Eastern Michigan University - Aurora Yearbook (Ypsilanti, MI)

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Zllbett Ieonatb HE GROWTH in educational interests in Michigan finds nowhere a more steady and satisfactory expres- sion than in the development of the Normal Schools. The Michigan State Normal School at Ypsi- lanti becoming inadequate to the larger demands put upon it, was advanced to the rank of a college for the conferring of degrees, and was supplemented by the two Normal Schools at Mt. Pleasant and Marquette. To further the interests of the three institutions, the State Board of Education devised the plan of uniting them into one Normal School System under one Executive, and to this office they elected Dr. Albert Leonard. This brief and simple statement best expresses the qualifications that were sought in the man who was to fill the position thus created by the Board. Albert Leonard, A. B., Ohio Univ., 1888, and Ph. D., Hamilton College, 1894, was born and educated in Ohio, having taken a course in the Ohio Central Normal Scllool before entering on his university work. He afterwards held the principalship in the public schools of New Holland, whence he was elected to a similar position at Dunkirk, N. Y., which he left for better work as High School principal at Binghampton, N. Y., leaving this for further advancement in 1897, when he was made Dean of the College of Liberal Arts in the Syracuse University, with the Chair of Pedagogy. Here again he was sought out by the Michigan Board of Education in their quest for a man and an educator to assume the office of President of the Michigan State Normal School System in 1900. Dr. Leonard early added journalism to his other work, establishing the Journal of Pedagogy, now in its thirteenth year of publication The Journal early took a place among the leading pedagogical periodicals of the country. It is always pleasant to read a man's own ideals in his public utterances, and in a recent paper read before the Michigan Schoolmaster's Club are found these fitting words with which to close this brief and inadequate sketch: Education is openness and flexibility of mind, justness of voice, candor, reasonableness and freedom from prejudice. In spite of the fact that the word czflfnre is often received with an easy sneer in certain academic circles even, there is no better term to designate the chief purpose of the whole educational process than the word which Matthew Arnold has defined for all time as 'the pursuit of our own total perfection by means of getting to know on all matters that concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the worldf