Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 38, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 August 1905 — Arithmetic, The Bane of The Common Schools. [ARTICLE]

Arithmetic, The Bane of The Common Schools.

It begins to look as though Jasper county would be very short on school teachers the coming year, so maDy candidates faili»g to pass the hard and puzzling examinations, prepared by the State Board of Education. So inordinately and unnecessarily hard are these that at the June examination here only 18 passed out of a class of 68 candidates. And the July examination was still worse. For that, some mathematical genius and idiot in everything else, prepared a set of arithmetical puzzles, (we will not so misuse the language as to call them problems) so difficult and unusual, that out of 85 candidates, the arithmetic examination alone slaughtered all but 23. What the rest of the questions will do to that other 23 will no doubt be a plenty. Unless there is a big easing up on the August questions, Jasper county will probably have about half enough teachers when most of the schools want to reopen. When will the day of cranks and faddists, and especially of the most pernicious of all, the arithmetic cranks enl in our public schools? For all purposes except mental discipline arithmetic is about the most useless study in the curriculum,' yet it continues to be made a regular fetish of; or we might better say, a Juggernaut, from the number of victim it claims, in one way or another. Not only among candidates for teachers’ licenses, but in the number of children it forces out of school before their education is nearly completed, not to speak of the many conscientious and ambitious children whose bod-ily-and often mental health is injured or wrecked by midnight pouring over arithmetical monstrosities, misnamed problems.