Business is put above learning, administration above education, discipline and order above cultivation of genius and talent. Our schools and colleges are controlled by business men. The school-boards, the boards of trustees of almost every school and college in the country consist mainly of manufacturers, storekeepers, tradesmen, bulls and bears of Wall street and the market-place. What wonder that they bring with them the ideals and methods of the factory, the store, the bank and the saloon. If the saloon controls politics, the shop controls education. Business men are no more competent to run schools and colleges than astronomers are fit to run hotels and theaters. Our whole educational system is vicious. A popular scientific journal entered a protest against the vulgarization of our colleges, the department-store trade methods of our universities, but to no avail. The popular hero, the administrative business superintendent still holds sway, and poisons the sources of our social life by debasing the very foundation of our national education. VIII From time to time the “educational” methods of our philistine teachers are brought to light. A girl is forced by a schoolma’am of one of our large cities to stay in a corner for hours, because she unintentionally transgressed against the barrack-discipline of the school-regulations. When the parents became afraid of the girl’s health and naturally took her out of school, the little girl was dragged before the court by the truant officer. Fortunately “the judge turned to the truant officer and asked him how the girl could be a truant, if she had been suspended. He didn’t believe in breaking children’s wills.” In another city a pupil of genius was excluded from school because “he did not fall in with the system” laid out by the “very able business-superintendent.” A schoolmistress conceives the happy idea of converting two of her refractory pupils into pin-cushions for the edification of her class. An “educational” administrative superintendent of a large, prosperous community told a lady who brought to him her son, an extraordinarily able boy, “I shall not take your boy into my high-school, in spite of his knowledge.” When the mother asked him to listen to her, he lost patience and told her with all the force of his school-authority, “Madam, put a rope around his neck, weigh him well down with bricks!”