The misery of our system, whether in town or country, is that it assumes that the chief end of man is to figure in some one of the so-called “learned” professions. So the high school is keyed up to the standard of admission to the college and university. The grade school exists to qualify pupils for admission to the high school. Hence the surplus of doctors without patients, at a time when humanity is learning how to avoid needing a doctor; of lawyers when men are fast learning to keep out of law.
In short, the end and aim of all education in the future must needs be efficiency in the line of the chosen vocation. The great lack of our present system is the failure to give the child a complete and thorough mastery of the tools by which any education worth while must be acquired: the ability to read with understanding, to express itself, whether in speech or writing, so that all may understand; the ability to see what is to be seen and tell it in plain English, and to put this and that together and draw a just conclusion.
I need not say that no training for efficiency is complete that does not involve the ethical as well as the intellectual and material. This is a Christian nation, and the ethics of Christianity should be taught in every school as well as in every home. We may not, and should not teach the dogmas or doctrines of any sect or denomination. We must forever keep separate the Church and the State; but underlying all these creeds and denominations there is an ethical standard which all but the criminal or would-be criminal accept; and this should be taught, because it embraces our highest ideals of manhood and womanhood and citizenship.
The crimes of which we are rightly ashamed are due largely to the fact that the jealousy of the churches toward each other has heretofore prevented the teaching of ethics to the children in our schools. Without the practice of ethics, without the striving to realize moral ideals, there can be no moral efficiency, and without moral efficiency intellectual efficiency may become productive of evil instead of good. An educated brain without an educated conscience is a source of danger to the public welfare. It is high time for the churches and all good people to get together and agree on ethical standards to be taught in every school, that will put moral as well as intellectual training in the coming generation.
I have touched merely the high places of the subject of human efficiency. I have endeavored to say that if the generation which is to follow us and carry on our work is to be efficient, the children must be well born and well fed, protected from the vampires that endeavor to suck their lifeblood, and must have an opportunity to develop their natural capacity by an education and training—physical, mental and moral—that will enable them to do the world’s work with profit to themselves and their fellow-man. (Applause.)
President White—In Denver, Colorado, some twelve years ago, there was found a friend for children; there was found a judge who believed that in the child brought before him for some breach of law, he could see something divine, that he could see the soul, the germ of the future man, the germ of a future life—something to redeem. He believed he could see why Christ said, “Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” He had faith in the child, and when he found it necessary, in the way of discipline, to send them to the reform school, he placed faith in them; he told them to go out to the reform school, and he would be up to see how they were getting along after awhile. He developed character from the start, and it soon became noised around. In every paper, in every magazine, all over the world the name of Judge Ben B. Lindsey, of Denver, Colorado, was known. (Applause.)
I now have the pleasure to introduce to you Judge Lindsey, who will speak on the subject “Is the Child Worth Conserving?” (Prolonged applause.)
Address, “Is the Child Worth Conserving”
Judge Lindsey—Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: I am sure I appreciate this very cordial and kind reception, because it shows your appreciation, not of the speaker, but of a cause—in which I have only had a small part—that has come close to the heart of the people of this Nation in the last decade or more, and well it is that the great National Conservation Congress should not overlook the welfare of the child.
I was delighted to note in the splendid address which we have just listened to by Dr. Wallace, that this important matter of the child, the youth, furnished its principal theme, because without childhood there is no manhood; without the conservation of childhood there is nothing else to conserve.