The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1913-06-14
SAYS UNCLE CAV

If you lived to be 80 and still have
the courage OF your dreams, there is
hope for you. Most of US outgrow our
visions and suffer for it. He who spoke
of entering the kingdom of heaven as
a little child broacIed a great philoso-
phical truth while he was launching
principle of his theology. We ruin more
children by education than we inn
prove We mean well and we do what
we always do when we merely mean
well-we spoil the job.
Better leave the child his dreams
which, if he have the right stuff in him,
he Will work out in pigment or phrase
or wood or steel, than kill them with
the unrelated hodge-podge that is COM
monty d1gnified by the name of educa-
ton Lately there has arisen a man
who has attempted to fit the task to
the man. 1t is high time we get back
to first principles and fit the education
to the child. The public school system
is a mill which grinds all to a dead
equality. The college is not much
peter. Neither makes for individual
ity which is the salt of the earth. Chill
dren and youths, bright and brilliant,
dull and stupid, good, bad and indif-
ferent are subjected to pretty much the
same course of sprouts and the world
stands aghast at the ineffectiveness of
what it miscalls education.
Unless education strikes in it is mis-
named. Unless it enhances inspiration
it is worse than dead. If it shuts out
from the eyes of the dreamer his
dream, if it deprives the budding seer
of his vision, it is a curse.
We got at our training backwards or
crosswise. Instead of stdying the needs
of the child, We stick to the formula
and let come what will We wouldn't
feed a fowl on fodder or a horse on
chicken food. but we expect to develo,,
an artist or an artisan or scientist
or an engineer on pretty much the
same kind of mental provender.
The great impulse of hum an progress
is not reason, but instinct. Reason
does not really get in it's best work
when it has become instinct. The ap-
proximately normal person is born
with a prediSpoSition to certain sorts
of usefulness. To develop that predis-
position is to render society a service
to kill it is racial suicide. We come by
our visions and our dreams honestly.
They are the natural and accurate
forecasts of our proper achievements.
They are the aspiring souls of our an
cestors clamoring for a chance to be-
come manifest in wood and steel and
colors and words and deeds. They are
the shadows of mighty heritages come
down to us from the dead who would
rise again in works meet for human
service. And those that we do not
kill with sneers-having forgotten the
days when we. too, dreamed and
a spired-we kill by the brutal admins
tering of the thing that we call educa-
ton or experience. Thus each genera
ton robs itself of it's birthright and
does its little pitiful best to make it's
choicest like unto it's mediocres. In a
general way, it succeeds.
The poet, the painter, the novelist, |
the engineer, the scientist, the archi-
tect-bui1ders and artists and dream
ers all-has yet to live who has had
his full share of human sympathy or
more than half a chance to survive |
the forcible feeding of the schools
For the most part, we have only |
begun to awaken to the unspeakable !
barbarism of coping up the morality, |
and mentally defective with !
the normal child. Tomorrow we may
realize the enormity of that other very |
common crime against nature which |
condemns the child with mechanical |
turn and the budding artists to trans !
late their visions into a common me- |
dunn which defeats the aims of both.
is wonderful word. Per-
hapS it will bring a generation so good t
at remembering and so keen in SYM
pathy that it will neither sneer at the
dreams of youth nor cruelty them
upon the cross of miseducation.-l
1913, by the Mcclure News
paper Syndicate.)