Sharp County record., 1879-01-09
" Going TO School,"

prepared for the awful consequences
which would follow a departure from
the monotony of textbooks and stereo-
typed class examinations. They must
know that the moment you treat a pupil
in school hours as if he was not a pris-
oner, he will at once kick up 4 rebellion
and forget his books,
Children are sent to school to learn;
we all know that Certain eminent
men have been called upon, or have
called upon themselves, to compile
Biographies, arithmetics, spelling
books, readers, ETC., for instruction of
school-children. Ii follows, ~ a mat
ter of necessity, that pupils have no
business to learn any thing except from
these books. If teacher should take
it into her head to explain to the pupils
the difference between poetry and blank
verse. or explain any interesting ques-
ton in natural history, she should be
severely reproved, because none of the
school-bOoks refer to such things.
The other day | met bit of girl
going to shool with tears in her eyes
and Sanders New Speller in her hand.
She could spell, but Sanders had told
her, and her teacher had cautioned her
to commit to memory the fact Words
are either primitive, deri7atiVe, simple
or compound The child didn't know
whether the word "primitive meant
twin hltching-postS or fire alarm, and
when l ask her the meaning of the word
"compOund" she looked from an ap-
ple-peddler's wagon to lamp-pOSt and
back, as if the significance of the word
hovered between the two. | didn't eX-
plain or assist her, of course. Because
Sanders put that sentence in his Speller
it follows that pupils must learn it, even
though their teachers could not write it
down and spell half the words correctly.
That same little girl, hardly 10 years of
age, must learn from the same book
that "indorser is one that indOrses,"
and that San appellor is one that makes
appeal" and while she may learn the
words by heart she will know their
meaning just about as much as her
teacher knows why Lake Michigan is
longer than it is broad.
Around the corner they buried IA
year old boy the other day. He didn't
die of scarlet fever or any other pro-
nounced disease. In fact, the doctor
never made up his mind what to call it.
The boy became pale, haggard and
thin, suffered much with his head, and
in his last hours he talked wildly and
strangely. ....
"He was such a good boy, and he
studied so hard," wept his mother, and
took look at the dead boys school
books. He had been studying mathe-
matics, history, photography, writing,
natural philosophy, and two or three
other things, and when his mother
"came to remember " she recalled that
his lessons kept him at his books from
breakfast until O'Clock in the evening,
and that she had sometimes caught him
working mathematical examples on the
Sabbath, in order to be "perfect" on
Monday. l soon found where he left
off in his arithmetic. 1t was an exam
pie reading about as follows: elf A
has 10 oxen which weigh 800 pounds
each, and B has IA mules which weigh
four times as much, and one-third of
the mules fall into a mud hole, and four
of the oxen lose their left ears what will
be the weather next weekP"
l do not say that this example killed
the boy. If it did, all right. 1t was
there to be learned, and he must either
learn it or die. Just imagine how ut
terly unfit that boy would have been to
society and business circles without be-
ing able to answer such examples off
hand! -
was talking with school-teacher
the other day who will certainly come
to some bad end if he does not change
his opinions. He had the audacity to
hold that children went to school not as
prisoners, but as pupils, the social
equals of teachers, but obeying orders
because realizing that discipline ad-
vanced the interests of all. He held
that it mattered not how the pupils
learned that Michigan was bounded on
the south by Ohio and Indiana, so long
as they came to distinct knowledge OF
the fact, and he therefore said to his
young class in geography:
"Now, child en-, the President of the
United States used to live in Ohio, and
Senator Morton, now dead, lived in In
diana. Tell me in what direction those
two States lie from Michigan"
1t is very wrong in him, because the
pupils take real pleasure in hunting out
the answer. No pupil should be al.
lowed to search for any answer not
regularly laid down in the text-bo ks
This teacher sets another awful example
Right in the face of the fact that there
is school-reader containing the history
of William Penn and the adventures Of
Mary's little lamb, he takes magazine
or newspaper into his school-room and
says:
sc Now chi1dran T shall LOT ono NJ