Life — October 10, 1907 — page 6: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“While there is Life there's Hope.” VOL. L. Published by PUBLISHING COMPA) A. Mitten, Sec'y and Treas rst Street, New York. LIFE J.A. Marcu, Pres't, 17 West Thirty: RITING in the ew York ing Post about the Edu- cation of the Neglected Rich, President Nicholas Murray Butler, of Columbia, takes a considerably more gloomy view of this subject than the facts of current history seem to compel. Disclosing how nearly fatal it is to the rich child’s prospects not to go to the public schools, and how in such preliminary schools as he can go to, for one reason or another, ‘“‘a systematic and judicious training of mind and char- acter is quite impossible,” he goes on to tell how “things go from bad to worse when such a boy passes to a boarding- school of a well-known type where only children of the rich can or will go.” We do not know of any boarding: schools of a well-known type in this country where only children of the rich go. Dr. Butler, occupying the place he does, ought to know whereof he speaks. Can it be that the schools he has in mind are such as St. Paul’s (Concord), St. Mark’s (Southboro), The Hill School (Pottstown), Groton School, and a dozen others of the same species? To say that only children of the rich go to these schools would beanabsurd misstatement; much more absurd than is generally ap- preciated, for it is rather commonly asserted and supposed that such schools as these are schools for the sons of the rich. We never have seen statistics of the pecuniary abilities of the parents of the boys who go to such boarding-schools as these, but it would surprise us consider- ably if less than seventy per cent. of the boys who are pupils at present at the four schools named, and at a dozen other schools of the same class that might be named, did not have it in prospec matter of necessity to make their own livings. pe ele ia In the boarding-schools indicated there is a much greater variety of bo estimated by the size of the parental for- tune, than is commonly understood. A good many pretty struggling people, widows especially, send their boys to such schools because they think them good schools and because the one extrava- gance they permit themselves is extrava- gance in education. Yet if Dr. Butler does not mean these schools, what schools does he mean? Whereare his“ boarding-schoolsof a well- known type where only children of the rich can or will go?” Can it be that Dr. Butler does not know very much about American boarding-schools and the boys who go tothem? It is possible, the more so because nowadays such schools prob- ably do not send any considerable number of boys to Columbia College. ITH the opening of the colleges come further exposition and discus- sion of President Woodrow Wilson’s plan for splitting Princeton University up into quads, wherein birds not of a feather shall flock together to the improvement of Princeton’s family life. In nearly all the big Eastern universities there is a yearning, such as has taken shape in Dr. Wilson’s scheme, to bring about a more democratic fraternization of the students, and to correct their natural propensity to group according (more or less) to the size of their allowances and the way they were brought up. The least impracticable way to accomplish this Utopian end has been thought to be this way which Dr. Wilson is bent on trying. In the current number of the Harvard Graduates Magazine Prof. Beale advo- cates an analogous plan for Harvard. But Harvard would rather watch Prince- ton split herself up than make any such experiment herself. Indeed, all the colleges will watch with lively interest anything that may be done at Princeton to realize Dr. Wilson’s plan. But it seems very speculative still whether anything will be done. To carry out the scheme would cost about two million dollars. Dr. Wilson thinks he can find some one who will give the money, but, even so, it to be seen whether he can get the backing of the great body of the Princeton alumni for the plan. Dr. Henry Van Dyke, an influential graduate and an ex- ceedingly popular member of Dr. Wilson’s faculty, thinks the new plan un-American, and dangerous, and argues vigorously against it. GONSIRERING how much thought and time have been spent on educa- tion since work on it began, it is remark- able that it does not pull more definitely out of the experimental sta; Here is President Butler telling what bad work some of the private schools make of their business ind praising the public schools. It would be easy to get authority quite as high as his for the assertion that, taken by and large, the private schools lead the public schools in the quality of their teaching and in the shaping of character. They ought to, for they have important advantages and can afford to employ more teachers at higher pay in proportion to the number of scholars. And here is Pres- ident Wilson laying momentous plans to supplement the very ambitious innova- tions he already has in operation and cor- rect the educational defects that one hun- dred and fifty years of experience had not yet eradicated from Princeton. Along, too, comes Mr. John Corbin with a piece in the Saturday Evening Post which leaves the perplexed reader a little doubtful whether it is worth any citizen’s money to maintain a youth at Harvard. If there is one thing about which, more than another, the doctors disagree, it would seem to be education. Yet somehow or other the work blun- ders along, and when it is not going back- ward it is going forward. One way or the other it moves continually in this lively country, and not without results; for Mr. Augustine Birrell, a wise and cultivated Englishman, was lately quoted as observ- ing politely that America is full of edu- cated people. Nobody knows absolute how education ought to be administered and in what doses except Mr. Charles Francis Adams, and he, though he is al- ways willing to tell, does not always tell the same story. comicbooks.com