Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 June 1881 — Practical Application of Knowledge. [ARTICLE]

Practical Application of Knowledge.

Pupils in our common schools are sadly deficient in the power of practical application. This must be evident to every teacher and parent who has ever tested the matter by asking practical questions. The pupil who, with the book before him, can readily “get the answers” to the difficult problems in profit and loss is wholly at a loss to determine the profit his father receives on cloth bought for 20 cents and sold for 25 cents per yard. He learns in school that Columbus and Springfield are in the same latitude, and is not sure at home that Columbus is not between Springfield and the North pole. He learns that every proper noun should commence with a capital, and then directs his first love letter to miss jennie smith. He can say with accuracy that there are 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 48 seconds in a year, but has no idea of how many times the sun will rise and set between two Christmases. He can give correctly the principal parts of see and go, and immediately after be guilty of saying, “I seen him r but now he has went away,” Is this fault, this studying to no practical purpose, due to our system of education ? If it is, it is high time that our leaders in educational matters point out the fault and suggest the remedy. Is it because teachers fall into mechanical, monotonous ruts of teaching, and perform their work in a manner so schoollike and so little business-like that it never occurs to the pupil that what he learns from his books has any connec tion with or application to the things that occur in everyday life ? Here we think is the trouble, and in this we should reform. Let each teacher make his work more and more practical; let him strive to lift his pupils from their unthinking, unpractical methods of study; let him give them matter for thought upon the simple, common things around them ; let him endeavor to create an interest in their minds upon the subjects discussed by the older people of the community, and soon we shall have a race of children in our schools who will know more at the age of 12 of what is practical and useful than our children now know when they leave the common schools.— Lansing Republican.