me back 'unchanged'--showing no sign of
mental digestion. We call this 'training the memory.' The present type of
education is a curse to modern childhood and a menace to the future. The
teacher who cannot tell whether a child is doing well without formally
examining it, should be heaving bricks, but such a teacher does not exist.
In Berlin they are now learning that the depression caused by these [23]
emetics (examinations) often lead to child suicide--a steadily increasing
phenomenon mainly due to educational overpressure and worry about
examinations.

"Short of such appalling disasters, however, we have to reckon with the
existence of this enormous amount of stupidity, which those who fortunately
escaped such education in childhood have to drag along with them in the
long struggle towards the stars. This dead weight of inertia lamentably
retards progress.

"If you have been treated with marbles and emetics long enough, you may
begin to question whether there is such a thing as nourishing food; if you
have been crammed with dead facts, and then compelled to disgorge them, you
may well question whether there are such things as nourishing facts or
ideas."

The gifted writer, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, in an editorial in the _New York
American_, expressed herself recently in the following terms:

"A wave of dissatisfaction is sweeping over the country regarding our
school system. And eventually this will cause a change to be made. The
larger understanding of mothers regarding education will result in the
personal element entering into the training of children.

"When women have a voice in the affairs of the nation there will be more
teachers, larger salaries, fewer pupils in each department, and more
attention will be given to the temperaments and varying dispositions of
children by their instructors.

"Instead of regarding the little ones who enter public schools as machines
which must be taught to go according to one rule, each child will be
studied as a threefold being, and his mind, body and spirit will be cared
for and developed according to his own peculiar needs. All this will come
slowly, but it will come.

"Before children enter the public schools there should be a great sifting
process under the direction of a national board of scientific men. The
brain equipment of each child, the tendencies given it at birth, should be
tested; then the nervous, hysterical and erratic minds ought to be [24]
placed in