Oxford eagle. (Oxford, Lafayette Co., Miss.) 1876-current, 1921-10-27
(By P. L. Rainwater; Supt. Oxford
City Schools.)

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Before there can be any intelli-
gent discussion as to the province of
the home, the school, and the church
in education, it is necessary that we
should have an understanding of what
education really is. Education is
preparation to live completely. Ed
ucation is the full and harmonious
development of all the powers of
the child--physical, mental, and moral.
Unfortunately this view of educa-
ton is not taken by the people at
large. Most men and women, and
certainly all children, are under the
delusion that education is "going to
school," To them the chief pur-
pose of schooling is to cram the
child and the youth with facts which
may be secreted again in the process
of an examination, the sole aim of
such examination being to push the
child into the next grade or into col
lege. In the true sense education
IS nothing of the sort. Real educa-
ton is simply the sum-total of the
physical, intellectual and moral
forces which, acting and reacting up
On you and me, thereby create what
we call our characters.
Growth is the law of all living
things. Then follow, just as ineyi-
tably and just as naturally decay
and death. But there must always
oe movement. If that movement is
not forward it must be backward.
Nothing in nature can stand still. In
mankind the growth which shapes
all later progress takes place be-
tween birth, and roughly speaking,
twenty-one. In this period the main
currents of life. are determined, and
the forming influences exert their
greatest force. In this time there
fore the work of education must be
carried on. To be sound, education,
whether carried on in the home, the
school or the church, must follow
the laws of all organic growth. 1t
must expand not repress the child;
it must lead, not force him; it must
develop him towards complete ripe
ness. Education in short must be a
steady progress of opening the indi-
vidual from within. not of shaping
him from without.
Moreover all physical growth, in
man, is simply a development from
the simplest beginnings, all mental
growth is but an enlargement of the
infants first perceptions, all moral
growth is strengthening of the first
exercise of the childish will. The ath-
lete, n his physical perfection, is no.
thing more than the pulling infant plus
the milk and meat, the water and the
air and the exercise of a quarter of a
century. The scholar, dealing with
the most abstruse problems, has the
same brain that, by associating GER
tain vague sensations, produced the
baby's first thought. The hero, whose
moral force carries him through a
seemingly impossible crisis, started
with will power no stronger or bet
ter than that common to infancy. Each
of these men, in thousand ways, has
been educated out of the helplessness
of babyhood up to the physical, men
tai, and moral power of efficient man
hood.
Education then has triple work to
do; to build up the body, to feed and
train the mind, to develop, strengthen
and direct the will. With these three
detectives, teaching, whether carried
on in the home, in the school, in the
church, must increasingly concern it.
self. But the schools under our pres
ent system have oversight of the
child during very short part of his
waking hours. If child goes to
school every day from his seventh to
his fifteenth year, he gets under best
conditions about eight thousand hours
of schooling; while his waking hours
from birth to his fifteenth year, are
approximately eighty thousand. One
tenth of his time in the schoolroom!
But during the remaining nine tenths,
he is nevertheless at school, his teach
er being the household, his street
companions, and all of his experiences
which, summed up, we call his environ
ment. And it cannot be too often re-
peated that, for that nine tenths, the
home is directly and entirely respon-
sible.
In this connection / am constrained
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