrial universities, patterned more or less after the methods of the International Correspondence Schools, teaching only the things of industrial value, and not infrequently located in or connected with inAustria! plants.
The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, 'Akron, Ohio, maintains such a school, so large in extent that a corps of seventy-five janitors is needed to heat it and keep it in order. One of the courses is instruction in the mute language, the Goodyear Company employing more deaf mutes than any other known concern. For this they deserve great credit.
The American Multigraph Company, Cleveland, Ohio, maintains a school for the training of its salesmen, as do the National Cash Register Company and many of the typewriter companies and other concerns.
The students at CincinnatiUniversity, and at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, attend school four or five weeks and then work in industrial plants for the next succeeding similar period. Thus they can earn while they learn. There are similar arrangements for electrical engineering students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and for certain students at Harvard.
New York’s continuation school is provided for those who must leave school before seventeen years of age and go to work. They must go to school a half-day each week. There are classes in all kinds of practical subjects. Wisconsin has had such a law for some years.
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