One Boy's Opinion by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 15, 1883

One Boy's Opinion.

By Editor

The following letter to the N. Y. Herald may be suggestive to some parents and teachers. We are happy to know that there are schools where the tread-mill, cramming system is not in vogue:—

"I am a German boy who goes to a public school. I find the studies not too difficult to master, but I do not get time to master them, and what education I have received during the last two years consists only of a jumble of ideas about geography, arithmetic, spelling, history, grammar, etc. I feel that these two years' education will benefit me as much in after life as my present ideas amount to about the comet. If I had time to deliberate I could master these school studies, but I have heard that lawyers and judges sometimes study a whole month attempting to master and understand the meaning of a single sentence in a book, and a poor youth like me should not, I think, be considered so dumb because I cannot master a dozen or more pages of all kinds of stuff in a few hours. An old man, who had been through college, told me the other day that if I attempted to remember all the rivers in the world and how long they were, and all the cities in the world and the number of their inhabitants, I might as well try and remember nothing else as long as I lived, for I would have to keep awake at night lest I might lose some of the names and numbers. Well, this is the kind of knowledge I have been trying to obtain for two years past, together with rules of grammar, arithmetic, etc., to learn by heart, without understanding the application of any of them. Why, I could repeat the twenty-eighth rule in a grammar used by us to the old gentleman I refer to, but he only laughed and asked me to write a sentence so as to apply the rule. I couldn't apply it until he took half an hour to show me what the general idea was although he did not seem to know anything about a rule. I would like to ask you what good my education will be likely to do me. Do you think it will fit me for business or professional life? This kind of school business makes a boy who thinks feel that he is either a fool or that somebody else is."