| Summary: | Newsletter of the North Dakota School for the Deaf. 2 THE NORTH DAKOTA BANNER What a gross error it is for pupils to be conning Chaucer or Coleridge or Borkc, and neglecting to read even such momentous present-day utterances as President Wilson’s recent one on peace. What a mistaken idea to learn by heart the dates of ancieut battles, with number of troops ougaged on each side, the number killed, etc., when the greatest war that the history has known is right now going on and students have a chance to study this war at first hands. All the great educators and thinkers of the world have agreed that education should be practical—but the little minds keep making it unpractical. Bacon. Milton, Carlyle, Penn, Spencer and other great Englishmen warned the world even in their time against this evil of an education which is artificially plastered on. Emerson said: “The popular education has been taxed with a want of truth and nature. We are studenls of words; wo are shut up in schools for 10 or 15 years and we come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not kuow a thing. We cannot use our hands; we cannot tell our course by the stars; we are afraid of a cow. a snake, a spider.” But, as we have already said, all this is going to be improved, for the people are waking up now and they will not much longer tolerate the apology for education which we now have. As the Education Board points out, the new education will not aim to “train the mind or produce make-believe literary schola’-s”, but will develop them all round, and prepare them for real living, instead of only giving them a thin coating of intellectual culture. As we know, our schools now drive out a large percentage of pupils and drop them. Such men as Edison, Ford and most of the men who do things found that the schools were made too hot for them and had to get their training elsewhere. The schools answer fairly for the average, mediocre pupil, hut they cannot interest the unusual ones. We all know youngsters who have rare talents in some directions but who are pronounced numskulls by their teachers, because perhaps they can’t get arithmetic through their heads. Altogether too much stress is laid on marks; Ibe pupil is all the time sacrificed to the system and “methods” are considered more important than souls. The new schools will provide for all classes of children and will keep them interested. — The Pathfinder. Dr. Gallaudet. lly Winfield s. Runde At Hartford the coming summer the deaf of America will celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the first public school for the deaf in the new world. Tho educated deaf will be there in great numbers. Tho sign language will be used in delivering most of tho addresses. Dr. E. M. Gallaudet, son of the founder of the school at Hartford and now in his eightieth year, and probably the most eloquent living master of the beautiful sign language will he there and will address tho great throng. I attended several of Dr. Gallaudet’s classes in Political Economy, International Law and tho Science of Religiou. While these looked dry and knotty in print, Dr. Gallaudet had the wonderful faculty in making them all clear and even highly interesting. His lectures on religion were most eloquent and forcible and there was always a packed chapel. His sign painting on the characters in his lectures was so vividly clear that all of us seemed actually to see them before us. His control over unruly studenls was even more remarkable. He was extremlv kind, patient beyond endurance, strict and just. Ho was so very fond of society and his Commencement receptions in May to the graduating class of Gallaudet College will always be remembered by those who have had the good fortune to be his guests. At these affairs long lines of carriages, containing foreign diplomats aud high officers of the federal government filed through the gates of Kendall Green to Dr. Gallaudet’s residence where the seniors and faculty in cap and gown were presented to the distinguished men. At the reception I attended Wn Ting Fong, minister from China, was the guest of honor as he was the orator of the day. I felt very big mingling freely with those great men even for those few short hours. It was a privilege which, of course, 1 can never enjoy again holding a sheepskin in my hand 1 was big then. Today 1 am a mere pedagogue! — The California News. Getting Rid of Your Garden Enemies. Tho boy who gets out early in the morning in his young garden and begins to pick squash bugs, cucumber beetles, potato bugs, and such slugs aud cut ami wire worms as are in sight, with his thumb and forefinger and drop them in a deep can, will do more good than poison could do in three days. Pour boiling hot water into the tin holding these insects, to make sure they are killed. Go tho rounds every morning. Do not wait until after school, or late in the day because they have feasted and crawled away to sleep and rest-most of them. Do not try to pick them at noon because they hide underground or behind leaves to get out of the hot sun. But bright and early in the morning they come out with the sparkliug dew to get busy and eat the good things you planted. Get up an hour earliei three mornings a week just to do this and the result will repay you ten times over when-your garden begins to supply you with peas and beans and cucumbers and lettuce and radishes and many other delicacies.—The American Buy. A Forgotten Great American. Few Arc Familiar With Name of Matthew Fontaine Maury. Everyone who has heard of Robert Fulton, certainly everyone who has heard of S. F. B. Morse or Cyrus W. Field, ought also to have heard of Matthew Fontaine Maury. But that is not the case. For my part, 1 had never heard of Maury until I went to Virginia, I have asked school boys if they heard of him. None of them has. Yet Maury’s scientific researches and accomplishments have had an enormous effect, not only in this country, but throughout the world. It may be said that Maury laid the foundation for our modem weather bureau, and that the science of meteorology began with him. He founded the national nautical observatory and the hydrographic office in Washington, and discovered, among other tilings, the cause of the Gulf Stream, and the existence of that plateau in the North Atlantic Ocean which, if I am not mistaken, made possible the laving of the first Atlantic cable. Cyrus” W. Field said, with reference to this: “Maury furnished the brains, England tho money and I did the work.” Further than this the charts of the North Atlantic which Maury made years ago are today the basis upon which that ocean is navigated by all nations. I am informed that though he was decorated by many foreign governments he was never given so much as a cheap little medal by that of the United States, and that his name has not been kept ahva by any memorial or other token of his country’s gratitude.—Julian Street in Collier Weekly.
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