A GRAVE RESPONSIBILITY by S.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · May 21, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 21.

A GRAVE RESPONSIBILITY.

By S.

THERE are continually coming to our attention illustrations of the pitiless struggle between the present educational system and the weak constitutions of the many children who ought never to be required to master, in the allotted time, all that the educational course demands. One has said that “the world is going university mad;” and with the hundreds of children that are offered every year on the altar of the present educational system, it certainly looks as if the world was running in that direction. We have nothing to say against the acquirement or possession of a good education. Good education is a blessing. The educated mind, with the same degree of spirituality, will accomplish more for God than the mind which is not educated. But the physical and spiritual welfare of the children should be a matter of far greater consideration than the acquirement of a specific amount of book learning in a specified length of time. The pitiful little wrecks that are strewn along the wake of that course ought to be enough to settle in every parent's mind what his duty is in reference to the matter. The fact that a certain course is marked out, and that many children accomplish it without apparent injury to themselves, is no excuse for any parent allowing his child to wreck its life in the attempt to master the task. But the ambitious parent who drives a child through the course at the sacrifice of health is guilty before God.

The following by a writer in the Ladies' Home Journal will illustrate the terrible result of this criminal procedure:—

A few years ago a family, whom I shall miscall Woolman, lived close by. Like many of their neighbors, they were poor, ambitious, aspiring folk. But the Woolmans had the pride of blood. It made them hopeful and also barred the women out from any but “genteel” employments.

The eldest child was a dull girl. Her brain was abnormally weak and slow moving. But she was neat, gentle, and affectionate, and she had plenty of common sense. She would have made an ideal nursemaid or chambermaid or waitress, or could have been trained into a capable housekeeper. But these occupations in the Woolman code were servile. Neither did it comport with the dignity of their ancestry that she should become a saleswoman or a stenographer.

Teaching was the only work suitable for women of that family. Polly was sent to the public school, and for years plodded her slow, tearful way until she was pushed and dragged into the Normal Department. Then began an actual struggle for life. Before her was a certain enormous amount to be memorized, a certain number of questions to be answered with some degree of intelligence in order to “pass” and become a teacher.

She had neither the memory nor the intelligence to do this. It was as if you should set a row of hurdles before a man without legs and tell him to jump them or die. She worked desperately all winter long—teachers drove, her father threatened, her mother wept. She went up to her examinations, and—failed.

Polly changed strangely; she became pale, and she had a hacking cough. Her doctor remonstrated with her parents; but their pride was kindled. “The Woolmans always had brains. What other girls did, she could do. Polly should try again.” She did try again through all of that year. Her father used to tell how she worked all night with ice to her head, taking black coffee and bromides to keep her awake.

“I know she'll do it yet,” her father bragged. She did do it, and passed her next examination. Then came headache, fever, stupor. Her mother raved wildly of typhoid, of “galloping consumption,” but the doctor told her nothing. To others he said, “The girl's vitality is exhausted. In her condition any ailment could bring death. Slow murder has been going on for four years.”

I can show you Polly's grave in the cemetery.

Life is more important than the deepest philosophy; health is more precious than the problems of Euclid or the declensions of Greek and Latin; and the full, symmetrical, perfect development of an entire human life is of infinitely greater worth than all the mythologies and aphorisms of the ancients, or the heaped-up and pressed-down wisdom of modern economics, psychology, and commercialism. Let the child and the man be educated; but never permit education to become the shroud or the grave that will hide away from you the young lives entrusted to your keeping.