The Times And Democrat

AN IMPORTANT QUESTION.

"Shall the Boys and Girls Be Sent Off to School?"

Are you hesitating, wavering, undecided about sending John or Mary to high school or college this fall? Hesitate no longer. The course in college or in the high school may double your son's or your daughter's earning capacity and, better still, give him or her a breadth of vision and a nobleness of purpose which could never have come without it, says the Progressive Farmer, of Raleigh, N. C.

There might be such a thing as a people making a too lavish expenditure for school training; but we in the South have never yet been guilty of that offense. We may have spent unwisely, but that is a very different matter. There are, no doubt, cases where father and mother have placed too heavy burdens on themselves to send the children to college; but there is, in the unwisest of such instances, a worthy even if misguided, spirit of heroism; and for every such case there are a hundred cases where the parents have failed to do enough, either from false notions of economy or because their own ignorance was so dense that they could not even comprehend the advantages of education for others—most piteous tragedy of all where darkness thus perpetuates itself and never even knows the light.

We believe in training every child to help himself, in trying to inspire him with the desire for an education and then in letting him help pay for it. We would not for one minute advise any father to wear himself out to send his boys to college or high school and give them a good time; but wherever the young man or the young woman has a real desire for knowledge and makes an earnest effort to attain it, the parents can well afford to make sacrifices, if necessary, to gratify that desire and realize that effort.