The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1908-07-11

would not recognize the township hlgh
school of a prosperous Indiana com.
munity of today. Such high schools as
these teach stenography and banking so
that the boy may go to the city ready
for the battle with business; they teach
soil chemistry and scientific agricul-
ture, SO that the boy may stay on the
old farm and make twice as much of
the same land as father did; they teach
the girls the science of cooking and the
philosophy of keeping the body clean
and well. They are the enemies of sloth
and dirt, the agents of industry and
cleanliness. One can find such rural
schools in California, in Georgia, in
Oklahoma, in the Dakotas. The day
will come when they will cover the
face of the country.
The Cleveland convention will devote
much attention to the discussion of the
part the school must take IN the phys
zeal training and care of pupils. New
York City found that of $4,000 public
school pupils, one-thrd had defective
eye-sight. TIE correction of visual de-
fects by adjustment of proper glasses
means the quickening of mental faeul-
ties, or at least, an increase IN the
power to acquire knowledge. New York
is solving the problem of detectives, in
corrigibles and unusual children, by
providing special schools in when the
physical supervisor has great deal to
do.
Sixteen years ago the Boston schools
blazed the way for medical inspection
of children in the schools. Early this
year the Massachusetts legislature en-
acted law requiring that all school
children in the state be tested for de-
fective hearing and eye-sight. Boston
has gone farther, and has employed
corps of twentyone school nurses.
These trained nurses are assigned to dis
tricts, and they go into the homes and
take care of the sick school children.
Boston will tell about its advances at
Cleveland; the teachers viii leave with
the advantage of Boston s progressive
experience.
There will be earnest discussions of
the relation of the public schools to
Industrial problems, to agriculture, to
the immigrant, to play, to the abnor-
NAL and defective child, to the state,
and to the movement for the proven
ton of disease. In all of these discus
sions the leaders will occupy ground
so advanced that the ordinary middle
aged voter would be shocked to hear the
speeches. But, for some reason or 9th
er, the ordinary parent and voter knows
more about the workings of the Rus
sian Duma than he does of the school
system where his boys and girls are be-
ing educated. 1t is only when the
school progressivists need money that
they encounter the force of the con
servatives. For that reason their actual
progress is limited in some sections OF
the country, but they believe it is only
for the time being.
Perhaps no one feature of the school
work which will be discussed at the
Cleveland convention is more markedly
representative of the contrast between
the education system of the present day
and that of sixty years ago than that of
"play.'' In the old days the children
were permitted to amuse themselves as
they saw III, and much play was con
sidered quite as bad for Jack as all
work and no play Now the tax
payers hire men and women to teach
their children how to play, and the
work is looked upon as one of the most
profitable branches of public school edu-
cation. How we do get on!
Next to the great national spelling
bee, revival of the elder day, the most
interesting feature of the Cleveland
convention will be the great play festi'
val, Four thousand school children of
Cleveland will be in Rockefeller Park
next Friday afternoon to show their
elders and the teachers of the country
how to play according to science. They
will be under the direction of the Cleve-
land public school supervisor of phys.
zeal training. The main feature of the
play festival will be the folkdances,
in which these thousands of Ohio lads
and lassies will go through the poetic
motions of the national dances of thu
peoples of the old world countries, and
incidentally demonstrate the cOsmopoIi-
tan capacity of the Americans to com
bine fun, geography, ethnology and ex'
ercise.
Another. and most important, mat
ter will receive earnest attention. 1t
is the question of schoolhouse con-
struction. Within a few miles of the
scene of the awful disaster at Collin
wood. the National Education Associa-
tion will take steps to abolish the in
swinging door, the unsafe furnace and
chimney. the threestory schOolhOuse,
and all the other agencies of the fire
demon. All in all, the Cleveland con
vention means quite as much to the
boys and girls of this great nation as
the Chicago and Denver conventions
mean to the grownups.