"A simple analogy will show the disastrous character of the present process, which may be briefly described as 'education' by cram and emetic. It is as if you filled a child's stomach to repletion with marbles, pieces of coal and similar material incapable of digestion--the more worthless the material the more accurate the analogy--then applied an emetic and estimated your success by the completeness with which everything was returned, more especially if it was returned 'unchanged,' as the doctors say. Just so do we cram the child's mental stomach, its memory, with a selection of dead facts of history and the like (at least when they are not fictions) and then apply a violent emetic called an examination (which like most other emetics causes much depression) and estimate our success by the number of statements which the child vomits onto the examination paper--if the reader will excuse me. Further, if we are what we usually are, we prefer that the statements shall come back 'unchanged'--showing no sign of mental digestion. We call this 'training the memory.' The present type of education is a curse to modern childhood and a menace to the future. The teacher who cannot tell whether a child is doing well without formally examining it, should be heaving bricks, but such a teacher does not exist. In Berlin they are now learning that the depression caused by these [23] emetics (examinations) often lead to child suicide--a steadily increasing phenomenon mainly due to educational overpressure and worry about examinations. "Short of such appalling disasters, however, we have to reckon with the existence of this enormous amount of stupidity, which those who fortunately escaped such education in childhood have to drag along with them in the long struggle towards the stars. This dead weight of inertia lamentably retards progress. "If you have been treated with marbles and emetics long enough, you may begin to question whether there is such a thing as nourishing food; if you have been crammed with dead facts, and then compelled to disgorge them, you may well question whether there are such things as nourishing facts or ideas." The gifted writer, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, in an editorial in the _New York American_, expressed herself recently in the following terms: "A wave of dissatisfaction is sweeping over the country regarding our school system. And eventually this will cause a change to be made. The larger understanding of mothers regarding education will result in the personal element entering into the training of children. "When women have a voice in the affairs of the nation there will be more teachers, larger salaries, fewer pupils in each department, and more attention will be given to the temperaments and varying dispositions of children by their instructors.