The Richmond palladium and sun-telegram. [volume] (Richmond, Ind.) 1907-1939, 1914-10-08
Applying Efficiency Principles to Educating Children
A Noted Efficiency Expert Outlines the Weak
Spots of Our School System, and Suggests Sci
entific Business Methods to Get Full Value for
the 5000, 000, 900 Spent Yearly on Our Boys
and Girls
By j. GeOrde Frederick.
BY j. George Frederick,

vHE first thing that a man of efficiency
education notices after examining
present-day education is how very much
It is like the condition OF q factory before
efficiency has been introduced
These are the points Of Similarity
G) The pupils like the workers in the In
efficient factory. are treated in mass. without
reference to individual differences.
ca The responsibility for results Is placed
on the pupil and not upon the teacher-just as
in the inefficient factory, where responsibility
is placed upon the workman rather than upon
the foreman, where it scientifically belongs.
CD That there is an effort in the school, as
In the inefficient factory, to get monotonous'
ly similar product, instead of great encourage-
ment for individual initiative and progressive
organization and development.
Here are three significant parallels which
demonstrate from new angle the now widely
accepted need for better educational methods.
Frankly, the ineffciency of modern educa-
ton is something to stir the blood of any man
or woman who thinks.
Considering the six hundred million dollars
spent on education each year "a larger sum
than any other nation spends), and the obvious
and universally inadequate results from 1t. is
surely call to immediate action.
The most serious evidence of the inefficiency
OF present-day education (if any one needs
such evidence) is the fact that in office and
factory, where the finished products of the
schools appear to start the actual work of life
1t Is necessary to do very great deal OF un-
leor~tn0-building up of discipline, training
into concentration, accuracy OF observation and
other qualities which schools are supposed to
have developed. before such raw material is
really worth anything.
AS a wellknown business man said to mo
recently: Il am really conducting free school
in my office and pay the pupils while they are
learning! l am overjoyed when l find only one
young man or woman in twenty who has the
qualities which proper school training could
give them as we'll better than I. The rest
Of the twenty I am obliged to make efficient
At my own expense and teach them about the
same studies they were supposed to get in
school"
1t is also pitiful how some of the most sim.
pie but vital conditions in pupils
looked and the same uniform, mechanical rou.
tine forced down their threats. In my office
found in tears one day a girl who was folding
and enclosing circulars, together with
9th er girls. The office manager had scolded
1er for not getting nearly many finished
he other girls. Just little observation proved
The fact that the girls eyes defective
and that she things in blurred way and
could not possibly do the regular days work.
yle otherwise intelligent but had been
, roken in spirit and set back ten years be.
luse some one as far back as the fourth grade
Il school had failed to observe the girls need
o: optical attention. Other girls l have found
are deficient in their muscular coordination,
a thing which little special training can
remedy and thus have their school and bust.
ness careers and their entire life affected