Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 August 1881 — No Progress in Education. [ARTICLE]

No Progress in Education.

In picking up a bundle of school books the other day, and carelessly glancing through them, we were struck with the almost Pagan darkness that seems to envelop education. Journalism, photography, telegraphy and the electric arts—everything, in fact, has made the most wonderful progress during the past fifteen or twenty years, but education, or the study of the sciences, is about the same old succotash that it always was. We see that there are still two grand divisions of the earth, and they are composed of land and water. That was the case twenty years ago. We turn over a few pages and find the following questions: “Where are the Mountains of the Moon ? ” ‘ 1 Where are the Himalayas ! ” “ Between what two bodies of water are the Philippine Islands situated ? ” “ State where the river Dneiper rises, what course it runs, and into what body of water it empties.” Well, it has been many years since we left the dear old school room, and our teachers who were so kind, and we are positive that at that time we knew where the Moon Mountains were, the Hymalayas, the Phillipine Islands and the Dneiper River, but we can place our hand upon our heart to-day and say truthfully that we do not know where one of them are, and we don’t believe we have heard one of them mentioned m the last fifteen years. Still, it must be remembered that we are in the newspaper business. If we were dealing in groceries it would probably be different, and we should use the Moon Mountains every day in our business. Customers would expect it, and while they would appear to be looking at the cheese to see if there were any skippers before buying a wedge of it, they would in rea'ity be making up their mind whether we knew where the Phillipine Islands were, and the general . course of the Dneiper. Some customers are very particular. People have expressed astonishment at the success of some of the leading dry goods merchants of Milwaukee, and have attributed it to the merchants’ knowing how to buy goods cheap down east and sell them for less than other merchants. This shows how ignorance is stalking through the land. If one could peek over the shoulder of the most successful merchants, when they are burning the midnight oil and clawing into their hair with both hands, they would be found poring over a geography, trying to find some little river in Asia Minor. Then there is algebra and cube and square root. Only last week we wrote an editorial and did not know really whether it ought to be published or not. All at once the words of our teacher came to us—“ Prove it; if it is correct it can be proved.” We threw a radical over it, raised it to the fourth power, extracted the cube root, and having x and y given to us, we easily found the unknown quantity z, and the thing was a bird. One of the most successful grocers in Milwaukee, a man who has accumulated a handsome fortune from a very small beginning, told us only the other day that he owed all his success to the use of algebra and a few theorems in geometry when picking a mackerel out of the kit with the hook and slapping it against the side of the barrel to get the brine off, and to buying just as close as he could for cash. Where would that man be to-day if he had only learned to add and multiply fractions, and had stopped there, and had bought his goods on time, with ten per cent, added. Teachers have a great duty to perform.— Peek's Sun.