Marion County Schools

          Mr Knowles

 

U. G. MITCHELL
Principal of the Hillsboro Schools and one of our Rising Young Men
AN ARTICLE EXTRACTED FROM THE PEABODY NEWS 1901
Contributed by Charmaine Keith (charmain@southwind.net) 26 August 1998

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Peabody News
1901

The subject of this sketch was born Nov. 26, 1872 in Nashua, Iowa, and named Ulysses
Grant Mitchell. In 1885 his parents moved to Marion County and settled on a farm five miles
east of Peabody. Ulysses attended the Peabody schools five years and graduated in 1892. He
then taught a country school at Braddock three terms and afterward attended the State
University of Nebraska. He completed his education by graduating from the Central Normal
College of Kansas at Great Bend with the degree of Bachelor of Arts. At this place he also
held a position as instructor in German and Mathematics for some time. In 1898 he was chosen
as principal of the Hillsboro school, which position he has acceptably filled three years.
Following we publish a contribution on education which he furnished by request:


KNOWLEDGE NOT POWER BUT CO-ORDINATE WITH IT

Our forefathers used to say, "Knowledge is Power." The statement would seem to
indicate that the two are coincident. They are seldom, if ever, so. It might mean that
knowledge and power, speaking broadly, are different phases of the same activity, much as
cause and effect are merged together into a single unity. In that sense it may sometimes be
correct. But the truth is that the two have certain points in common and are usually
concomitant and if the old adage means more than that it is faulty.

There is a broad a distinction, educationally, between knowledge and power as there
is between science and art, and to see that distinction and recognize its force at all times
in his work is highly essential to the educator. The distinction, as it affects his work,
amounts to this, that while every child possesses a certain natural and individual
capability both of learning and of power to apply what he knows to the varying circumstances
of environment, the one does not necessarily follow the other and education can develop both
together or either at the expense of the other. Education can not create; it can only
develop natural capacity and that development should be harmonious. The true education gives
knowledge but it gives with it commensurate power to apply that knowledge to the
difficulties and forces of the world which are to be met and grappled with. It must be
admitted that our schools too often lay stress up on the importation of knowledge and
neglect the cultivation of power. Many a boy who has "gone through" a complete arithmetic
and not only learned all the rules and definition but also, as he proudly announces, "solved
every problem in the book," is completely at sea when you give him a simple problem which
requires nothing but the application of what he already knows in a way that is slightly new.
Many a young lady who has finished grammar can rattle off any definition pertaining to it
or model for parsing that you may ask for, besides having had a course in higher English and
another in rhetoric, when given a little stanza from Longfellow or a sentence from Webster,
cannot name the principal proposition or correctly place the clauses and phrases in their
relations to each other.

Many a high school student with full three years of Latin, flattering himself that
he is quite a Latin scholar, comes across a word of easy Latin derivation such as
"concatenate" which he has never seen before and it is a dead blank to him. He knows well
enough that "con" means together and "catena" chain, but just here where he needs them he
cannot put them in place and see that the word literally means to chain together. Many a
classical college graduate, flushed with honors, believing that he is a scholar, fully
equipped for a splendid career and that he is going forth, "conquering and to conquer,"
suddenly thrown upon his resources and compelled to make for himself what we common folk
call "aliving" is about as helpless as if he were surrounded with the necessary tools and
materials, which he has seen before but never touched, and told that he must build by
himself a King's palace. He is familiar, perhaps, with how a King's palace should look, he
has seen the workmen handle the tools, but what sort of a palace do you thin he would build?

Essentially similar are the failures of the boy to grasp and unravel the problem,
the girl to interpret the sentence and correlate its parts, the student to use his Latin
when opportunity is presented and the college graduate to make a bare living when necessity
required. We may be inclined to charge such failures to meager capacity on the part of the
learner, but by no means it is due to the deforming effects of one-sided educating. Such
teaching is due to false standards, a desire to cover a great deal of ground and to make
work "show off" well. But such questions may be asked, such work may be assigned, such means
and methods generally may be employed as will develop knowledge and power simultaneously and
harmoniously and may God help us teachers to find and use more of them for the good of the
precious young lives entrusted for a time to our guidance.


U. G. Mitchell,
Hillsboro, Kan., May 23, 1901


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Letter of welcome from the Board of Education 1901    image

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PROF. E. L. ROSEBUSH
Principal of the Florence Schools and a Worker
AN ARTICLE EXTRACTED FROM THE PEABODY NEWS 1901
Contributed by Charmaine Keith (charmain@southwind.net) 26 August 1998

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PEABODY NEWS
1901

The picture below is not of a "fine auld English gentleman." As you might suppose,
but of E. L. Rosebush, a fine young man of modern ideas and exceptional merit. He is a man
of action and an earnest student. By close application and earnest study he has acquired an
education, which with his natural abilities fit him for much higher positions than he
occupies as principal of the Florence schools. But he believes that a place well filled is
but his simple duty and gives his best efforts to doing good work in Florence. He is
appreciated there and has now completed his second year in that school, with prospects of
being called again.

The News asked him to contribute an article for this edition. With modest apology
for its brevity and lack of preparation he submits the following, which contains some ideas
worth careful investigation:

Notice the tender plant that ventures to raise its head against the cold winds of
April. How it sways with each unkind gust; but between cold rain and truing days come
sunshine and balmy breezes. Finally it has itself disciplined to the changes of weather.
Weather, too, has become more kind and the tender plant is now a grown flower, strong in its
beauty and conscious of success. Life is a struggle. The flower combated the external. The
pupil aided by the teacher must fight the internal in order to command the external.
Teachers, talk plainly with you pupil about the struggles that you have gone through. Many
of your pupils are now where you once were. Early let them see that bad conduct is simply
lack of self-discipline, and that you sympathize with them. Who are you that you may frown
and scold and worry and say sarcastic things to your pupils for then failure to measure up
to your exalted standard? Do you expect a pupil from ten to sixteen years of age to acquire
what you have been collecting for thirty years? I believe in the discipline of kindness and
fairness. Kindness is not effeminate, mistaken inactivity; it is often stern reproof of some
times a good switching. Discipline a pupil must have. You see that he gets it.

E. L. Rosebush,
Florence, Kan., May 20, 1901

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Peabody High School Football Team 1912
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