The evening times., 1898-11-12
4 HaIf-Educated Educator.

4 statement recently made by a
superintendent OF public schools at ST.
Paul Minnesota, is fairly good ex-
ample Of the brain work of some of the
men who are responsible for our school
system. He gave a public lecture in
which he described Herbert Spencer as
an old man in London who had built
up a system Of philosophy which viii
shortly be forgotten and assured his
hearers that ''tkis man Spencer has
written nothing by which the world has
proiited,
The thing which We most need in our
school system is more thorough and eX-
act knowledge in the teachers and less
cramming in the curriculum. Men like
this superintendent. who have for their
equipment only a smattering of general
information and an intense belief in
themselves, are all too common among
our trustees and superintendent. They
are the persons who have introduced
Greek. Latin. the higher mathematics.
and modern European langua ges among
scholars who will probably never have
use for any Of these things. They have
a glimmering idea that such things give
culture least that is what they
will tell you. They are laying broad
foundation for culture" in after years.
AS a matter of fact. they desire to give
their particular school the reputation
of having a more advanced course of
study than other schools. and, if it is
a school for which tuition is charged,
they wish to attract pupils for the sake
of making money. If the children, be-
wildered by the vast variety of sub
jects which they are expected to under
stand, come out of that school unable
to speak their own language or add a
column of figures correctly, that is the
fault of the scholar or of the teacher
not of the superintendent 1t is this
system which creates the public school
graduate who has a vague and hazy
idea about nearly everything in the
universe, the idea being usually wrong.
He has a belief that logarithms are
used in trigonometry, because he was
pulled through term of that study at
eighteen by some hypnotic power on the
part of the teacher; but ask him to cal
culate the number of rolls of wall paper
required for a room in your house, and
he will become pitiably mixed in his
calculations. He knows how to trans
late an ordinary French sentence with
the help of a dictionary, and without
making more than one mistake, but he
does not know that those sort of
things is very bad grammar In short,
he has been crammed for eight or ten
years with all sorts of things which he
needs not to know, while all the things
which he must know to be really useful
in the world have been carefully left
out
Thoroughly trained and cultured men
know that it is better to read half
page of a good English author with un-
derstanding than to know, incorrectly.
three foreign languages. With such
men at the head of our school boards
the children might not learn any Ian
guage but English, but they would
speak and write that correctly They
might not have studied geometry, but
they would be able TO keep books They
might not know the names of all the
ancient provinces of Rome. but they
would know whether the Philippine ISL
ands were in the Atlantic Ocean or else
where They might not have read the
! life of Alexander the Great, but they
would know what happened in arr war
of 1872 They would. above all. have
studied slowly, thoughtfully, and with