Good Motives but Bad Methods in Education
IN The Delineator for February a writer points out some disappointments in education which both parents and children ought to consider. We quote from the excellent article the following of a father who was a hard-working printer, laboring to give his daughter an education: “ ‘You see,’ he said simply, ‘my girl graduated from college two years ago. When she was a baby in her cradle, her mother and I used to sit beside her and say to each other, “Now she shall have what we didn’t get!” So we raked and scraped, we did without, and we kept that plan in mind until she had graduated from the high school. Then we had saved enough to send her to college. She is teaching now, and they say she is the best teacher in that county.’ “No one could see the light in those earnest eyes or hear the tremor in that earnest voice without a lump in the throat, and the heartfelt hope that the girl, wherever she might be, would make good, in complete allegiance to the home ties, the life-long sacrifice. “But here, as we all know, the problem is a serious one. Out of the common home with its meager furnishings, bought by the plodding toil of both father and mother, the girl goes to her college life, so foreign to her earlier experiences. Unless she is very wise and unusually well disciplined, she comes to set a false worth upon all that she wins through the college associations, and to underestimate the virtues which have been won by the very life of toil, of sacrifice, from which she is escaping. She does not realize that in many ways her father and mother are educated far beyond her; she does not realize that their toil and sacrifice have won out of the farm, out of the routine which was their daily portion, a strength, a dignity, a virtue which she has yet to win. “The parents also overestimate the advantage of this life which is foreign to them; and so the daughter often comes back from college virtually estranged from the home, a gulf having been fixed by this very sacrifice. If she is wise and womanly, and has been trained to consider essential values, she ought to reenforce the home life and to bring a generous blessing with her when she returns from college. But if she sees only the awkwardness, hears only the doubtful grammar, deplores lack of convention, and fails to realize the greater virtues which abide in the home, the gift of the father and mother simply results in the loss of the daughter.”