University of Wyoming - WYO Yearbook (Laramie, WY)

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- o S 0 =»v FACULTY OFFICERS OF THE FACULTY. Chairman PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY Secrelar]] Justus F. Soule Registrar James D. LeCron Aven Nelson. M. S. (Drury) M. A. (Harvard) Ph. D. (Denver) Professor of Biology and Curator of the Rocky Mountain Herbarium. I Charles Bascom Ridgaway. B. A., M. S. (Dickinson) (Student at Harvard) Student at Cornell) Professor of Mathematics. Henry Merz. B. S., M. a. (Black- burn) Professor of German. ' o rr o- o =»-: '

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•: 0 := 0 0 = 0 ' A fifth grade child should use algebraic equations without necessarily understanding the theory of transposition; and it is almost criminal for a grammar school boy to be unfamiliar with the logarithmic tables. We have destroyed the utility of our work in mathematics by clinging to the exploded theory that by mathematics we teach men to reason. It would be as sensible to say that by the use of chow chow we could teach a child to walk. In geography we teach children to locate Kamchatka and Bachmatchagovsk, who do not know that water natur- ally runs down hill. Our whole courses of study are burdened with useless clogging and extraneous matter that the wliole life of man or woman condemns in the life of the child. But that our educational system is clogged with superfluous and useless material is not the strongest indictment that can be brought against it. There are active demands of every-day life — demands that lack of fulfillment of which are threatening the very foundations of our civilization — which the school is not meeting. The passing of the small shop and of home manufacturing, the movement of the rural population towards the city, the establishment of the factory system of production, and the department store system of distribution, has de- stroyed for the boy or girl of today the hand training once obtained as helper in the home and as apprentice in the shop. The result is that at the very time when the industrial world is demanding men and women of greater dexterity in the handling of more complicated tools and machinery and demanding that they enter industrial life prepared to take up this work, since more and more the opportunity for ap- prentice training is passing away — at the very time when these demands are growing more and more insistent, our boys and girls are being more and more deprived of the training that would prepare them for this new, highly complicated, economic life. There are some signs that the educational world is preparing in some degree to meet these new demands, though not in the inde- pendent, clear-sighted manner that is desirable. Instead of revolution and complete reorganization of our school course to meet the new demands and to get free from the worthless accumulations of grafting and stuffing, we are to have for the most part a retention of the old with industrial and commercial education grafted on it. This move- ment IS seen everywhere in the establishment of commercial courses, in the introduction of manual training, in the building of agricultural and trade schools, and in some isolated cases even the sloughing off of some of the useless accretions of a century and a half of experi- mentation, additions, reforms, and blunders. It is to be hoped as the work of guiding the destinies of our public schools passes into the hands of better educated and more thoughtful men and women who understand modern life and conditions, that the problems which con- front and threaten modern education will be met earnestly and fear- lessly, and as time passes with less regard for tradition and the prejudices of the past. •:-o -0«C3 0

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■:-o = o 0 : 0 ' :- Agnes Mathilde Wergeland. Ph. D. (Zurich) Professor of History and French. 5 1 June Etta Downey. B. A.. (Wyoming) M. A., Ph. D. (Chi- cago) Professor of Philosophy and Enghsh and the Principal of the Depart- ment of University Ex- tension. Helen Middlekauff. (Illinois State Normal School) (Wellesley) Professor of the English Language and Principal of the Preparatory De- partment. Grace Raymond Hebard. B. S., M. A. (Iowa) Ph. D. (Illinois Wesleyan) Professor of Political Econ- omy and Librarian. Charles Kerns Buckle. A. B., M. a. (Rio Grande) Ph. D. (Wooster) Principal of the State Nor- mal School and Profes- sor of Education. 0 r»-: