a choice in the selection of the material to be used.
One of the best ways to counteract the harmful influence of the poorly
conducted moving picture show and the vaudeville is to develop something
better to take their places. Let it be something that contains the
life-giving principles, something that will appeal with equal force to
the impressionable youth, and yet be clean and wholesome and natural.
Shall we not look upon the public playground for the children, and the
park system, for all, as a promising hope? And, properly developed,
would they not soon come to act on the young, both physically and
psychically, as a prevention, thus making a later cure unnecessary? And
upon adults, might we not reasonably expect their use to tend toward
making less attractive, and so to the eventual abandonment of, many of
these practises and forms of entertainment and recreation that are now
so sapping of both physical and psychical life?
IX
THE FUNCTION OF TEACHERS COLLEGE
_An Address delivered before the North Dakota State Teachers Association
on December 27, 1906. It later appeared in the January and February,
1910, issues of "Education"_
Among the various educational institutions of the United States to-day,
the one which, as it seems to me, is attracting the most intelligent
attention on the part of our educational thinkers, and the one upon the
right solution of whose problems depends, in a high degree, the success
of our entire educational system, is the institution for the education
of teachers. For we all have come, finally, to accept as true the
statement of the old German writer, "School reform means schoolmaster
reform," also that other, used so effectively in the days of our own
early educational revival, "As is the teacher so is the school." And we
are ready to-day to admit that those statements are true whether applied
to the ungraded rural school with its noticeable lack of needed
equipment, to the perfectly graded school of the city with every
facility that human ingenuity can devise and money procure, or to the
college and university where scholarship and culture are supposed to
make their abode and contribute of their fullness. For I care not, and
you care not, what be the physical and material equipment of the school;
I care not, nor do you, what be the scholastic attainments of the one
called teacher; if he isn't able to teach, that is, to cause to learn,
we all know that the school, in just
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