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Show diving Children Heller Chance Lincoln Stelfcns, old-time muckraker and disillusioned reporter, is a candidate for school trustee in his home town of Carmel- Calif.; and his informally-announced platform indicates that he would make a school trustee of 'a strange and refreshing newness. "My principal purpose," he says, "would be to develop the schools to the point where they would work to see that our children are not a repetition of ourselves, but a needed improvement on us." , , - , And how would he do this? Well, he would begin by having a survey made of all the grown tips, to find out what their "funny certainties" are. -X- "Then, having made the survey," he says, "I would have the children taught the opposite. This may be a rough method, but it reveals my theory; to get us out of our troubles we must somehow produce children who will develop devel-op into grown-ups utterly different from us." Here is a notion which almost every grown-up has had at one time or another. To look into a schoolyard full of bright- lively youngsters is to feci both lifted up and depressed. de-pressed. Trie children are so unspoiled, so eager, .so ready to be filled full of the faith that can move mountains but just as this thought encourages you, you reflect that in 20 years or so they will simply be grown men and women no better and no worse than we ourselves are tody v. Somewhere along the way the brightness gets worn off and the eagerness gets dulled, and instead of faith there comes disillusionment, and year by year the world's follies and stupidities get repeated by a tribe of adults who are not recognizably better than their fathers and mothers. Probably all of us have mused over this melancholy fact onw and again. We might not be quite ready to adopt Mr Steffens' scheme, for it would be a drastic one, and if carried out it might leave us, in our old age, lonely strangers in a world which our children had re-made. But its an idea that bears thinking about- just the same. The welfare of the world depends ultimately on the emergence of people who are wiser and kinder and in all ways better folk than we ourselves are. |