ses unthinking men immediately
began to criticise the schools. They should have been trade schools, or
industrial schools or military schools--any kind of schools that they
were not. And how clearly it was being demonstrated, we were told, that
the time formerly spent on music and drawing, art and literature,
algebra and geometry, history and Latin, had all been wasted! How much
better it would have been if, instead of these "frills," the children
had been given "practical subjects"! (Practical. Save the mark. One is
tempted here to go off on a by-path and discuss the topic, "What is
Practical?") Thus the criticism of the unthinking--of the laymen who
went off at half-cock.

And this criticism was deepened and strengthened and extended and made
more vehement, again by the unthinking, when the fine results of the
Plattsburgh experiment were revealed, in which, thru the processes of
intensive training, men were quickly whipt into shape for new, and
difficult, and responsible undertakings. And the equally good results
that came from the officers' training schools, in which college boys by
a similar program were metamorphosed, almost at over-night, into capable
army officers, had the same effect. How signally had the schools failed!
And these long years spent in school and college, "dawdling over the
frills," had been to no effect, whereas "a few weeks under _intelligent_
educational direction accomplishes marvels."

And the same has further illustration. Ministers of the Gospel selected
for chaplains, physicians and surgeons chosen for medical service,
nurses for the Red Cross, engineers for various forms of engineering,
and many others have all been given this short period of intensive
training and, to their credit and ours be it said, all responded
quickly. But the conclusion drawn by the unthinking has been, all along
the line, that the later efficiency of these men which has gained for us
the plaudits and the gratitude of the world was due to this short period
of intensive training, "under men who were intelligent enough to know
just what was needed and just how to go about to secure it"--men not
hampered by any pedagogical nonsense or grown stale over a long attempt
to discriminate between the "infinity of nothingness and the nothingness
of infinity" (as one might summarize a rather common criticism), rather
than to the former years of patient toil, and discipline, and
accomplishment which had really laid the foundat