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4
Conversations With Six Hundred Thousand
WHAT IS AN EDUCATION WORTH?
but it has one immense advantage: The younger children can learn ahead of their time by listening to the recitations of the older ones.
Here is where the real, genuine teacher, comes in. Everybody knows how a man or woman filled with a love of young people can mold the boys and girls under them. Good teachers are fathers and mothers to their pupils. It is their business to encourage the slow; to prepare the talented, and to catch a genius if they find him.
Here is where the school friend comes in. There is Rob Bebee, the famous doctor missionary in China; you began to know him in the district school. There is Governor Windom; he was your chum in the High School. The school is the place to make friends that stick, friends that help, friends that pull you out of the routine. All that is part of education. Young people help to educate each other and then go on through their lives educating other young people. That is why real education is bigger than a school room, and longer than the eleven years course.
Practical Education
It is a fine thing for schools to teach interesting things, which many children would never get otherwise. It is a public benefit to induce children to read books, and magazines, and newspapers, so as to know what goes on in the world. The people of the United States want all that, and they want more. They want their schools to turn out young people who can do something that the world wants.
What is practical in the usual list of school studies? First of all the three R’s. Reading, does not mean simply the ability to transfer letters and words on the printed page into spoken sounds, but the ability to understand as you go along, and to remember the gist of what you read. W’Riting is in some countries a fine art. Every French child is taught to write legibly in a running hand, and also a big record hand. A’Rithmetic, is the foundation of bookkeeping and accounts and money transactions of every kind. The study of the mother tongue is perhaps the most valuable thing taught in the schools, because it trains the youngsters to think for themselves, and make other people understand what they are thinking.
All these things properly taught are practical; but the times demand that every boy and girl shall do something in school that helps him to take his place in life. Stenography and typewriting and bookkeeping are good for the mind and likewise good for making a living. Wood and iron and electrical workers are needed all over the land. There is a dearth of printers and it has become one of the best paid trades. The school that seriously teaches these things is enlarging the field of education, making it worth more. Practical education does not shut out the fields of study which enlarge the mind and give occupation to the thoughts and bring people closer together; but it adds a solid core of instruction to those who are going to care for themselves.
What Can We Moose Do For Education?
The members of the Moose Order feel a special interest in the Worth of an Education because so many of them have children for whose future they are working and planning. Any Moose father or mother who does not think the education of children worth while had better leave the Order; for it is founded on the idea of making the world bigger and better for old and young. The Moose have also a special advantage in their ownership of one of the most practical, and therefore one of the happiest and .most successful, schools in the country.
MOOSEHEART aims to do all that the old fashioned education did in teaching the children the thoughtful and enioyable sides cf life. It makes them acquainted with the great writers, shows them how to express themselves in good, sound, pointed English and gives them a good foundation.
MOOSEHEART believes that right alongside this advantage can be added a practical knowledge of some useful pursuit, all the way from homemaking to cement blocks. Visit MOOSEHEART and see for yourself what the effect of this double barreled system has been on the orphan children of the Moose Order. It is the general experience that those who are best at class work, are also best in vocational work, because both kinds call out the capacity and character of the child. Here we come back again to the word “Educo,” “drawing out,” reaching into the thoughts and hopes and abilities of the children, making them know themselves, as well as the world around them. That is what MOOSEHEART means, “The School That Trains for Life.”
By PROFESSOR ALBERT BUSHNELL HART Harvard University-------Mooseheart Governor
borhood because she put her mind upon whatever she had to do. She was one of the best cheese makers, one of the best architects of those delicious country dinners, the taste of which lasts in one’s mouth for fifty years. She was one of the best Sunday School teachers, a rare mother of a family, counsellor of three generations of young people. Aunt Polly had education within her, and she brought it out all through a long life.
Not only is true education a long long process, it is also a wide, wide relation. Everything that is worth doing and everything worth observing is part of an educated man in our time. Theodore Roosevelt read, studied, thought and reflected every day of his life, from childhood to his last hours. Likewise Theodore Roosevelt took in every kind of pursuit. He studied books, the law, the New York Legislature, San Juan mountains for hunting, ranching, cat-birds, international law tropical rivers, wild elephants, members of Congress, editors, policemen and his own children. That is what you call an all around, really educated man. His book was the world.
