Newspapers / The Chatham Record (Pittsboro, … / July 28, 1927, edition 1 / Page 2
Part of The Chatham Record (Pittsboro, N.C.) / About this page
This page has errors
The date, title, or page description is wrong
This page has harmful content
This page contains sensitive or offensive material
PAGE TWO THE CHATHAMRECORD o. J. PETERSON Editor and Publisher SUBSCRIPTION PRICE: One Year Six Months THURSDAY, JULY 28, 1927 The opening of the great Chowan River bridge last week was a real event. The northeastern corner of the state now has access to the in terior. Lieutenant-Governor Long was master of ceremonies of the occasion. Better watch out for the boll weevil. Every punctured square picked up now will save a swarm of weevil later, and don’t stop plough ing as long as the horse can make his way up and down the rows, or till the danger of the weevil is past. Os course, when the editor char acterized A. D. Watts as unscdupu lous it was in connection with his political career. A friend chal lenges us on the use of the word, stating that it implies deceit, a characteristic foreign to the late Mr. Watts. But we do not interpret the word, but would only cite the election laws and the congressional and senatorial districting as an il lustration of what we mean. It was all open enough. But may be, our memory of the part played in those performances by Mr. Watts is at fault. Some of the elite of Hayes-Bar ton suburb, Raleigh, have been playing the fool recently. A Greek citizen, who has won w T ealth run ning a shoe-shine parlor, bought a lot in that exclusive suburb and proposed to build a $12,000 home. The Hayes-Bartonites held an in dignation meeting in the Baptist church and used anything but Christian charity in discussing the means of preventing the contam ination of their community. It would be interesting to run back the pedigree of + he Greek and the objectors forty, fifty, or a hundred generations, if it were possible, but fully as interesting to watch the I outcome of the families the next few generations. Chatham gets $2,000 from the special SIOO,OOO fund of the equal ization fund. The equalization board met last week, but made few changes in the allotments to the various counties. It is probable that they knew at first more about the comparative value of property in the hundred counties than any body did that hasn’t studied the sit uation. It was taken for granted that those counties which had hith erto got a lion’s share but were cut this year had been treated wrongfully. It is difficult to see why so much credence should be put in the fairness of former al lotments and so little in this year’s allotments. Some counties that had been getting nothing have been made handsome allotments this year. But that would as aptly in dicate that they had been treated unfairly before* as that they are being favored this time. A man cannot stand off 100 miles and judge the average wealth of the citizens of a county by what he knows of the larger enterprises of the county and of the wealth of a comparative few citizens. There is much wealth in Robeson county but there are lots oi people in it and ten thousands of acres of little present value. “THE DRY FORK”. While commenting the other day upon the dryness of this immediate community and the abundance of rain above and below, Mrs. W. L. Powell recalled that the Indians are said to have called this the “Dry Fork”, the clouds following the Haw and the Rocky and Deep ri vers. In 1924 the rains were sc general that the principle didn’t work. In 1925 the clouds time and again followed the Rocky. This season more of them seem to have been attracted by the Haw, but a considerable number more than have reached this burg have followed the Rocky. For several weeks it has been difficult to work the crops in some sections of the county, but up to this writing, July 22, the ground has been too wet to plow only once in Pittsboro for more than a few hours at a time, and that exceptional time for only two days. DISCUSSING SCHOOLS. “Your editorial on the subject of teaching in our public schools is deserving of a pension by the state”, wrote Capt. S. A. Ashe, the veteran soldier, editor, and histo rian, after reading the recent “An Appeal for the Capable.” The practice of tying all the children to gether with the same rope is crim inal. Each class should be divided into sections,” the nonogenarian continued. “That editorial of yours last week,” said Mr. Fred P. Strong of the Carolina Power Company, San ford, is the best thing I have seen on the school question. In England where I was educated, we had the scheme you suggest, and I was through college at sixteen and a half