Lacon High School - Tickler Yearbook (Lacon, IL)

Page 14 text:

L be if our forefathers had not planted trees. watered and protected them? They were looking ahead, not alone for their own pleasure. but for those to come after. So it is with us. Let us look ahead along educational lines, pre- pare for those who are to come after, and with all of us helping those who are chosen as ministerial officers ltrustees and board of educationl, make our community the very center of learning and the best place to live and rear our children HOMER BARNEY. GEORGE SMITH, FRANK BARR, GEORGE CONV.-KN. HARRY HEXTER. LEVVIS ALLEN, Board of Education, Lacon L'nion Schools. THE V IEWPOINT OF THE FACULTY OUR AIM The writer does not claim the following ideas as orig- inal with him. He has drawn freely from two books, The lluman Factor in Education, by james Monroe, and Com- munity Organization, by joseph Kinmont Hart. These books are to be highly recommended to those interested in the social view of education. The writer hopes that in some sniall degree he will set Lacon people to thinking along these lines. Education is a word found in the everyday vocabulary of a great ma- jority of people and yet there are so few that really perceive all that the word implies. The ordinary layman associates the word only with the activities of the school proper. All children labor under the delusion that education is going to school. XYith hundreds of people education has lost the most important part of its true significance. and legion are those who associate it with but one of the true phases of human development, that of the mind. Men seem to have temporarily forgotten that human nature is threefoldg that every child has a body to properly care for and develop as well as a character to develop for good or bad.

Page 16 text:

ACONHIGHSCHOOL The education of the child, says Dr. Laurie, is the bringing of him up in such a way as to secure that when he is a man he will fulfill his true life-not merely his life as an industrial worker, not merely his life as a citizen, but his personal life through his work and through his citizenship. And this is as true and as all-comprehensive a definition as we may find. XYe have undoubtedly heard the phrase, Send the whole boy to school. But how many there are who fail to realize that the school of life to which the larger part of the boy still goes has unlicensed teachers, unsupervised studies. and, too often. the devil for head-master ! In pioneer days the youth did go to a real school, comprehensive along the child's threefold nature. NYe of today might place our modern palatial schools alongside of the pioneer schools of trees and boughs and say in rather a conclusive manner: See how far we are ahead of our grand- sires in matters of education. But considering modern needs and resources, were we to meet today's conditions in as complete and comprehensive a manner as those early American frontiersmen, we would have to show some- thing more than palatial piles of brick: we would have to show additional forces more conducive to human needs. In the early Puritan history of our blessed nation the life of men began in small communities which lay, perhaps. at the crossing of two Indian trails. ln such miniature family communities life was very simple and modern social institutions. the church. the government, and the school, were undif- ferentiated. The community was everything-as one family. How did these primitive communities educate their children? By building schools of brick or mortar? Hy sending their children back across the water or to thc larger towns? XYas education in these far-gone pioneer days a duty of a special one? XYas it merely going to school ? No. They gave them the oppor- tunity of growing up in the midst of the common life. They were given the opportunity of learning the bare essentials and of becoming an effective member of their little group fit to carry on the family and community name and traditions. The child's mental training, by modern standards, was pitifully narrow: but his teachers were God-fearing men, and the minister. the lawyer and the squire had personal knowledge of every boy's advance- ment. His physical training was rude and laborious. but it was manly and out of doors. and was personally looked after by the father or master, both having a direct interest in making that part of his education thorough and effective. His moral training was hard and unlovely: but, such as it was. no youth was permitted to escape it. And over all phases of the boy's daily life, the parson and those indefatigable lieutenants of his, the deacons and