Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 83, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 April 1919 — SCHOOLS TEACH BY EXAMPLE AS WELL AS PRECEPT [ARTICLE]

SCHOOLS TEACH BY EXAMPLE AS WELL AS PRECEPT

If Rensselaer was asked to touch her beauty spot, she would not point with pride to the rear of her intermediate school lot on Van Rensselaer street. We do not like to knock, but if every knock is a boost, we would like to give several knocks if it would boost the rubbish, filth and other ugly objects out of sight and away from this prominent place in the city. No great value will come to the .children by becoming accustomed to seeing this spot which is not valuable for the training of the aesthetic nature. Evidently the school board or whoever is responsible for this gathering of rubbish accumulate of filth and unsanitary material have not the spirit so prevalent in this community often expressed by the prase, “A more beautiful Rensselaer. Possibly the same emotion which maintains the iron fence about the school lots to keep the cows off and that allows a portion of this fence to be piled in the yard where children play, a real menace to their bodily safety, and which has the bell mounted upon the building without steeple or shelter on a rude frame more in keeping with the surrounding of a reduction plant than an institution of learning, may be responsible for the unsightly and unsanitary condition of the part of the school lot referred to above. —?- Dirt and filth like vice is a monster of so hideous means, to be despised needs but to be seen too often familiar with her face, we first endure, then pity and then have tuberculosis.