1254 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



Dec. 1 



Mr. Arnold touched the secret of our power. 

 We are the wonder of modern times to Europeans. 

 Democracy to a European is a mob government, 

 and yet we have attained heights of power and 

 glory as a nation. We have stood the strain over 

 one hundred years, the shock of the bloodiest 

 civil war since the morning of creation. Today our 

 prosperity is to them a constant source of amaze- 

 tr.ent. The secret of it all is that our fathers built 

 the republic on free boys, free brains, free libraries 

 and free schools. When our fathers wanted to make 

 the voter a Christian they founded a free church; 

 when they wanted to make a man a patriot they 

 gave him his political rights and a share in the 

 government; to make him a scholar they founded 

 a free school, the academy, and the college. And 

 this is M'hy, when the new emigrants have come by 

 the millions with their note of anarchy, with their 

 hatred of all government in the state, with their 

 apposition to ecclesiasticism in the church, they 

 have been transformed into patriots and citizens of 

 good quality — the strong and useful leaders in the 

 city and state and national life. 



Not less important is education in the accumula- 

 tion of wealth. Give a thousand dollars to your 

 boy and he can soon spend it; but he can never 

 spend a thousand dollars given to him in an educa- 

 tion. The interest of a thousand dollars is $60 

 per year; but the difference in position which two or 

 three years of schooling will give to a boy is worth 

 anywhere from $300 to $1,000 a year. Investments 

 which pay from 33 to 100 percent are not common; 

 education is such an investment. A liberal educa- 

 tion equips a man for one hundred chances. Fail- 

 ing to open one door he has the keys to ninety-nine 

 more. Well-educated men rarely starve, and rarely 

 go to the poorhouse. There are not many high 

 school graduates among the beggars and paupers 

 and tramps of the country. Money in the educa- 

 tion of a child is a good investment. 



Education contributes to the wealth of a nation, 

 fgnorance ruined the soil of Palestine and the hill- 

 sides of New England. Ignorance has wasted the 

 lumber of Our great forests. Ignorance brought 

 pestilence through the lack of the principles of 

 sanitation. See the loss of life in our great epi- 

 demics. Education in farming has increased the 

 production so that we raise more wheat per acre in 

 Ohio today than we did in the day when the soil 

 was rich in its virgin conditions. Looking back to 

 the time before the Civil War we see that the South 

 was growing poorer, and the North was growing rich- 

 er and richer. Slave labor represented ignorant labor. 

 The slave bought no newspaper, no books; his ig- 

 norance starved the press; he had one coat and 

 one pair of trousers; he had no amusements; he 

 had no use for the sewing machine, the cottage 

 organ, nor any of the comforts of life, and so there 

 was no need for manufacturing towns. Free labor 

 is educated labor. Good workmen are usually good 

 buyers; they hunger for beauty, friendship, hos- 

 pitality and comforts, and th«se develop new needs 

 and people become prosperous by leaps and by 

 bounds Rudyard Kipling paid two cents for paper, 

 ink and pen; he made some marks upon the paper 

 and called them the "Recessional." He sold it to 

 the London Times for $2,000. The raw material 

 cost two cents; the rest was education and training. 



The story went the rounds of the papers a few 

 years ago of a machine which broke down. The 

 owners sent to the city for a specialist, who re- 

 paired the broken machine in thirty minutes. He 

 charged them $50.50. They asked him what the fifty 

 cents was for, and he replied, "It was for fixing 

 the machine, and the $50 was for knowing how to 

 do it." There is a cave of diamonds, and knowl- 

 edge finds the path to that cave; therefore, 

 "with all thy getting get understanding." 

 n. The helpful relations of the home to the schools 

 requires the home to magnify and appreciate 

 the work of the teachers. 



The essence of all criticism should be helpful- 

 ness. Thoughtless and useless criticism is cheap. 

