Baltimore Evening Sun (15 June 1911): 6.

If the present striking of attitudes and intoning of heroics continues, the newspapers may be forced to withdraw their reporters from the City Hall and send their dramatic critics.

Dr. Boris Sidis, of Harvard, a pundit of high eminence, has lately published a pamphlet in which he vigorously attacks the public schools of the United States, alleging that their main effect upon the really intelligent pupil is to throttle his intelligence and so reduce him to the low level of the average American and pseudo-American child. Says he:

The good-goody schoolma’am, the mandarin-schoolmaster, the Philistine-pedagogue, the pedant-adiministrator—all have proved themselves incompetent to deal with the education of the young. They stifle talent, they stupefy the intellect, they paralyze the will, they suppress genius, they benumb the faculties of our children. The educator, with his pseudo-scientific, pseudopsychological pseudogogics, can only bring up a set of Philistines with firm, set habits—marionettes–dolls.

The average American public school teacher, says Dr. Sidis, is an ignoramus. The thing he implants in the minds of his pupils to not education, in any true sense, but a haggis of balderdash, to wit:

Credulity in old wives’ tales, sheepish submissiveness, barrack discipline, unquestioned and uncritical belief in authority, meaningless imitation of jingles and glbberish, memorization of mother-goose wisdom, repetition of incomprehensible prayers and articles of creed, unintelligent aping of good manners, silly games, prejudices and superstitions and fears of the supernormal and supernatural.

A plain-spoken and forthright men is the good doctor—a fellow of explicit and sizzling utterance. But how much truth is there in his indictment? Is it true, as he says, that the tendency of the public schools is to discourage originality and intelligence and cultivate a depressing mediocrity? What are the facts? What do they show? During the past half-century the public schools of Baltimore have turned out, I should say, about 600,000 pupils. Of that large number, how many have developed into first-rate men and women—men and women, that is, who have made real contributions to human knowledge or to the art of life—men and women who have given real aid to the progress of the race and left the world a bit better than they found it?

At the moment, unfortunately, I can’t think of a single one. Baltimore has raised a large crop of respectable second and third-raters—successful business men, competent professional men, middling artists, fair administrators. But in business, we have not produced, in 50 years, a single Havemayer or Wanamaker, in the sciences we have not produced a single Bell or Bessemer or Welch or Roentgen, in the arts we have not produced a single Meissionier or Rodin or Pinero or Mansfield or Henry James or William Watson or Victor Herbert, and in statecraft and politics we have not produced a single Taft or Aldrich or La Follette or Hughes or Laurier.

Are the public schools of Baltimore to blame for this paucity? I’m sure I don’t know. Has any gentleman in the house anything to say upon the subject?

To the inventory of freight encountered upon street-car platforms, some poetical fellow adds the following:

I took a few things home last night, to make the place look nice; My little lot will be a replica of Paradise. I piled them on a trolley car and pulled the starting cord— I eode alone, there was no room for other folk aboard.

And as I looked upon my goods I conned my memory o’er To see if I'd forgotten aught or left it in the store. The first installment seemed complete and not a thing I missed As with the greatest care I checked each item on the list:

Two feet of hose, a wooden reel, a shovel and a spade, A weeder and a trowel all were on one seat displayed. A rake, a watering pot and hoe and sodding set complete, Together with some flower pots, took up another seat.

Then, too, I had a barrow and a sprinkler and a trap; Likewise, a ten-foo t ladder, which I placed upon my lap. To close, I had a hammock, and with this I made so bold As to pass the package forward for the motorman to hold.

But this is not a fraction of my real suburban needs, Today I’ll buy a carload lot of vegetable seeds. I’ll get a cultivator and a plow and eke a horse— How will I get ’em home? Upon a trolley car, of course! G. G.

0ne of the things our volunteer publicists overlook is that the movement of the negroes out of dirty alleys and into such streets as Druid Hill avenue will have a tendency, whatever its drawbacks otherwise, to decrease disease among them. Living in filthy hovels, they have suffered greatly from tuberculosis and other such ills of bad housing, and no doubt they have helped to spread disease among the white population. A tuberculous negro cook in the kitchen is very apt to infect the family. During 1909, the last year for which figures last year are at hand, more than 10 per cent. Of the deaths from tuberculosis in Baltimore were among domestic servants, and no doubt all save a few of these servants were colored. The total death rate from tuberculosis among the colored population was 5.39 a thousand, while among the whites it was but 1.83. This shows that the average negro’s liability to tuberculosis is nearly three times that of the average white.

No doubt better housing will lift part of this burden from the black folk. Those wide and clean streets into which they have wormed their way show many evidences of an effort toward more civilized living. The houses are well kept. The darkies taking the air on the front steps are well dressed.

Well housed, with room to breathe and move about, the colored folk should quickly show a better state of health. No doubt, if the figures could be obtained, it would be found that the death rate among those living on Druid Hill avenue is already much lower than that among those who still live in filthy, tumble-down shanties in adjacent alleys.

Not the City Code, but the automobile law, was the statute actually violated. Such breathless haste plainly exceeded the speed limit–and not a light was burning!

After all, a leak in the reservoir is much easier to bear than a leak in the City Register’s office.

The Voice of the People, as the zephyrs waft it in:

Preston ain’t afraid of nobody. What they need in the Fire Department is rough-necks. College students ain’t no good. This town couldn’t hardly be no deader.