The Worth of Learning Things
Everybody cannot be a Roosevelt; but everybody can get something out of education. First of all there are the jagged facts, that one acquired in schools. Success depends on an outfit of hard and not always agreeable information. To read without knowing the alphabet is difficult though some people seem to chance it. The multiplication table is one of the most useful accomplishments of mankind. Geography is useful. A would-be graduate of Harvard College recently insisted that Chicago was on the Pacific Coast, which would have been awkward for him if he were looking for Chicago in an aeroplane. A good knowledge of the mountain systems, the courses of the big rivers and lakes, the main water-sheds, the state capitals and principal cities, is handy to anybody everyday. Geology reveals the makeup of the earth’s surface, and may help in locating copper or silver mines. Botany has become a practical branch of study for the farmer, who also needs simple zoology to help in the care of farm animals. Modern languages are very useful to a growing class of businessmen who buy and sell in foreign countries.
One of the best things about education is the habit of learning by heart. The weekly recitation day, the learning of' short poems, and prose extracts, the committing to memory of the multiplication table and the symbols for the chemical elements, is a splendid preparation for all those who have to deal with orders and formulas and exact details. Even in the army guards had to learn by heart the list of their duties.
Education Through Your Neighbors
People can learn many things without a teacher. The Indian has no class room, no bell calls him to recitation. People can learn modern languages out of a phonograph. But no one can learn human nature, except from human beings. Most college graduates will tell you that they got quite as much from their fellow students as from their nro-fessors. The old fashioned district school is often a poor and mixed up substitute for real education,
WHAT’S an education worth?
What’s a boy worth? What’s a girl worth ? No market quota-tation reported in the morning paper; any well regulated family would refuse a million in cash for a smart baby. Some fathers put the value of a factory on their daughter’s back when she gets married. Some fathers are willing to pay thousands for the education of their sons, and at the end would be glad to dispose of that education at ten per cent of its face value. An education is worth just what it brings to the possessor. No more and no less. If he thinks more, lives more enjoys more, or earns more, because of his education, he has made the best kind of an investment. If he is no happier or wealthier he might as well buy oil stock in an unknown field. Education is worth everything or nothing according to the educator and the educatee.
Everybody knows what the word education implies; that it is from a Latin word which means to “draw out.” The idea is that education consists in finding what is in a boy or girl and making it of some use. The child’s mind is looked upon as a sort of gold mine which will be very profitable if you can reach the rich ore and bring it to the surface.
That is what the word means; is it what our ordinary school education means ? In far too many schools the notion is that the valuable raw material is all in the teacher’s mind; and that it is her duty to break it up into small pieces and poke it into the children’s minds, much as you feed an unwilling chicken. The late Mr. Furness of Philadelphia, a great Shakesperian scholar, and one of the best educated men of his time, by the way, had the misfortune to be very deaf. He was left by himself in the house once by his children, who warned him to not pay any attention to any ^noises that might possibly reach his ears. Not being an obedient parent he roused himself at a faint tapping and located the sound at the back door where a milkman was all but smashing in the panels with his knock. The man of learning fitted his ear trumpet to his ear and pointed it toward the milkman who promptly poured into it a quart of milk! That is the way that probably half the children m the United States are taught. They are not supposed in the school to give out something, but to take in something. They are not there to think, but to remember.
That is not the way to fit out boys and girls who are studying to be workers and employers, voters and lawmakers. They want the kind of training expressed by the motto of MOOSEHEART; ‘“The School That Trains for Life.” You cannot make an athelete by feeding him; the runner the tennis player, the center rush, or the pitcher becomes skilled by doing a thing with all his might. Coaching never makes a player; it can only change a f-ir player into a better one. In school and in college as in life, people learn to do things, and not by talking about them.
Real Education
From this point of view the schools complete no education, they only begin it and that is why the list day of a school or a college course is usually called Commencement. The time has come for the graduates to show what they are good for. They find plenty of “commencing” when the go into the factories or offices, or mines or transportation. The moment they have finished one kind of education they begin another. Hence the real education lasts from the day when the baby discovers that if he says “Mamma” his attendant will come and smile at him, through the kindergarten and primary school, through the grades and the high school, and the college and the professional school, to the work, the thought, the results of active life, all the way to the moment when the soul goes out, carrying with it the education of a life time on earth into new fields of heavenly experience and growth.
Employers say that a boy or girl learns as much that is new and useful and arousing, in the first year after leaving the high school as in the three previous years of study; but without those three years of study there would be no foundation for the year of activity.
For example, Aunt Polly, one of the saints of the earth, who was married at sixteen, many years rgo, and never went to school after that; yet she was one of the best educated women in her neigh-