Tonopah Daily Bonanza

Normal Training School
Tonopah deserves congratulations for having secured a normal training school for the ambitious young folks of both sexes of the southern country. The opening of this branch of school life will enable many young men and women aspiring to pedagogical training to perfect themselves in the courses that lead to the granting of teachers' certificates.

In the appointment of Miss Rieve it is certain that the course of study will be supplemented by ability, diligence, diplomacy and experience and the results will no doubt repay the investment which comes from county funds instead of from school funds. Miss Rieve is a preceptress of experience whose faculty of directing minds budding into maturity has been tested in the schools of three states and there is little question but that she will give a good account of her stewardship at the expiration of the first year of the normal in this district.

One of the great evils of Nevada schools has been the importation of instructors from other states. Nothing has been said against the competence of these teachers but it is a notorious fact that few of them have been in touch with the interests of the state which gave them bread and butter. They came here as mercenaries, ready to give so many hours a day and so many months a year to the public schools but their hearts were not with the vast commonwealth of whose resources they had but faint conception. They were here for the sole reason that the schools of Nevada paid more than the schools of their home states and they never allowed the fact to escape the attention of parents that they were outlanders intent on finishing their contracts and returning home to spend the money taken from Nevada taxpayers.

The result has been that the pupils of Nevada schools acquired more about Magellan, Hatteras, Pike's Peak and Labrador than they did about their own state. They were regaled with mountain climbing experiences in the Himalayas, the Andes, Timbuctoo, or Thibet, and they seldom or never heard of the beautiful mountain splendors of Elko county, the snow clad heights of Mount Rose, the Alpine splendors of Mono or Inyo counties, within a night's ride of Tonopah, in California. The prehistoric grandeur of Lahontan with its absorbing antiquity were a sealed page and at no time was there an opportunity for a child to learn that the first white man whose foot threaded the sagebrush was a Franciscan monk wending his solitary and parlous way from the halls of Montezuma to the monastery of his order in California.

How many public school children or teachers even know there is a citrus belt in Nevada where semi-tropical fruits grow in wild profusion? Do any of these foreign teachers know that cotton was cultivated in Nevada in commercial quantities during the war or are young minds impressed with the significance of the proud title of the "Battleborn" state? What effort has been made to enlist interest of high school pupils in the strange subterranean rivers that feed the farms of our fertile valleys?

None.

The teacher imported from the east or north or south has been a necessary evil because Nevada had no teachers of her own to supply the demand of the schools that seemed to spring up over night with the inrush of twenty thousand miners and their families from Colorado, Utah, California, Idaho and Montana. The hectic stage of growth has passed and the educators of Nevada have had time to plan and prepare for a permanent and Greater Nevada.

The normal school is the first step in this direction of developing state pride, loyalty and love of environment and a resolve to develop and build up the land of their adoption.

Nevada teachers for Nevada schools is the slogan that should ring through every county of the state and thrill every resident with the fire of fresh zeal and the unquenchable ardor of missionaries.

Such a policy does not spell banishment for the loftier grades of educators who must always be in demand on the strength of their ability. This state is too big and the people are not so hidebound with conceit that they will deny their children the influence and instruction of the best talent that money can buy. If the boys and girls of Nevada do not qualify for the noble cause then they are the ones who should be weeded out after a trial shall have demonstrated the fact that they are not capable of imparting instruction to the younger generation. For another decade at least specialists must be hired in older established sections, but in the meantime Nevada should not shrink from the responsibility of educating its own sons and daughters to take the stations in the public schools where they legitimately belong.