years of age, having won a $6,000 scholarship at the age of twelve. If I had been tied down with all the pupils of my age, I would have been several years long er getting through, if I had got through at all. In our London school, the bright pupils were se lected and taught together, and it made no difference how young a lad was just so he had covered enough of the fundamentals to have the foundation for the advanced work and had evidenced an ability to do it”. “I read that editorial of yours”, said Mr. J. J. Jenkins, of Siler City. “It was on the right line. Yet the solution is difficult. There is no question that a few pupils can learn much more rapidly than oth ers and that holding them back is an injustice”. The foregoing are uns:licited comments upon the one editorial, capitoned “An Appeal for the Capable”, and Capt. Ashe goes further and says, “Please keep up your good work. Persuade the au thorities of Chatham to do as you say. The resulc will be so favor able to Chatham that the Chatham schools will become celebrated.” But there is so much we should like to say that it is hard to say it in reasonable space limits. There is no question, we believe, that one pupil in every ten, on the average, can learn ten times as fast as the slowest poke in the ave rage ten, and one in every hun dred that can learn five times as fast as the average of the hun dred. Only one who has had large experience with boys and girls can appreciate the difference in intel lectual capacity that exists, and the dififculty of doing justice to every member of a school when the race horse is hitched in the same team as the poky mule. It is not only an injustice to the capable, but to the poor fellow who actually needs every assistance to be rendered by the teacher and to go at only such gait as permits him to build a thorough foundation. We have shown, in the previous editorial, how the capable not only fails to progress as he should and thus save years of time in achiev ing the same thing but also be comes a trifler and a loafer, in juries that are almost irreparable. Further along we shall show the effect upon the dullard of being yoked with the high-geared. Recently some one said that Lin coln would not have remained in college if he had had the fortune, good or bad, to attend one. The process, would have been too slow for him. But that depends in any case upon the initiative of the bright student and his self-assent iveness. In some cases as bright a youth as was Lincoln, un aware of his genius, or capacity, and lacking in self-assertiveness, would, without outside pepping up and suggestion of the folly of giv ing time and money to obtain whai he could secure alone in half time, would continue to drag along with the appointed group, constantly growing more and more willing to be a poke with the sluggish team and sluggish driver with which he has become associated. Just now, before beginning this editorial, we read the statement from Dr. Nicholas Butler that there is no great genius in the world standing head and shoulders above the commonality and the reason is possibly, to be found here the smothering of genius or ability by the present-day standardization. Think of Bryan’ts writing “Than atopsis” at the age of eighteen, and of how unlikely it would have been had he been required to meet the conditions of present-day col lege admission. The average eign teen-year-old youth of today would never have heard the word “thanatopsis” if that eigh teen year old boy of a century ago had not written his poem, and, we doubt, even after that youth’s poem has been made the subject of study in their classes, if half the high-school graduates of North Carolina can tell you off hand what the word means. Greek has been thrown out of the curriculm, as of too little worth to take up the time of the youth, and it is too good for the average boy, but it would certainly be more sensible to allow the capable youth to study the language which helped make Bryant a poet and philosopher at eighteen than to give a modicum of time to the study of the poem of the youth himself. The bright youth can certainly, at least, understand alone what a bright youth of a hundred years ago wrote, else no further commentary upon present methods of teaching is needed. The con clusion is inevitable, and the reason for the lack of outstanding schol ars, poets, and other writers is evident. Milton in an essay on education, advocating a reform, gives a scheme that makes a youth at twenty practically the master oi the great literatures of the world, but, unfortunately, his reform, which dealt with the teaching of the languages, was not adopted by the pedagogical