The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1914-07-17
1rURDEsT1R AS PEDAGoG.
stxangest school In the World in
 DTaryland Prison.

A
 The stFangest school in the world, writes Bruce Barton. in Collier q Weekly, is at the bottom of a long flight of steps in the Maryland state penitentiary. Not the fact that ft is in q penitentiary makes it strange not the long row. of zvl1itewashed cells that almost touch the desk. nor the blue coated guard who occupies the ex- treme rear seat There are schools in other penitenttaTiess some of them with long. honorable histories. But the strangest school is different in it's teachers. it's pupils. it's methods, and it's results.
 There are 112 pupils. 1e teachers and the average axe of pupils and teachers together is 33 1-3 years. One Of the teachers is a murderer doing life: one is a highway robber doing 20 years; one is a bigamist; one a forger; and only the warden knows what the others were or did to bring them there. Tn one class of eight scholars met two bteamists. a murder, a bur g1ar, and one who had burned down a store. The baby of the school is barely turned 21, hardly more than a boy: the eldest is 72, Altogether the school constitutes nearly a third Of the whole population of the prison and not a man of the whole 112 scholars now enrolled could read a daily paper or write his own name.
 They hled in quickly at the begin ming of the session, as though eager to be at their books and when looked around there was not one vacant seat. They were of all types. young fresh looking lads, with the bloom of health on their checks old men on whose faces the whitesvashed walls of the prison had cast it's pale fixed shad- osvs; men who held their heads high and men who turned their faces from you as they passed; men with hope stfn strong in their eyes and dogged, almost sulIen, men: white men and black men: men who would pass out into the world for new lease Of life, and men who had ceased long ago even to dream of the world. With only few preIiminaries the teacher wrote on a blackboard the lessons that were to occupy this session, and the 112 twisted their stiff fingers clunnsily about their pencils and bent their unuscIed backs to write.
 s.Use each one of these words in a sentence teacher had written:
 ssobedience. bottom, protection. health, family. laugh z
 walked in and out among the great straining bodies and watched them write. No breadth of thought or nicety Of expression was here, but in almost every sentence one might read something that revealed the wrf- fereS+ own paIher1cs SlaTVed e2ApeE1SflSe-
 s.I am obedience to the worden in this place. wrote one bulky highway man, fashioring each letter with infin- ite exertion Until the school started he had never lived through a month in the prison without being summoned before the warden for discipline; but for six months now he has been lobe dtence''
 Most men are good at the bottom of their harts,'--tflis from a 1ifer in for murder; and i've are protection by the warden in this pface''-frorn a cIean-1ooking young fellow whose six months of enforced abstinence have pretty thoroughly removed the thirst for liquor that brought him to dis grace.
 My family has 2, pritty hard time. One could well believe it as he looked back of the writing to the shrqnken form of the negro writer.
 At the back of the room stopped moment to glance over the shoulder of tired-faced little pfckpocket, whose hunched shoulders seemed to have shrunk in upon themselves un- der the weary burden of life. laughed at a monkey" he had writ ten. and then added, letter by letter. s.tfree years ago. And felt sudden ly a great pity for the poor pickpocket in whose life laughs had been so rare a blessing that he remembered their very number and the year in which each had come