p. 155 | CUBAN TEACHERS

Training-School Pub. Ass'n, Ltd. · Battle Creek, Michigan · May 1900

FromTraining School Advocate, Vol. 2, No. 5.

CUBAN TEACHERS.

The United States wishes to Americanize the Cubans, and it has been decided that the quickest and surest way to do so is to work through the schools. The plan is said to have originated with Alexis E. Frye, the superintendent of the Havana schools. Mr. Frye was a former student of Harvard, and has been making arrangements for a thousand or more Cuban teachers to take a course in the Harvard Summer School. “President Eliot was communicated with,” says the editor of the Normal Instructor, “and he immediately notified Superintendent Frye that the Summer School would receive all the Cuban teachers that it might be considered advisable to send, with no charge for tuition. Other expenses will be charged against the Cuban school fund.”

The editor comments as follows: “The broadening and deepening of the minds of the teachers which will follow this experience must have a tremendous influence on Cuba’s school children, and will do more to make the inhabitants of every Cuban hamlet acquainted with the United States and its people than anything else short of sending all the children themselves here. But the projectors of this really notable scheme should keep in mind that it is the elementary schools and their pupils that are to be reached, and that too much ‘junket’ and ‘university’ might not give the most practical benefit.”

Is there not danger that the children of the world will prove themselves wiser in their generations than the Christians? When American ideas are sought for in Cuba, school teachers are sent to America to imbibe our customs, so that they can give them to the Cuban children. Do Christian parents manifest the same anxiety that their children shall be trained in Christian principles?

Again, our churches have been told repeatedly that young people should be sent to our training-schools to receive a preparation to work. Are they to-day selecting young people who are competent to teach, and giving them the necessary training in the principles of Christian education? If not, why not?