Dodgeville chronicle. [volume] (Dodgeville, Wis.) 1862-current, 1872-09-20

that the ability to acquire is not the ability
| to do. The rewards of excellence in
schools and colleges are, as rule, melted
| out to those who have demonstrated their
| capacity for acquiring and examining.
The practical world has ceased to
expect much of its valedictorians and
| its prize-medal bearers. Those whose
growth of power is slow, and whose
/ vitality has been unimpaired by excessive
study during the years of physical de-
| velopment, are the men who do, and who
| always have done, the work of the world.
Thousands of educated men go through
| life with feeble health, and power i'm
| paired, and limited usefulness, in direct
| consequence of their early triumphs, or,
| rather, of the sacrifices by which those
| triumphs were won.
We cannot but believe that prizes do
more harm than good, and that it would
| be blessing to the nation if they could
be abolished in every school and college
in the country. They are won invariably
| by those who need rather to be restrained
| than stimulated, and are rarely contended
| for by those whose sluggish natures alone
require an extraordinary motive to exer-
ton and industry. Their award is based
upon the narrowest grounds. Their ten
| dency is to convey false idea of manly
excellence, and to discourage the develop
ment of the stronger and healthier forms
of physical and mental life. The young
man who goes to the work of his life
with firm and healthy frame, apure heart,
and the ability to use such knowledge
as he possesses, is worth to himself, his
friends, and the world, a thousand times
more than the emaciated scholar whose
stomach is the abode of dyspepsia and
whose brain is lumber-house of unused
learning. If we have any prizes to give
let us give them to those young men of
delicate organizations and the power of
easy acquisition who restrain their ambi-
ton to excel in scholarship, and build up
for themselves a body fit to give their
minds a comfortable dwelllng-place and
forcible and facile service. These would
be prizes worth securing, and they would
point to the highest form of manhood as
their aim and end. ...-..-.
The tendency in all these educational
matters is to extremes. It is quite as
much so in England as here. We have
no sympathy with the aim which is fos-
tered in some institutions of making
| athletes of the students. Baseball
matches, and rowing matches, and aero
batic feats are well enough for those who
have no brains to cultivate, or those who
are not engaged in educating and storing
them but they are not the things for
studious young men. The awful strain
that they infict upon the body draws all
the nervous energy to the support of the
muscular system, and kills the ability to
study. More than all, they wound the
vitality of every man who engages in
them. We once heard an English clergy
man say that every noted athlete of his
(the clergyman's) class in the university
was either dead or worse. Moderate
play every day in the open air, limited
hours of study in the daytime, pleasant
social intercourse, unlimited sleep, good
food, the education of power by it's use in
writing, speaking and debating-these
are what make men of symmetry, health
and usefulness. The forcing process, in
whatever way applied, and to whatever
set of powers, is dangerous process. We
make great stir over the fogging of
refractory boy by teacher. Whole
communities are sometimes convulsed by
what is regarded as a case of physical
cruelty in a school, but the truth
is that the ferule and the rawhide are the
mildest instruments of cruelty in the hands
Of more teachers than can be counted.
The boy who is crowded to do more than
he ought to do in study, and so crowded
that he is enfeebled, or takes on disease
of the brain and nervous system at the
first onset of sickness, is the victim of the
subtlest cruelty that can be practiced
upon him.
We write strongly of these things be-
cause. we feel strongly. We believe that
there is a wrong practiced upon the chill
dren and young men of the country that
ought to be righted. We believe, too,
that not only teachers but parents are
blameworthy in this matter. 1t all comes
of false idea of education. To acquire
what is written in books-in the quickest
way and in the greatest quantity-this is
education in the popular opinion. The
enormous mistakes and fatal policies sof
which we complain all grow out of this
error. Half of the schooling which we
give those children who go to school,
would be better than the whole; while
the poor third, who do not go to school
at all, would give employment to the I'M
used energies of those teachers whose
time would be released to them by such
reduction of school hours. Six hours of
daily Imprisonment for child is cruelty.
without any reference to the tasks to
which he is held during that period.-J.
G. Holland, IN Sc1a6ner''s for September. -
tSSt s-------@>ep--------- F... y"~ q