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 --------------------------------------------------------------------- KSGENWEB INTERNET GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In keeping with the KSGenWeb policy of providing free information on the Internet, this data may be used by non-commercial entities, as long as this message remains on all copied material. These electronic pages cannot be reproduced in any format for profit or other gain. Copying of the files within by non-commercial individuals and libraries is encouraged. Any other use, including publication, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission by electronic, mechanical, or other means requires the written approval of the file's author. --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 --------------------------------------------------------------------- KSGENWEB INTERNET GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In keeping with the KSGenWeb policy of providing free information on the Internet, this data may be used by non-commercial entities, as long as this message remains on all copied material. These electronic pages cannot be reproduced in any format for profit or other gain. Copying of the files within by non-commercial individuals and libraries is encouraged. Any other use, including publication, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission by electronic, mechanical, or other means requires the written approval of the file's author. ---------------------------------------------------------------------