A TALE OF TWO BOYS

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jun 4, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 23.

A TALE OF TWO BOYS.

The inexcusable folly of allowing young children to be ground through the merciless mill of modern educational methods, regardless of the consequences to them, is well illustrated by the following article from a Western mother in the February Ladies' Home Journal. There are teachers who seemingly forget that a child's health is of more value to it than any amount of learning it may acquire. And yet oftentimes the teacher is an unwilling partner in the wrong. The fault lies farther back. It is in the system which the teacher is required to carry through. The article speaks for itself:—

“When I was first married, we lived in a Western city. Another young couple occupied the next house to ours. Both husband and wife taught in a public school. Education, they declared, was almost dead in C——. Certainly they spared no effort to bring it to life again. They set a high standard in their school, and drove and dragged and goaded the children on to reach it. It did not matter how dull by nature a boy was, or how sickly, he was given the same tasks as the cleverest pupils in the school. All day long this cramming process went on: commit and recite, commit and recite. There was too much to learn to explain anything to the poor little wretches. No time for understanding. Commit and recite, day in and day out. When school was over, they carried home a load of books and pored over them half the night.

“They had a boy, Johnnie, just the age of our Godfrey. He was a lean, bloodless child, with a curved back, and weak, light eyes, staring through spectacles. His father determined that he should be an example to the school. He worked him mercilessly. He could read at four, was in Algebra at nine, and construing Cicero at eleven. The boy had a big active brain, and loved the work. His father coached him every night. ‘Work never hurt any brain,’ the father would brag. I don't know about that, but it is certain that it hurt the rest of Johnnie's neglected body. Stomach, muscles, heart, and nerves all broke down. He dwindled every year. At fourteen he looked like a boy of ten. But his father drove the harder. ‘I mean him to enter the junior class of Princeton at fifteen,’ he would say. ‘John never disappointed me. He has been a leader in the school for three years.’

“And poor Johnnie, with his watery eyes and white cheeks, went to work harder than ever. One day he fainted in school. He was ill for months, and then the doctors ordered him to go to a farm, live out of doors, and not open a book for two years. His brain gave way first. He lost his memory, and what grieved the father most, he loathed the sight of a book. At the mention of lessons, he would cry and mutter for hours; and in two years the poor child went to his grave.

“I meant to tell you about our Godfrey. He wasn't bright with books, and we would not urge him. Johnnie's father scolded. But we made a farmer of him, and he is now a big, jolly fellow, with boys of his own, and clever enough to be in the legislature. He knows neither Greek nor mathematics. But he is here.”