The Advocate and news., 1898-02-23

ther, and confess my conviction that 1t
Is the duty OF society, as It's ability
steadily increases to furnish the, Oppor-
tunities for such education to the most
wretched guttersnipe in the metropolis,
and to the most fOrlorn herdsbOy in the
frontier dugout. And with the OppOrtu-
mites should go the means whereby each
may avail himself Of them. No pub
Tic educational system has done Its work
which has simply provided educational
institutions, opportunities and facilities,
and left around them the gulf Of poverty,
crossed only by the bridge of comfort or
opulence. Society should provide the
school. and in addition must make it
possible for the boy or girl to 90 through
1t from basement to cupOla.
believe In an education as broad and
liberal as truth itself; In the right Of
each 10 enjoy It; and In the duty Of so
ciety, out Of It's abundant wealth, to
provide 1t, and to provide the means by
which each willing and competent stu
dent may avail himself Of 1t, and to the
full. II this appears Utopian, we have
hut to cite the example Of Switzerland in
this regard, and to imagine how much
more UtOplan our present educational
facilities mot to mention our other op-
pOrtunitles) would have appeared to the
Pilgrim Fathers.
SO much for the general education.
Whereon now shall we base our demand
for a practical education?
Barring those who from youth or age,
or from physical or mental weakness,
kOnanoINla dOnIntNF nnVnehk 10 hn
largely Is made up Of workers. That
mems myriad and ever growing wants
may be satisfied, the globe must be ex-
plotted, and natures forces harnessed;
and only by mans contriVing can this
be done. True 1t is that machines
driven by steam and electricity are eman-
cipating man from many of the coarser
and Cruder forms of work; but by so
doing they but free him for work In the
higher fields where machines are worth
less. Further, save In the cases of de-
pendents and Of the parasitic classes ION
the top and bottom rounds of the social
ladder), work Is essential to the life of
the individual. Only in the sweat OF his
face Is man permitted to eat bread. For
most OF these forms of work, a general
liberal education, however rational or
scientific, fails, unsupplemented, to At
one. No amount Of philosophy will in
Itself prepare young man to manage a
lathe, project a railway line, drive
locomotive, run a grocery store on
paying basis, or make money out OF
Kansas farm. To the assumption that a
general education affords sufficient prep
arati0n for the worlds work is due in
large part the contempt felt by many
practical men for the diploma OF the
classical college.
But II the general education, however
rational, fails in itself to prepare for the
practical work of life, how much more
must 1t fail when irrational and unscien-
tine? And such In some degree Is still |
the character Of much Of our general |
educational work. Because In the middle |
ages practically all literature was locked |
up In Latin and Greek neCessltatlng the |
mastery Of these languages as the first |
step in the path of letters, many have
even yet failed to see that since our most |
helpful literatures are now in the mod |
ern tongues, the study of these tongues |
ought to receive the emphasis once laid
ON Latin and Greek. Realizing, however,
that 1.-THE specialist excepted) no modern
man reads or particularly cares to read
Latin or Greek, our schools have insen-
sibly so modified their methods Of teach
ing as practically to withhold from their
students the power to read these Ian
guages; with the curious and astound-
ing result that after having given the
flower of his educational life to the study
OF dead languages, the student not infre-
quently leaves college, his Latin diploma
in hand, blissfully ignorant OF the fact
that Latin and Greek can be read at all,
or In anywlse comprehended, except by
FIRST laboriOusly turning them into the
mother tongue with the aid OF grammar
and lexicon.
Education, furthermore, Is rendered
irrational by the blind subservlence paid
lDy many educators To authority. Many