Democratic Sentinel, Volume 14, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 June 1890 — School Days of Long Ago. [ARTICLE]

School Days of Long Ago.

No more interesting character of our times now lives than Gen. F. E. Spinner of Treasury fame. Although nearly ninety years old he preserves all his faculties, and in “College and School” he tells in an entertaining manner of his schooldays in Mohawk Valley. The schoolboys and girls of the present day will be able to contrast their happy lot with Gen. Spinner’s. “And now ‘the master;’ he was, as a rule, selected from the hands who worked on the farm in the summer and taught school in the winter; not for the quantity or the quality of his brains, but for his superior muscular development. "His equipment consisted of a stout pair of coarse cowhide boots wherewith to discipline the big boys, a lot of rods, a heavy ferule and a two-bladed pocketknife, the larger blade used for the cutting and trimming of rods and switches, and the smaller one wherewith to make pens from quills out of the wings of a goose. A goose! fit emblem of all that pertained to an old-time common school in the Mohawk Valley. * “Teaching in those early days was principally by induction, and it was induced by rod and ferule. Old King Solomon, •the wisest of men,’ made the law that governed tire old-time common schools in the Valley of the Mohawk. “ ’Spare not the rod,’ was the edict at the home and in the school. ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child,’ came from the pulpit, the school-room and the nursery. "Perhops this is the reason why I did not spoil, and that I am now, at the age of eighty-eight years, so well preserved. The rod was never spared on me at home or m school, and now, with grown-up great-grandchildren, I can truthfully say I have never, in all my long life, struck a child a single blow. “I was licked enough to last through the whole four generations of self and my posterity. I have found it safe through life to practice the reverse of what was taught me to do. “Farm hands in those days received f 8 a month and board. When employedin the winter as teachers they sometimes managed to get. a little more, but they were obliged to ‘board round’ with the parents of their pupils. “The board usually consisted of john-nie-eake for breakfast, corned beef and* cabbage, or pork and saner kraut, for dinner, and sepawn and milk for supper. The lodging a ‘shake-down’ in the garret. “Websters Spelling book, Columbian Reader, English Reader, Jiabol’s Arithmetic and Lindley Murray’s Grammar were the books mostly in use in those far-off days. “The routine of the school exercises of that day was to commit to memory passages from the books, the meaning of .which the pupil had no more conception lot than Nicodemus had of the second fcixth.’’— Golden Daye.