BUILD FIRMLY THE FOUNDATION
In the Chicago Times-Herald of February 12 there was an editorial entitled, “School Reforms Must Begin at the Bottom,” in which it was said that the speeches made at the banquet of the Merchants’ Club, held a short time before, were, in fact, “an indictment of the entire public school system in this city. It is true that the addresses were intended as strictures upon the scope and quality of the high school work. It was pointed out that our high school graduates seemed to be utterly lacking in the training necessary to fit them for any kind of a business career. Mr. Shedd deplored the manifest ‘professional’ tendency of the high school instruction, which seemed to imbue the student with the idea that only the ‘professions’ were worth striving for, while Mr. Farwell frankly stated that the best employees secured by his firm were ‘graduates of country high schools. They get outside training in ability to construct and to accomplish, which the city high school boys do not have.’ “But to discover the sources of the acknowledged deficiencies of our high school graduates one must go further back than the high schools. . . . If a young man is not fitted for the ordinary requirements of business when he gets through the highest grammar grade, the common school system is a failure. The higher school, with its courses in Latin and rhetoric and chemistry and geometry, can not be expected to supply the essential elements of a business training unless it is to be converted into a ‘commercial school.’ The truth of the matter is, There is no thoroughness in most of the work done in the lower grades of the Chicago public school system. Incompetency, shiftlessness, indifference, and incapacity are discernible on every hand. . . . The unfitness of hundreds of the teachers is a matter of such common knowledge and comment as to constitute a scandal and a reproach to the city. . . . No use beginning at the top while the foundations are crumbling.” A correspondent wrote to the editor (issue of February 15), describing his experience in a school, thus: “I took about a dozen of the older boys and gave them pens and paper, and dictated a letter which I had written. I then pinned my letter upon the wall, and had the boys each go to the copy and mark the errors upon his written sheet. It was a short letter. This test revealed the fact of the total failure of these letter writers to follow me. The essentials named were atrociously inaccurate. Some of the letters were out of form, and contained as high as sixteen errors! How do you account for it?” And to this the editor of the Times-Herald replies, in the following forceful and sensible sentences: “How account for it? Our correspondent has only to visit any one of the grade schools in Chicago to find the solution of his conundrum. “Or if he can get hold of a programme of the meeting of the National Educational Association to be held here February 26, 27, and 28 next, he will perceive the wherefore of the phenomenon of inaccuracy of our present school system in the essentials of education. This is to be a gathering of school superintendents from all over the country, and the list of subjects for discussion proves that instead of a prayerful consideration of the ways and means of saving the children of the republic from ignorance of reading, writing, spelling, and ciphering, its members will devote themselves principally to psychology, physiology, and manual training. Not until the afternoon of Thursday, February 28, when the meeting is in the throes of dissolution, do the members get down to a discussion of ‘A Standard Course of Study for Elementary Schools in Cities,’ and ‘Some Aspects’ of Public School Training.” “Instead of setting an example of accuracy in its ‘Programme,’ the National Educational Association starts out by spelling that word after the bob-tailed fashion of the Amalgamated Society of Faddists. A few years ago there was quite a rage for such a spelling. But the common sense of the English-speaking race asserted itself in favor of etymological accuracy. According to Skeats, a great authority with the philologists, the word found its way into English from the French, although the Latin form ‘programma’ appeared in Philips’s New World of Words as early as 1706. It came originally from Greek ‘programma,’ a public notice in writing. “The programme also spells through ‘thru,’ although this word is merely a variation of thorough, which the spelling reformers with delightful inconsistency spell ‘thoro,’ as if the two words were not of common origin. Etymological consistency is a jewel they spit upon. “Of course this gathering of experts will discuss the following proposition:— “Would these young people (prospective teachers) catch the spirit of teaching and gain valuable APPERCEPTIVE material for their broader training-school course?” “No discussion of modern pedagogy is genuine without the word ‘apperceptive’ blown into it with all the self-consciousness of psychological superiority. “In the meantime the children of the republic are being robbed of the alphabet, multiplication table, and the commonest rules of syntax. The course of study in the elementary schools is so top-lofty that it is bound to come down with a crash.” Any one who himself understands the fundamentals of schooling can verify for himself the truth thus stated by the Times-Herald, by merely asking the pupils, or the teachers, in any school, and especially in the high schools and colleges, to spell some common words; to read a page of matter; or to write a common letter, an item, or a short article. That reform in education will be the most successful, and the most quickly successful, that recognizes this truth so emphasized by the Times-Herald; and137that, in recognition of this truth, begins at the foundations, and builds only by a thorough teaching in the fundamentals.