IS THE PRESENT EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM A SUCCESS AS A CHARACTER BUILDER?
By Editor
This is a serious question, worthy of serious consideration. Many educators believe that it is. Others frankly confess its defects. Measured by what State schools alone should seek to do,—develop good citizens,—increasing crime, lawlessness, and vice among the youth do not warrant the claim. Measured by a Christian standard, it can not be otherwise than failure, for Christian education is not, nor can it be, the work of the State. The object of this writing, however, is to let others speak rather than the writer. First of all, we can do but little better than to call attention to an article entitled "A National Crime at the Feet of American Parents," by Mr. Edward Bok, in the Ladies' Home Journal for January, 1900. The whole article should be read; we have not space for it here. In Mr. Bok's arraignment of the system, he makes, he says, "no attack on the teachers of this country, for I yield to no one in my admiration of the work which these noble men and women are doing. And from no class, I venture to say, will these words elicit a stronger approval." "Special systems of 'marks,' which amount to prizes, are started, serving only to overstimulate the preternaturally bright child, who needs relaxation most of all, and to discourage the child who happens to be below the average of intelligence. It is cramming, cramming, cramming! A certain amount of 'ground must be gone over,' as it is usually called. Whether the child is physically able to work the 'ground,' does not enter into the question. And we do not stop even there; the poor children are compelled to carry home a pile of books to study, usually after supper, and just before going to bed. And that is about the most barbarous part of the whole system." Some of the results of the system he gives in his first paragraph, as follows:— "Do American men and women realize that in five cities of our country alone there were during the last school term over sixteen thousand children between the ages of eight and fourteen taken out of the public schools because their nervous systems were wrecked, and their minds were incapable of going on any further in the infernal cramming system which exists to-day in our schools? And these sixteen thousand helpless little wrecks are simply the children we know about. Conservative medical men who have given their lives to the study of children, place the number whose health is shattered by overstudy at more than fifty thousand each year. It is putting the truth mildly to state that of all American institutions that which deals with the public education of our children is at once the most faulty, the most unintelligent, and the most cruel." Here is another word on the moral side, the result of a popular education, quoted by Dr. Lyman Abbott, in a sermon delivered before Harvard University students:— "I was brought up in an orthodox circle. My mother was a devout believer. I learned from her the Christian creed and the Christian Bible. I learned to pray; I had no doubts. I began my studies, and soon came to the conclusion that the world was not made in six days. Presently I discovered that man had been on the earth more than six thousand years. Then I reached the conclusion that he had come from the lower order of animals. Then I discovered that language was not broken up at the tower of Babel. I found reason to doubt one after another of the so-called miracles of the Bible, until, at last, my faith is all gone. I do not know what I believe about the Bible, about myself. I do not even know whether I am immortal, or whether there is a God. O, that I could go back to the simple faith of my childhood! But I can not." There are thousands of others making the same wreck of faith to-day in religious as well as State schools.