world, and for two centuries and a half the same wasteful method of teaching the languages has continued, with the result that the educational world has decried Greek and Latin. Mil ton’s idea was that languages should be studied as means of se curing the keys to the literatures, and that unless the keys were us ed, the study of the languages was of comparatively little value. He urged the actual reading of the classics, regard being had in the selections of the classics which are really educational in their con tents. But the schools failed large ly to adopt his idea, with the con sequence that hundreds of thou sands of boys, and more recently girls, have studied Latin and Greek without ever becoming competent to read the languages, and merely for the disciplinary effect of the studies of the mechanisms of the languages. The writer, reading that essay two months ago, thought what a fool he was to have studied Greek several years and never to have read a complete Greek classic. At college, the reading was stopped every minute or two to examine the wheels of the language. The gram mar, of course, is the first essen tial, but to make the whole Greek or Latin course a mere tiresome ex amination of the mechanism of the language is wasteful and abortive. For instance, of the seven books of Xenophon’s Anabasis our class read scarcely two books and did not reach Xenophon’s own wonder ful part in bringing back the ten thousand Greeks from their march with Cyrus into the very heart of the great Persian empire. In the first place, there were members of the class that were a clog upon the wheels of the class men who could not have learned to read the lang uage gliby in forty years. On the other hand, there were a few of us that could have read the seven books in the five months given it, and have really got a wonderful lot of information from it, and thrills as numerous as in any wild west story, and more stisfying be cause of their truth. We recall one day reading the al lotted page for the next lesson with a slow poke whose very persistence, cultivated by the necessity of dig ging, has made him one of the big preachers of the state. When we had gone over the page, the other youth said, “Let’s read it again”, and the writer hooted at the idea, saying that he knew the thing by heart. He was dared to repeat, and asked which he should give, the English or the Greek. “The Greek”, said the young preacher, and there was the test. The other boy repeated every word of that page of Greek, through he had not been aware of the test that he would be put to at the end, recall ing the English translation when the Greek didn’t appear to his con sciousness and retransplating. The only error was in putting one par ticle in the wrong place. Yet he had to go the next day and sit fifty minutes on the class while the page was slovenly read, a sentence at a time, and then the wheels examin ed, just as if one should start out on a Ford and every hundred yards have the chauffer stop and get down and have you examine into the mechanism of the engine. It would be an exhilerating journey, wouldn’t it? And you would nat urally love to ride in a Ford, and seek every opportunity to take a ride—nit ? Well, just as you would feel about the Ford, those of us who really might have spun along enjoying the scenery, developed no THE CHATHAM RECORD i love for the literature, and very little vocabulary, since vocabulary grows by frequency of meeting words in print or conversation. And for thirty-five years the most perfect of all languages was neg lected, and though we had the key to its wonderful literature it re mained sealed up while we read the Saturday Evening Post and va rious other junk in magazine and book form. After reading Milton’s essay and seeing the folly of the procedure parented by the college, and know ing that we knew, even after 35 years of neglect, more Greek gram mar than the average newspaper reader knows of English Grammar, we found a copy of the Anabasis in Mr. B. Nooe’s library, and in the spare time of the next SIX WEEKS read every line of the seven books, of which a third of our time for five months of the heydey of youth, when the gram mar and the vocabulary were read ier to hand, was given to reading less than two books, and we have never enjoyed any book more, and have marveled at the readiness of Xenophon to meet every kind of occasion that arose, and thought what a teacher his Socrates must have been! Now, the foregoing is necessary, as is the rather apparently boast ful statement of Mr. Strong’s, in order to make clear our point,that the time of the capable student is wasted, and that many a man who