ITEMS OF INTEREST March 14, 1908 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

President Roosevelt, in an address before the National Education Society, department of superintendence, says: "I trust that more and more of our people will see to it that the schools train toward and not away from the farm and the workshop. We have spoken a great deal about the dignity of labor in this country, but we have not acted up to our spoken words; for in our education we have tended to proceed upon the assumption that the educated man was to be educated away from and not toward labor. The term 'dignity of labor' implies that manual labor is as dignified as mental labor; as of course it is. Indeed the highest kind of labor is that which makes demands upon the qualities of both head and hand, of heart, brain, and body."

The annual convention of the department of superintendence of the National Education Association, at its recent session in Washington, D. C., adopted resolutions in favor of the study of agricultural subjects in the schools of the rural districts, granting federal aid to the State normal schools for the training of teachers in agriculture, manual training, and home economics; the maintenance in all large cities of a school for backward children, the opening of large ungraded schools in large cities for the instruction of the children of immigrants unable to speak English, and urging an increased appropriation for the National Bureau of Education.

The results attained by night schools in the great labor camps give good promise of assimilating our adult foreign population. At Aspinwall, Pa., such a school has been running for two years in the Pittsburg Filtration Company's plant, actively helped by the officers of that company, and more recently other schools have been started at other points in Pennsylvania and New York. The immediate response of about one-third of the men in a camp shows that the work meets a demand which already exists. The effect has been to turn into quiet, orderly communities camps that had previously been a disturbance and menace to their neighborhoods.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Article

THE VITAL TRUTH OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE