St. Paul daily globe., 1889-06-16
*PenaIty in California.

and not less than $50 for each SubSe-
uuent repetition thereof. You must also
agree ana bind yourself in advance not
to withhold your assessment, even
should you withdraw your child from
the school of our selection, because we
should in that event need the money for
education of other children.
ever consent. while living and in the
to entrust such power as this over
your infant child-girl or boy-to any
two men in existence? Would you not
spurn such proposition as the above
with indignant scOrn, come from what
source it might? We may here remark,
in passing. that it surely could not bet
ter the matter should these supposed
friends and neighbOrs. in consideration
of this proposed outrageous betrayal OF
your parental trust, even offer to perpe-
trate a similar wrong against their
own children by turning over
to you, the insulted father,
a corresponding share in their
parental authority. And yet, good
reader, this miniature picture which we
have just drawn of the public school
system presents that system in the very
best possible aspect; because we have
represented you, the father, as still
allowed to retain in your own hands
one-third of that parental jurisdiction
and control which the God OF nature re-
uuires YOU to exercise over your child,
while the other two-thirds are to be en-
trusted to two of the very best men in
the whole community. But under the
public school system. as it is by law
established. instead of retaining in your
own hands even so much as
one-third of your parental author
ity, you retain only an infini-
tesimal fraction thereof. Where there
are, as in San Francisco. tens of
thousands of voters, each father divides
his parental authority into tens of
thousands of equal fragments, retain
ing but one of these fragments for HIM
self, whilst the great bulk OF this au-
thority, instead of being lodged. as in
the case above supposed. i'll two OF the
very best men to be found in the city, is
scattered around broadcast among tens
of thousands of people, good, bad and
by every rough and every rake who is
allowed to vote: and this is what they
call our great American free school
system.
"Those who attempt a justification OF
this monstrous usurpation of parental
authority never fail to entrench them
selves behind the hackneyed and much
abused maxim, that the majority has the
right to rule. But there are some
things in which the majority has no
right to rule. For example: The ma
jority has no right to select for man
his religion; neither has it a right to
choose for man the wife, nor for
woman the husband, who is to become
parent of his or her children"
Our best teachers are fully alive to
the anomalous position they are placed
in by the limitations of the present sys-
TEN; hence Hon. E. B. Carr, former
state superintendent of public instruc-
ton in California, did not hesitate to
say that: dependence on one side and
patronage on the other destroy the free
and harmonious play of benefits be-
tween the home and the school," and
that "Private institutions, colleges and
Seminaries draw away our best teach
ers, who thus avoid what is, to a SEN
sitive and high-minded teacher, an in
tolerable burden"
Gail Hamilton declares in her book
already quoted that 1.-The system is
constantly degrading teachers into
menial, and concentrating authority in
the hands of outside men who have
nothing whatever to do with the actual
teaching, and have the slightest possi-
BILE contact with the children"
AMERICAN CITIZEN.
yIavy