The Wichita daily eagle. [volume] (Wichita, Kan.) 1890-1906, 1895-04-28
Squeak.

With last night closed one OF the
| most woful weeks in the history OF
| the public schools of Wichita. The
gay little boy who is wont 10 hive hap
piness from all his surroundings,
whether his inventive faculty joins the
dynamic forces OF a tin-can and a
dog together, or whether his inclina-
ton draws him to grassy banks to
| waylay the wide-eyed and bewhisker-
ed bull-head-the gay little boy has
been wandering around town with
large gobs of dark blue gloom and
crystal beads Of refrigerated perspir-
alton hanging to his troubled brow.
And when the old man has spoken
kindly of childhood's happy hours. the
aforesaid boy has gone out behind the
wood shed and gently kicked himself
This is all the result of fin-di-siecle
education. During the last week near
ly every boy and girl iii the public
schools has been presented with seven
ty-five questions on music. These
questions to be learned. After they
had been submitted for few days, a
period cautiously limited to prevent an
epidemic of insanity, an examination
was held and the poor children had to
=
| boys in the school-rooms and the girls
as well We're numbered. and one at a
time, in funereal procession, they filed
into the belfry, where they were given
a musical score and commanded to
sing to their teachers.
The boys are in open rebellion and
have been all week. The girls manag-
ed to make out some way, as usual,
and do not figure in the case. But
when boy is seriously asked to find
the square root of an intermeZZo
Seni-tone, or to bound on four sides
and locate the principal rivers of a
crescendo fortissimo with e pluribus
unum attachments, or eliminate the
tautology of a chromatic scale, he lays
down on the bosom of the United
States of America and wants to die.
And he has the sympathy of his
parents, too. Every man wants to ap-
pear as an oracle in the eyes of his
son. 1t is his especial delight to an
swer all questions put to him with a
careless show Of superior knowledge
on all subjects. But when a little tot.
pronunciation of single two-syla-
BILE word braks in on his father with a
simple query as to the da capo ale
gretto movement in G fat fugue, the
old mans head swfms instantly: a
cloud of black despair arises from be-
meath and engulfS him, binding and
suffocating his selfconceit. When he
comes to. he will fire the boy out of
the room bodily, but later when he
finds the boy in corner weeping and
discovers that the little fellow was in
earnest, the old man retireS to the
privacy of his library and records
some Streaked remarks about the
idiocies of modern educatio that
would peel paint off a tin-roof.
But this doesn't aid the boy At
least instances of the kind did not as
sist him at all He had to get down to
work and learn those insane questions.
But that's wasn't all. On the day of
the examination, the pulsating mo-
ment, when he had to stalk into that
belfry and sing for the benefit of his
teacher, arrived. The poor future
presidents, one by one. in unsupported
loneliness, without a friend on earth,
appeared before the throne with their
knees knocking together with a sound
like wooden-legged man having
fit on hardwood floor. In a cathe-
dral-Silence they began on the chro-
matte scale. In some instances the
boys found to their horror that they
couldn't make squeak. Their
tongues fastened to the roof of their
mouths, their larnyX went out on a
strike and their thoraX miscued, and in
that dreadful condition they looked
into the eyes of the kindly school
marin appealingly and she let them go
and marked them a hundred, for which
she should be honored and esteemed.
1t was terrible ordeal. And also,
in the eyes of the good old unsophisti-
Gated, unmusical, unchromatic scaled
people from whose sides Lincolns and
Garfields and Longfellows have arisen
Off not a single PadereswkD it was
idiotic nonsense.