Life, 1916-05-25 · page 8 of 40
Life — May 25, 1916 — page 8: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains two distinct elements: **Main Article:** "The Schoolmaster at School" critiques educational institutions' rigid social hierarchies. The text argues that college social organizations (clubs, fraternities) are "faulty and nonsensical," advocating instead for studying human nature through direct observation and democratic principles. **Political Cartoon:** The top illustration shows an airplane amid explosions, captioned "Why have you never asked her to marry you, old chap?" / "Oh! I never had the nerve." This appears to be satirizing wartime romance and masculine anxiety—the speaker suggesting that surviving aerial bombardment requires less courage than marriage proposals. **Lower Cartoon:** "Secondary Education" depicts a figure being crushed, likely satirizing authoritarian teaching methods or the burden of traditional education. The page targets institutional rigidity and social conformity prevalent in early 20th-century American society.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
980 The Schoolmaster at School Te first defect of the Democratic party Mr. Root found to he the temperament and t ing of the Presi- dent. . It is, doubtless, to this first defect that we owe the appointment of Mr. Daniels. He was the choice of the gentleman who rejected the compli- ment of the Chevy Chase Club in mak- ing him an honorary member; a gen- tleman whose mind seemed very much affected at that time by impatience of polite life and a yearning to get back to the plain people. It was he who said, when president of Princeton, that he did not propose to be president of a country club, and who tried to dis- solve the social organization of Prince- ton and herd the students in new groups, arbitrarily contrived on the basis of locality. The social organizations of the older colleges are so faulty and so abound in nonsense and worse, that every zealous reformer burns to abolish the whole collection of them and lead the boys back to nature and democracy and the simple life. Nevertheless, in their way they are laboratories for the study of human nature, especially on the side of its diseases, and men large enough to digest them and shed their nonsense get a training out of them which is often useful, especially in public life. They study a limited num- her of members under conditions of intimacy, think about them a vast deal, discuss, weigh and estimate them, and by constant exercise of judgment about their fellow creatures come—some of them—to learn the difference between man and man. * SECONDARY FDUCATION ” \ \ Te bitte GO “WHY HAVE YOU NEVER ASKED HER TO MARRY YOU, OLO CHAP?” “OH! | NEVER HAD THE NERVE. Mr. Wilson gave the when he came to Washington, of be- ing very little versed in this branch of knowledge. He knew the difference between men’s minds and mental capac- ities, but he had singularly few friends and not a great company of even poli cal acquaintances. He owed his politi- cal preferment to his powers of mind impression, and speech, with very little help from his social qualities. He was never a recluse, but he was not a practiced hand as a social being. When we compute the value to the country of what Mr. Wilson has learned in three years we are doubtless warranted in putting a fairly high esti- mate on what he has learned about his comicbooks.com