Well do I remember going to a neighbor, whose farm was mortgaged for
all it was worth to buy finery and pay tuition bills in said academy,
and begging for the services of the daughter to help my sick mother. I
was refused with insult and scorn. "Do you think," shrieked the irate
virago, "that I will allow my daughter who is studying French, Latin,
Greek, and German to wash your dirty dishes?" I was driven from the
house at the point of the boot. That daughter is to-day shaking and
twitching with St. Vitus's dance, a physical and mental wreck from
overstudy, causing nervous exhaustion and despair.
Hundreds of girls throughout our country who might have been good
housekeepers, are to-day useless invalids, made so by what is called
"higher education." Hundreds of boys, who might have become successful
farmers and mechanics, are now dissipating in beer shops while waiting
in vain for lily-fingered positions as bookkeepers or teachers. In
scores of New England towns, one man, employed to fill the heads of a
reluctant few with the dead languages, receives more salary than all
the other teachers combined.
It seems to require a surgical operation to get the fact through our
thick heads, that our school system demands radical reform from top to
bottom to the end that hands as well as heads may receive technical
bread-and-butter, practical education.
I was a victim of this elective-study craze, and with the usual
stupidity displayed by a child when left to decide what he shall do,
I chose Latin as my principal study in this common district school,
because I fancied it smacked of erudition.
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