might be a master of the rich lit i eratures of the world, and acquaint ed with the richness of nature’s re : velat : .ons, has become a waster of i time and talent because of the lack i of incentive which should come to him in school. But some one says that a bookworm is not what the schools want to make. All Greek philosophy and oratory and poetry r are not practical, but if the es ;! sence of the language is not worth ; j arriving at, what is the use of studying it at all? And if the sub i stance of the literatures is of no i practical value, which certainly is not a reasonable proposition, of r what value can be a slovenly study ing of the mechanics,which instead of enriching the capable youth’s i j mind, deaden his ambitions and creates an ennui that is deadly in [ all its touches ? Milton had learned , these things, Latin, Greek, German, Italian, and practically every other European language and literature, but they did not hinder his per forming acceptably the duties of secretary of state for the Com monwealth of England, and, cer tainly, it is improbable that we should have had for the delectation of high school students, today “Paradise Lost” and Paradise Re gained” if Milton had not been a classical scholar. In short, the ed ucational world is neglecting the things that made the poets and philosophers whom the modern world is bowing down to and giving devoted years of study. Shake speare’s education consisted large ly of the study of Latin, and it is doubtful if he had not read Virgil, (and we may believe he had read it all and not the few mouthfuls that the ordinary highschool class reads), there would have been no Shakespearean classics for grad uate students in the great Ameri can Universities to study so pains takingly that they actually count the times the great dramatist used certain words, and that according to a North Carolina youth of a few years ago, who, studying at Johns Hopkins or some other University, wrote of the silliness and boredom of such a procedure when he had expected to be engrossed in some thing wonderful under the tutelage of a great university professor. There you are—devoting years of time to the studying of the works of a youth who got his education in the Latin academy of Stratford on-Avon, and neglecting the edu cational means that made the Mil ton’s Shakespeares, Johnsons, and Bryants! But it is only the one in the hun dred that can achieve mightlily as did a Milton or Bryant in school, but that one in a hundred or thou sand is the Dempsey, Kilrain, or Tunney of the intellectual world, and needs an individual training if his talents are to be conserved to the world and become a blessing to himself and others. But tens of thousands by a different mode of teaching can achieve wonders that are not now achieved. They can take all your “practical” subjects and do the other too, and do it all more easily than other hundreds of thousands can take only the practical” subjects. But this editorial has grown long and we have only touched upon the wastefulness of the pre- j sent method so far as it concerns 1 the capable. Our treatment of the matter from the standpoint of the apparent dullard, or even the ave rage student, must await another issue. But let us add here that the curse of the present day as far as the bright student is concerned is the unit system, the requirement that one must have so many “units” to enter college, must have sat on a bench a certain number hours and been bored to exhaustion by a perhaps bumble-headed teach ! er and the slovenly answers of the • ordinary run of student. Imagine • Maude S. as a filly being compelled . to take trotting lessons of an hour • a day from a poke of a horse that , could never have made a mile in i five minutes! Well, that is what i the bright student is up against. ; You can amagine Maud S. becom > ing disgusted with a race track and ‘ becoming a cart horse. That was > what the recent speaker meant . when he said Lincoln would not . have remained in college if he had ; gone. Not only does the talented l student need individual teaching [ (but mighty little of it) but he ; needs also a flaming intellect to f teach and inspire him. But So ; crates, today, could not get a col ; lege professorship in North Caro lina, forsooth because he hasn’t the Ph. D. degree, hasn’t been ’ through the educational mills, and ( Jesus Christ would lose out on the same grounds. More anon. > ) The suggestion in last weeks’ Re . cord that the county issue bonds to help the owners of the Bonlee • and Bennett Railroad . extend the line through Pittsboro j to Seaforth has apparently met a . lively response. The building of , that road