The semi-weekly messenger. [volume] (Wilmington, N.C.) 1897-1908, 1901-11-05
ILLITERACY AND EDUCATION.

From time to time you will see in
northern newspar ers reports showing
defective teaching in public schools
and giving many amusing examples.
You will also meet with communica-
tons and editorials on changes desir-
able in the methods Of higher educa-
ton ETC., hat are demanded as we'll as
necessary. The monthlieS some times
discuss such a topic. We find some
times papers in English periodicals
bearing upon certain phases in un1ver-
sity and other kinds of higher educa-
ton in that country,
The subject of education is prominent
now in North Carolina beyond all past
experience. Twenty years ago. more
or less. this writer undertook to advo-
cate in one or more editorials the neces-
sity of an educational revival in North
Carolina, and urged that the Superin-
tendent of Public instruction should be
a gifted speaker and should begin a
anvas in Currituck and steadily pur-
sue it through the years until all
the counties were visited. We men,
SAOA~a "Aio " NopiNoh
Governor Vance would make. Now
there are dozens of speakers, some of
them able and highly accomplished,
who are urging upon the people Of
North Carolina the vast benefits
of education and the imperative neces-
sity of sending all the children to the
public schools. The reputation of our
state for iniforaoxy ic n constant charna
and r~eproach. This, too, when for over
thirty years, the whites in their
poverty, have been taxing themselves
so generously in behalf of educating the
children of both races and of the
masses. Millions of dollars have been
expended, and fruitlessly in the case
Of hundreds of thousands of the chill
dren. In some counties, ven now,
hardly one-haf of the children of school
age. attend upon the public free schools.
What is the remedy? It may be that
a very Objectionable compulsory law
may become a necessity.
The schools of most kinds are not
what they should be made. Poor schools
means poor education. Cramming is
highly Objectionable and is an evil to
be discarded. 1t is a mistake to push
children too much and to resort to a
dollhouse system. Some one has said
but we do not know the author .
hat "our schools are Intellectual hot
houses in which the young idea is
taught not only to shoot, but to shoot
into immature Inc unnatural luxur-
lance. In this apparent growth the
the mind, like the older intelli-
gence, is really dwarfed; it loses all
expansive force; it becomes a machine
for registering ideas from without;
there is no consciousness of develop
ment from within"
1t is the opinion of many people no
doubt who closely observe that the
students in some higher schools are
trained like athletes, and consequently
suffer from entertaining. Not that
athletes are suspected of over-study.
The prize business has been thorough
ly over-done. You can not measure the
mind as you would the steam in a
boiler. Its efficiency is not to be clear
ly ascertained ''in mental horsepower"
h same wise writer quoted from.
said:
ITO fill the pitchers with facts to the
brim and eav them without h capac-
ity to recognize those facts in their
true relations to themselves and to the
outside world is nothing better than
Grad-grindism. Education cannot sue
cessfully be distributed by wholesale: