The Washington herald., 1911-11-19

pupils of the public schools and even
students at colleges are deficient in
spelIhg?' y
my answer is that they are not ded-
cient There are more good spoilers N
the country to-day than ever before. !
know the editor grumbles that when he
hires a boy out of the public schools he
gets somebody who cannot spell any too
well. I reply that the boy in all proba-
bility spells better than did the editor
when he was youngster at school. Un-
less the editor Is under forty he had no
training in English whatever, All that
he did in that direction was TO write a
composition once a month and read 1t on
Friday afternoon as an alleged enter
tainment to the rest Of the school Eng
Hsh wassnot taught insthis country until
about the year 1856, not even In colleges
The education Of the editor If he at
tended the public schools, was limited
TO reading, writing, spelling. arithmetic,
grammas and geography. On the other
hand. the boy OF whom he complains has
had an these things and English, biology
chemistry, history, and physics oesiues.
OrthoRraphicaI Innovations,
Formerly, 1t was the exceptional per-
son who spelled correctly. While was
teaching in North Carolina a father, an
important man IN the community, an au-
thority on teaching, wrote me-deer sur,
he began-to inquire why 1 didn't Turn
his sun how to spell az 1 was turned
He was a frightful case, I admit. With
some modification, however, he can be
put down as a type. The country is full
of such critics and OF such able spoilers.
Thomas Jefferson injected an a into the
word independence, and he was supposed
to know as much about independence as
anybody. George Washington's letters
were not without alarming orthographical
innovations. Many merchants used to
write it 'shugar' in their accounts. l
have seen their bills and books myself.
Sugar Is not spelled that way nowadays
by our commercial classes.
We are all acquainted with the aceu-
| sation that pupils Of our public schools
/ stumble over common words when put
| ting them down on paper. 1t is stock
criticism, the last ditch of a beaten
enemy. Not long since the examination
slips of fifty years ago were eXhumed in
a New England village, spelling papers
and all. The spelling was simply impossi-
BILE. marking it according to present
standards, and was a sweeping and un-
deniable answer in ink to one Of the i'm
putations against the present methods Of
teaching"
Are American children being taught
to think, as were their mothers and faith
ers in the little old log schOolhouse down
the road"
Certainly. Every one knows, and
teachers more than anybody else, that
thinking is the first necessity of civil
izatiOn. 1t is the foundation of good
citizenship and personal morality. AS a
matter of fact, children do very little
Independent thinking up to the age OF
fourteen. Until they reach that age
they seldom apply general principles
to their mental operations They think
concretely, taking one fact they know
about and using their knowledge upon
another similar fact. You must not
steal apples by projection and logi-
cally, includes peaches and cherries.
Here the three evil acts are alike and
the juvenile intellect governs. itself
accordingly. After they are fourteen
years old. however. children begin to
apply principles to their conduct. to
see the analogy between facts and
events, and to reason broadly and not
restrictedly. The teaching of to-day.
no matter what persons outside of the
schoolhouses may say, tries to develop
the thinking faculty that the pupils
may become good men and women.