Daily Arizona silver belt., 1910-03-20
MEDIEVAL METHODS OF EDUCATION

Under the title "Medieval Methods for Mod ern Children Maude Radford Warren writes in the current Saturday Evening Post tren- chant analysis of modern educational methods in this country that rings with unassailable com mon sense The Silver Belt is particularly ln- terested in it because it is exactly in line with its expressed opinion that the time IS come when the public schools should cease to'be conducted wholly in the interests of the l per cent ot the pupils that go to college, and when the needs of the go per cent should be met with something that will benefit them and fit them to be useful men and women
 Says Miss Warren: ''We started with the Puritan ideal of education formated by hard headed stock that sent the most promising boy to college while the rest of the family lived on porridge to pay his fees. The Puritan remained fastened in the idea that every boy should have the education of the scholar and the gentleman. He must know Latin and Greek. The conditions of the country have changed, but not, so far, that original academic ideal of education. To this day most of the emphasis is put, on the scholar and gentleman courses, the college entrance requirements, which may be fitted, in deed, for the progeny of the Pilgrim Fathers, the 20 per cent of Brewsters and Afdens But all over the country are thousands and thous- ands of children who call themselves Americans but who answer to the names of Alessandro and Lars and Heinrich and Ignatz and Ikey, and who are pushing up to the doors of our schools and asking for their moneys worth. Do they get it?"
 Miss Warren proceeds to show that they do not; that the needs of the many are forgotten in the superstitious devotion to a system that is designed to prepare everybody for college and the professions, when only per cent can go to college and less than that can be profes- sional men and women, while the 99 per cent who must be business men and artisans and housewives are dropped by the waysde, wholly unemployed to face their share of the world $ work, and with their real education yet to be gained. The country demands artisans and housewives, and it gets small proportion of graduates more or less fully educated for pro fessional life, and an appalling proportion of forced graduates from the early grades, not fit ted for anything.
 'Our public school system, elaborate as it is, fails to meet the needs of all the children chiefly because the standards are academic, /" says Miss Warren 'It meets excelenty the needs of the Aldens and Brewsters who have minds fit for such training; and if no one but Aldens and Brewsters went to school, then the system would be without a flaw. In that case there would be enough teachers to make the children perfect in tellectual aristocrats. But for the majority of the students are needed industrial schools, trade schools. As it is in city of million inhab itants, we have manual training schools that vii accommodate about one-half of 1 per cent o1 the children. And these courses, incomplete as they are, have their usefulness still more low cred because they are unrelated to the funda mental work of the schools'
 This country has many institutions deeply en crusted in habit that is almost impenetrable but it has no institution more deeply entombed in perncious inefficiency than the schools, anG none that so greatly needs to be dug up and re built