Prizes in Schools by Editor

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA · Sep 11, 1879

Prizes in Schools.

By Editor

The Northwestern Advocate has a good editorial in which the custom of awarding prizes for excelling in certain branches in study is condemned. The editor well says that those who receive the prize and those who fail to receive it are injured. The rivalry is stimulated by an unhealthy motive. It is offered for excelling in some particular study; special labor is bestowed on that branch, and others are neglected. Our contemporary says:—

“The prize is a species of gambling; success for one by the failure, the calamity, of several. There is a large element of chance in it, for the judgment of the awarding judges is often as reliable a test of justice as a throw of the dice; not more. They are the petit jury sitting in a school-room. The excitement which permeates chapel or church on the occasion of the contest is so like the excitement at a horse-race or billiard-match, as to leave little difference except in the classes who patronize them. Does the more respectable presence at the one afford pardon for similar acts among the less respectable class? Rather is it the excesses about the hoof and hand contests for prizes which ought to warn the head against following into the same line of amusements. It is the laying of the foundation for love of excitement and for money or goods not earned.”

To all of which we fully subscribe, and we now, as heretofore, would discountenance the custom with emphasis.—Cal. Chris. Advocate.