 A fakir dentist stood upon the streets of our town 

 a few weeks ago, a man who could not make his 

 living for more than tw» days in any town at a 

 time, and who, as a preface to the sale of his 

 quackery at enormous prices, which some of you 

 bought, he attacked schools, all professions, gov- 

 ernment, religion, and wound up with the astound- 

 ing statement that he "would not allow his boy 



to graduate in a high school, because he did not 

 want him to be a blot on civilization, and anyway, 

 that ninetecn-twentieths of all that we know is 

 false." And the thoughtless ones laughed. A few 

 years ago a prominent divine, whose sermons were 

 published in many of the dailies tkrough the coun- 

 try, preached a sermon which was widely circulated, 

 on the cramming, crowding, stuffing and jamming of 

 a child's intellect, and, in connection with a lot of 

 other baseless utterances, said: 



"Girls ten years of age studying algebra; boys twelve 

 years of age racking their brain over trigonometry; 

 children unacquainted with their mother tongue 

 crying over their French, German, and Latin les- 

 sens; all the vivacity of their nature beaten out of 

 them by the heavy beetle of a Greek lexicon. And 

 you doctor them for this and you give them a little 

 of that medicine for something else, and you won- 

 der what is the matter with them. I will tell you 

 what is the matter with them. They are finishing 

 their education. 



"In my parish in Philadelphia a little child was 

 so pushed at school that she was thrown into a 

 fever, and in her dying delirium all night long she 

 was trying to recite the multiplication table. In 

 my boyhood home I remember that in our class at 

 school there was one lad who knew more than all 

 the rest of us put together. If we were fast in 

 our arithmetic he extricated us. When we stood 

 up for the spelling class, he was almost always at 

 the head of the class. Visitors came to his fa- 

 ther's house, and he was almost always brought 

 out as a prodigy. At eighteen years of age he was 

 an idiot. He lived ten years an idiot, and died 

 an idiot, not knowing his right hand from his left, 

 or day from night. The parents and the teachers 

 made him an idiot.' 



The only trouble with that utterance is that every 

 word of it is false. If the case of the idiot cited 

 was correctly diagnosed, it was not the school 

 system nor the teacher that ought to be indicted, 

 but the father and the mother. We are not war- 

 ranted in forming general conclusions from specific 

 instances. 



If a teacher is to be held responsible for a 

 knowledge of each_ child's condition and capacity 

 she must have omniscience. The curriculum of the 

 schools is not made by teacher, superintendent nor 

 by the school board only indirectly. It is the re- 

 sult of an observation over a wide area of terri- 

 tory, and is adapted to the mind of the average 

 child. If, because of hereditary tendencies, or of 

 sickness or of rapid development, your child is not 

 able to cope with the studies of her class, what is 

 a parent for if not to guide in such a case? 



To hear soine criticise the schools, one would 

 think that the children were always angelic and 

 the teachers were always diabolic. Strange how we 

 are prejudiced in favor of our own children! 

 how to us, all virtue and excellency run m our 

 own families. 



I believe it is not customary to interrupt 

 a minister in the midst of his sermon; but I 

 am sure my dear brother will excuse me if 

 I ask him to wait a bit and let me add em- 

 phasis to his further remarks as follows: 



You Ijave the only boy that amounts to much in the 

 world — so have I. His hair doesn't look much like mine, 

 but he has more of it; his eyes are not the color of mine, 

 but his caught the blue out of the sky as he came 

 through: his face is not shaped like mine, but he smiles 

 twice where I smile once; and when the dimples conie 

 in his face it makes one think of the angels; and he is 

 smart. He knows just when to go to sleep and when to 

 wake up, and that is more than you can say of your 

 child. If he continues to improve in four years as he 

 has in two I shall want the school-board to employ 

 Harper to teach him. That's the way I am tempted to 

 feel about my boy— and there are others. You think 

 that nonsense ? There is more sense than otherwise in 

 that description. 



After Mr. Hill had made the above re- 

 mark he paused in his sermon, and a pecu- 

 liar smile lit up his face that the audience 

 had learned by past experience always pre- 

 faces some bit of pleasantry. He pointed 

 his thumb toward himself, and then went 