would probably do more . than any other one thing to in , crease property values in the coun ty. The county owes a million dol , lars for things it couldn’t sell if it £ had to try. There would be in trinsic value in a railroad, and it > itself would be a taxpayer, and if . it developed the county as it would r seem possible it would, within a few years, increase taxable values j in the county sufficiently to take ( care of the increased indebtedness. I i Suggestions For Fall 1 And Winter Crops 9 Farmers should begin making ’ preparations for winter feed and ’ cover crops, now and if possible, buy seed now as they are always higher as the season advances. Some good winter cover crops and 1 feed crops that might be men -1 tioned for this county are oats and vetch, rye and vetch, and combina tion of abruzzi rye, beardless bar ley, wheat and vetch has been found to give good result in this section. The above mentioned crops may be used for hay, or turn ed under for osil improvement. Where a soil improvement prog ram is to be carried out, abruzzi rye and vetch may be used in com bination to be turned under in the spring, using a bushel to a bushel and a half of rye with twenty pounds of vetch per acre. This should be turned under when the rye is in the dough stage. Oats and vetch make a good hay combination where a bushel and a half to two bushels of oats are used with twen ty pounds of vetch per acre. A report just received from the Piedmont Branch Experiment sta tion at Statesville reports an ave rage yield of five bushels of Abruz zi rye over the common rye per acre in a five year test. This va riety is no doubt the best for this county, due to its highest yielding qualities and also to its hardiness. In the case of barley, Tennessee No. 6 seems to give highest yields in this state. In the case of oats, in a five year test, the Fulghum has been found to be superior to either the Appier or the Lee carieties. Some varieties of wheat that have yielded well and above the others in this five year test are; Alabama Blue Stem, N. C., Fulcaster and Pennsylvania Fulcaster. Any of the above mentioned varieties would do well in this county. The county agent would like to hear from any farmers who have any of the following seed to mar ket; Abruzzi rye, common rye, oats, wheat, barley, crimson Clover or hairy vetch. This information will be turned over to the Agronomy Division at State College, and buy- j ers will be able to know where to' get good seed. N. C. SHIVER, County Agent. Learn how many servings can be expected from each kind of food you buy, and you will go a long way toward economical manage ment of the food supply. Buy by weight or number when you can. WHEN ITS TIME TO BUY r i ROOFING i : | j For Chatham and surrounding counties, Budd-Piper Roofing Company in Durham is headquarters for all kinds of roofing. i t The Budd-Piper Roofing Company can sup | ply you, and supply you at the right price, . with anything from 5-V Crimp Galvanized ' Roofing to the better grades of roofing for J good homes, churches, schools, factories, stores 1 and other structures. THE BUDD-PIPER I ROOFING CO I DURHAM, N. C. t F STATEMENT OF i ft THE BANK OF PITTSBORO ‘ PITTSBORO, N. C. t AT THE CLOSE OF BUSINESS JUNE 30TH., 1927 : t RESOURCES 5 Loans and Discounts $158,026.32 i Stocks and Bonds 22,500.00 Banking House and Fixtures 15,320.00 Cash and Due From Banks 74,167.61 Total ; $270,013.93 * LIABILITIES > Capital Stock $ 20,000.00 1 Surplus and undivided Profits 20,085.70 > Interest Reserved 2,500.00 i Bills Payable 10,000.00 . Cashiers Checks Out 2,430.41 l Deposits 214,997.82 1 Total $270,013.93 o— A. H. LONDON, Pres. J. L. GRIFFIN, Cashier. ————■MgggMj■ggg— J v. 1 ! SOMEBODY IS SAVING Did you know that last year the savings of the people of this country amounted to 6,938 mil lion dollars? This is 334 million more than a . year ago, and 500 million more than two years ago. So SOMEBODY is saving, that’s sure. Are YOU? That’s the question. The huge advance in savings may be due to prohibition or many oth er causes, but it shows that our people are be ginning to “salt down” more money than in real ly prosperous times. We invite you to open an account at our Bank and join the WISE crowd. THE BANK OF GOLDSTON, GOLDSTON, N. C. i j Cedar Poles | Crossties ;I :> I want all I can get. Highest . <; ;! cash prices. Bring them along •, | j R. M. CONNELL, ;t j| Pittsboro, N. C. j: Thursday, J o |, , 8 ,
The Chatham Record (Pittsboro, N.C.)
Standardized title groups preceding, succeeding, and alternate titles together.
July 28, 1927, edition 1
2
Click "Submit" to request a review of this page. NCDHC staff will check .
0 / 75