cher more for his pains. Save for
assistance derived from a single person, I had to do the work myself for
all the years that the department continued. It was apparently
impossible for the American to work with sufficient patience and care to
achieve a result.

We all have our pet notions as to the particular evil which is "the
curse of America," but I always think that Theodore Roosevelt came
closest to the real curse when he classed it as a lack of thoroughness.

Here again, in one of the most important matters in life, did America
fall short with me; and, what is more important, she is falling short
with every foreigner that comes to her shores.

In the matter of education, America fell far short in what should be the
strongest of all her institutions: the public school. A more inadequate,
incompetent method of teaching, as I look back over my seven years of
attendance at three different public schools, it is difficult to
conceive. If there is one thing that I, as a foreign-born child, should
have been carefully taught, it is the English language. The individual
effort to teach this, if effort there was, and I remember none, was
negligible. It was left for my father to teach me, or for me to dig it
out for myself. There was absolutely no indication on the part of
teacher or principal of responsibility for seeing that a foreign-born
boy should acquire the English language correctly. I was taught as if I
were American-born, and, of course, I was left dangling in the air, with
no conception of what I was trying to do.

My father worked with me evening after evening; I plunged my young mind
deep into the bewildering confusions of the language--and no one
realizes the confusions of the English language as does the
foreign-born--and got what I could through these joint efforts. But I
gained nothing from the much-vaunted public-school system which the
United States had borrowed from my own country, and then had rendered
incompetent--either by a sheer disregard for the thoroughness that makes
the Dutch public schools the admiration of the world, or by too close a
regard for politics.

Thus, in her most important institution to the foreign-born, America
fell short. And while I am ready to believe that the public school may
have increased in efficiency since that day, it is, indeed, a question
for the American to ponder, just how far the system is efficient for the
education of the child who comes to its school without a