Frostburg mining journal. [volume] (Frostburg, Md.) 1871-1913, 1898-04-02
CORRESPONDENCE.
Compulsory Education VS.. Farm
Education.
SYKEsvILLE, MD, March IA, 1898.
To the MINING JOURNAL.

SYKEsvILLE, MD, March IA, 1898.
To the MINING JOURNAL.
Republican delegate Eddy Elmer
Harm, of Frederick, some weeks since
introduced a compulsory educational
bill in our Legislature, which, up to
this writing, has received but inSig-
nificant attention.
But there is no knowing at what
moment interested professors may
pounce upon the judiciary committee,
to which it was referred. and influence
a favorable report thereon.
1t is entirely uncalled for in Mary
land. Hundreds of thousands of dol
lars now go to public schools and some
sixty or seventy thousand children at
tend the public schools of Baltimore
alone. The few children who are
taught at home, or who are brought
up to work are not the ones that are
filling Frederick county and other
counties with tramps and criminals.
A bishop of Nebraska says our
schools are making our anarchists !;
Bismarck said ten years ago they were
making the discomfort in Germany !;
Sam Jones says 1.-The State has no
more right to educate our children
than it has to feed, clothe, spank them
and put them to bed" He sees Social
ism fostered in it all. Prof. H. T..
Peck, of Columbia University, New
York city, has reused the educators of
the country IN his denunciation of
compulsory education. Living IN a
State in which it is in full force, he
sees its disastrous results and Richard
Grant White, a writer in the North
American Reoie~, has sometime ago
given world wide denunciation Of
the whole public school system.
While petty professors are clamoring
for the schools, let us extract from Mr..
White on The Public School Failure :"
The case is worse than that of mere fail
ure for the result has been deplOrable, and
threatens to be disastrous"
knowledge will not lift the masses, except
as balloon is lifted, because 1t is inflated
with gas
The road to the best government of the
people does not lie only through the door
of the public school-hOuse."
'Ifignorance be the mother of vice, and the
public school is the efficient foe of ignorance,
the last fifty years should have seen in all
tlleSe IeSpeClS d I'LL pIONellleHl 81 Sitttt lildt
admiring nations would applaud and humbly
hope to initiate. But who needs to be told
that in these respects we have deteriorated."
"Our large towns swarm with idle, vicious
lads, and young men who have no visible
means of support. Our rural districts are in
tested with tramps-a creature unknown to
our fathers, and even to us in our youth"
Bribery at elections is almost openly prac-
ticed by both our great political parties"
Dishonesty in business and betrayal of
trust have become SO common that the public
record of the last fifteen years on this subject
is such that it cannot be remembered without
shame"
Crime and vice have increased year after
year almost po,i paSSn with the development
of the public school system, which, instead
of lifting the masses, has given us in their
places nOndescrpt and hybrid class, unfit
for professional or mercantile life unwilling
and also unable to be farmers or artisans, so
that gradually our skilled labor is done more
by immigrant foreigners, while our native
citizens who would naturally fill the respect
able POSITIONS in society, seek to make their
living by their witS-honestly if they can !;
if not, more or less dishonesty"
"Filial respect and parental love have both
diminished
The remedy may be briefly indicated as a
discOntinuance of any other education at
the public cost than that which is strictly
elementary-reading spelling writing and
the common rules of practical arithmetic !;
and IN the remission of all education higher
than this to parents the natural guardians,
and earthly providence of their children.
And those children only should be thus edu-
Gated at public cost whose parents are too
poor to give them an elementary education
themselves"
"lf government is to assume parental and
formative function, and to attempt the max
ing of good citizens, it may with much more
reason and prOpriety establish public farms
and public workshops and train in them its
future citizens toget their own living respect
ably and honestly, than 1t may establish and
compel attendance upon schools on a system
the result Of which, according to the ex-
perience of half century, is deterioration in
purity of morals, in decency of life, in thrift,
and in all that goes to make good citizens.
accompanied by a steadily increasing failure
in the requirement of the very elements of
useful knowledge"
1t will be observed in the last para
graph that Mr.. White advocates the
State educating its masses to the farm
and the workshop if it must take the
place OF the parents. This is in line
with the farm reform views | have
formerly laid down in the JOURNAL
and 1t would, indeed, avert the Social
ism the schools are educating to if it
received the attention of our legis-
lators.
Mr.. Dodson's manual training school
bill is a step in the right direction
Why cannot these schools, if instituted,
be located in the country and farm
work begun
Many California papers are taking
up this farm reform movement in
earnest: one of the most prominent
men in the State, Mr.. George H. Max
well, of San Francisco. is writing and
lecturing on it and the Salvation Army
is founding an immense colony at
SOledad, where ten-acre farms are to
be the rule.
Let Allegany's Senator, Mr.. Dick
and her delegate, Mr.. Campbell, con
slider these matters.
Francis r IINESEY