Jasper County Democrat, Volume 20, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 August 1917 — BLAZING THE WRONG TRAIL [ARTICLE]

BLAZING THE WRONG TRAIL

One of the leading farm, journals of the South is authority for the statement that in the rural high schools of North Carolina 7,000 children are Studying Latin, while only 700 are studying agriculture. The significance of these figures are not grasped until we learn that of the pupils attending high school in this country not more than 1 per cent ever reach the college or university. When we assimilate the further fact that the high schools do not and can not impart a working knowledge of the Latin language, we begin to appreciate the utter foolishness of an educational system that forces u'pbn children the study of a dead language from which not one in 7,000 will ever benefit. The above figures may vary in other states —-we hope they do. But they serve to call forcibly to our attention a glaring fault in the school system of the United States. Any system that requires hoys and girls (who in many cases can ill afford the time and means to attend even a high school) to waste from a quarter to a fifth of ,their school life on a study that will never benefit them in Jife’s struggle, is, not a blunder—it is a crime. - ' • • Copaider , again. Of the- 7,000 Latin there are only 700 StsHtyfag agriculture. These figures may vary in other states, but aoy one familiar with the ?yatem of this country knows proportion of our rural vavj girls who secure a com- *.'.**• “

petent education in agriculture is lamentably small. / » And what is the conclusion? Why, that we are wedded in our schools to a fossilized, petrified and antiquated system that ordains that. in order to acquire an "education'’ one must be conversant with a language that is so everlastingly dead it has not .been generally spoken on earth in the last -laW years. And this while the crying, burning needs of the hour are sidetracked as of minor importance.

It is time, for the rural population of our country to arise in their | might and demand that the schools, cease educating their children away/ from the farm. The professions are overcrowded and the trades are -in even worse! Condition. The farmer’s Job is the only one .in this land that promts--a career without the paralyzing; competition to be met in other lines. Yet instead of being ‘trained for efficiency in this great calling our youths are compelled tp fritter away their time on a course of study that, to be in any sense beneficial, must be followed through the college or university—-which the very smallest pe.- cent of them ever reach. The day of the antiquarian the dreamer, the mummy, is past in this country. The age demands action, and the mind that is not trained to it in capital letters is doomed to be left at the starting wire.