The daily morning journal and courier. [volume] (New Haven, Conn.) 1894-1907, 1900-10-25

and sleep soundly, without a dream of
school or scholar at night? Can you
say NO every time when the chair
man of the committee wants a paper
for the Woman's club, or the superin-
tendent of the Sunday school asks you
TO take class, or people invite you to
late evening entertainments where you
do not feel able to go? Is Sunday a
day OF real rest and refreshment? Do
you have good times with friends of
your own choosing, and spend happy
hours in congenial company? Do you
invest money as impersonally and con-
servatively as though you hadn't a rel
ative or a friend in the world, in saw
1ngs banks or gilt-edged securities, or
mortgages on productive property
worth three times the value of the
loan, and owned by persons who have
other property besides that on which
I you hold the mortgage? DO you have
long restful enjoyable vacations, when
you live in the sunshine with the birds
and flowers, riding or sailing, playing
golf or tennis, climbing the mountains
or roaming the woods, or bathing in the
surf? In a word are you as good to
/ yourself as you would be, l will not say
]
come up to that standard but as you
! would be to valuable horse or ma
chine which you wished to keep in the
! best possible working order? And are
you consequently perfectly healthy,
happy, free and efficient in your work,
pouring into it every day and every
term floods of energy stored up by va
ried enjoyment, and saved from every
conflicting expenditure and waste?
Then you have gained the end of educa-
ton, and your pupils are likely to catch
| the contagion of it from you.
BY this rather personal test, I trust
we have gained a feeling of what the
end of education is, even if we have no
intellectual grasp of the formula for it.
Shall | now try to put into a definition
what we have all felt to be the end at
which education aims?
The end of education is to know and
get what is best in the world, and to
give our best work in exchange.
There are four stages of education,
elementary, secondary, higher and
professional. The end of education is
not something which is to be attained
only at the conclusion of the fourth
stage. 1t is something which can be
attained to certain degree at the con-
clusion of each stage, and may be
gained more completely at the conclu-
sion of the first or second than it often
is at the end of the third or fourth
There are many bachelors of arts and
doctors of philosophy who, tested by
our definition, or as we teachers have
beer testing ourselves tonight, are
much farther from the end of education
than many a graduate of the district or
grammar school, In my remarks this
evening I shall confine myself to ele-
mentary schools, and show how the end
of education may be attained in them.
Inasmuch as the actual high school is
frequently below the ideal grammar
school, a discussion of elementary edu-
cation may prove of profit even to |
teachers in secondary schools,
Each stage of education should be |
complete in itself Elementary educa
ton should be directed exclusively or
chiefly to the needs of children who will
leave school forever at the age of tfir-
teen or fourteen. The great majority
of children cannot remain in school be-
yond that age. The problem of elemen-
tary education, therefore, is to prepare
these children who are to be working
men and working women, or wives of
workingmen, to know the best in the
world and to get their share of it, and
to give their best through their work in
exchange Now what Is to be the MAJ
ture of their work? 1t is chiefly the
of material things. Hence,
since so much of their life will deal
with material objects, the properties of
such objects, form and color, and the
manipulation of these objects by hand
and eye, are the first elements of train
ing which these children who are to be
workers should receive.
In the simple agricultural life of our
fathers, every boy and girl got this
training on the farm where there were
plenty of chores to do; animals and
plants to tend, tools to make and mend
and use. Next to the farm in educating
power comes the shore, with it's
perpetual battle with tickle and treach-
erous elements. The increasing con-
centration of population in cities is
raising up a generation Of children who
have in their home life no means of &C
curing this rough discipline with
plough and hoe against a stubborn SOIL
Or with oar and sail and rudder against
a threatening sea. The city, cut off
from field, forest, stream and sea, tends
to breed a race of mental dwarfs and
moral cripples. Living in a ready
made world, in which there is little or {
nothing left for them to do, they come !
20 school with flabby minds as well as
7abby muscles; with undeveloped wills ]
IS the counterpart of unused hands. {
The city has it's compensations. In :
many respects the city boy gets the
start of his country cousin. But in the
quality of getting the Il
most out of life and giving his best u
,ack to it, the country boy is at great
advantage | suppose that is one rea- "
on why the most successful men in the
business and professional life of the s
titles themselves are almost invaria- a
,ly country born and bred. q
The problem of the city school is now D
o stem this tide; how to put its chill a
ren on a level with their country O.
ousins, and save them from the degen- s
ration which threatens them. Now p,
he old curriculum, well enough in it's 6,
way as a supplement to the real train #
ne which the farmers children got in nj
he field and the barn and the shed and +,
he shop, is utterly Inadequate to do =,