The daily Nome industrial worker., 1916-04-05

without tremendous application ,and desperate earnestncss, and that these must be guided by intclligen, teachers whose work must be some thing moro than routine and whose discipline something other than the rurposeless regulations which muGI be unintell:gently obcyed because they arc regulations.
 The value of learning another language than our own is precisely the same as that of learning the tongue we speak, and must have pathological basis, assisting us in de cyphering the puzzling elements of history and the economic basis upon which history is founded.
 Mentioning history we do not mean that grotesque romance which passes muster as such in the schools, wherein great men, important batt- les and national activities are allied with innumerablc number of dates | tending to confuse confusion and ln- crease bewilderment. We mean the actual story of the people; how they lived, what they thought, why they acted in that process of human &C., tivity that the scribes have recorded l for us.
 On the other hand, admitting the value of strictly scientific educa- the belief that a knowledge of the chemical elements or ordinary che mical reactions, smattcring of bo- tany, physiology or biology is going 1 to improve us a single bit. We are not educated in the strict sense or the term unless we understand the rela tion of those sciences to our owr lives, and they are of actual assist ance to us in determining our con- duct so that we can adjust ourselves and our actions to the natural order of things and in compliance with the laws of health and prudence and social inter-relations.
 Education is only the means to the end of living fuller and pet ter existence. For the vast majority lit has no relation whatever to this, the only end. Where 1t serves its purpose in the workshop, In the i l. in iS tuted to the advancement of an other instead of ourselves.
 ! For most of us however our edu cation in the truest sense of the term begins after we leave schooi. Experience is the greatest teacher and experience is merely the reflex of a mans environment upon his nature.
 Lots of sluSh is written about schools building character and so forth. But all the schools cal do is to allow a mans character to un- told itself, remembering that char acter depends upon heredity and present time environment.
 The schools don't lend much aid towards the building up of charaoter They allow too little initiative. And the examples some teachers give Is anything but conducive to such de- velocment.
 The great trouble with the public school system is that it measures every individual with the same yard stick. It prods him with the same lessons and compels him to read the same text books, professors acc"mo- datingly changing tho latter to acco- modate the publications from year to year of the book trust. The woful lack of system in text books is a wonderful joke, did one not understand the commercial ele- ments that have forced this upon the country for their own profit. From year to year and from school to school we find an endless variety of pedagogues making effort to teach Latin or Greek or history or gram mar some new way, with little or no progress being made and certain ly no individual advancement result ing therefrom.
 The art of teaching, let it be said, does not consist in assisting brilh- ant students to greater brilliancy, but in inspiring backward students to greater effort towards improve ment. Needless to say the art of teaching is in most of the public schools a lost art and teachers bless