Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 20, Number 54, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 March 1899 — Pretty Good Logie. [ARTICLE]

Pretty Good Logie.

Mrs. Lew Wallace of Crawfordsville says: “If your boy’s tastes are not soholarly you make him miserable trying to force a love for learning. He will go through the books and the books will go through him: there is no assimilation. After all, what are our children being educated for? The boys to be bread winners. They must hurry through and ‘hustle for a living.’ The girls—let us believe it—are future homemakers. The word helpmeet is obsolete—left behind with the woman who made Eden paradise. Constantly the question is being brought up, ‘Shall this and that be added to our public schools? But who asks, ‘Can the scholars endure any more? They have no protests nor petitions; they must stand like human vessels ready to be filled to the brim with mixtures of facts. 1 plead for a childhood of the soul as well as of the body, for the free air, the blessed sunshine, the moderate task eilded at the schoolhonse. “This night young heads are leaning against their mothers, tired as no young things should ever be, and it is a sorrowful sound to hear a child waking from what might be the sunny slumber of a light heart beating to the heathful music to ask in a troubled voice - ‘Do you think I can make the pass grade?’ It is said that they like to go to school. Yes, and they would like to twice as well if there were half as much to learn. Many children have I known, but not one who loved study for its own sake. Companionship is what lures them. Instead of wandering up and down the wilderness of wintry facts let them loiter awhile among the dear illusions. The happy valley of chilhood is but narrow, where the golden water babbles to the talking bird and the singing tree, where the sun always shines and the years are summers. They who adjust the hand that presses so heavily on the springs or life have much to account for.”