JOYS AND SORROWS OF SCHOOL-DAYS.
It was the custom in R——, and is now to quite an extent elsewhere, to elect as school committee those especially noted for their ignorance and unfitness for the duties, perhaps to keep them out of the almshouse, or to educate them by the absorption process while hearing pupils recite. These men were paid two dollars for each call they made at schools, consequently they "called" early and often, especially when the school ma'ams were young and pretty.
Here, as elsewhere, there was always a great fight at town-meetings for these school board positions, especially when the school-book agents became numerous, for these committees could secure from said agents unlimited free books, and get high prices for all their spavined horses, dried up cows, and sick pigs in return for voting for rival text-books.
As the committees were often unequal to the task of making out a course of study, pupils selected what studies they pleased, as suicidal a policy as it would be if, when you were sick and went to the physician for relief, he should point to a lot of different medicines, and tell you to pay your money, and take your choice.
As there was a cramming machine close by called an academy, whose sole object was to push students into Harvard College, of course the common schools must be "crammers" for the academy, and the result was, that we had no educational institutions whatever, and mental dyspepsia was well-nigh universal, a smattering of everything, a knowledge of nothing. As well might we pour food into the mouth by the peck, pound it down with a ramrod, and expect healthful physical growth.
Hundreds of poor parents are working themselves to death to send their children to such schools with a view to elevating them to "higher positions" than they themselves occupy, and soon we will have none to do the honest physical labor of life, but the world will be full of kid-gloved hangers on for soft jobs, who regard working with the hands to be a disgrace.
Well do I remember going to a neighbor, whose farm was mortgaged for all it was worth to buy finery and pay tuition bills in said academy, and begging for the services of the daughter to help my sick mother. I was refused with insult and scorn. "Do you think," shrieked the irate virago, "that I will allow my daughter who is studying French, Latin, Greek, and German to wash your dirty dishes?" I was driven from the house at the point of the boot. That daughter is to-day shaking and twitching with St. Vitus's dance, a physical and mental wreck from overstudy, causing nervous exhaustion and despair.
Hundreds of girls throughout our country who might have been good housekeepers, are to-day useless invalids, made so by what is called "higher education." Hundreds of boys, who might have become successful farmers and mechanics, are now dissipating in beer shops while waiting in vain for lily-fingered positions as bookkeepers or teachers. In scores of New England towns, one man, employed to fill the heads of a reluctant few with the dead languages, receives more salary than all the other teachers combined.
It seems to require a surgical operation to get the fact through our thick heads, that our school system demands radical reform from top to bottom to the end that hands as well as heads may receive technical bread-and-butter, practical education.
I was a victim of this elective-study craze, and with the usual stupidity displayed by a child when left to decide what he shall do, I chose Latin as my principal study in this common district school, because I fancied it smacked of erudition.