After this I should like to cast a brief glance at our public (state) elementary schools. Let us enter one of them — and what do we see? Rooms prepared for penning up these poor little ones, despised by the grown-ups. Yes, they are despised, and everything proclaims that we do not respect our children and take no account of them whatever. We do not look upon them as members of society whom we are preparing to bear its responsibilities when they grow up; we hand them over to the servant girl and to the street, leaving them to flounder in manifest error.

Everything that has been pre-pared for children in our country has come from the hand of one of the women's associations, which exert their efforts to collect money to carry out their projects. All they have accomplished so far is great, but it is little, owing to the lack of sufficient assistance available to them.

The thing that made me grieve and laugh at once is what I read in our newspapers recently about the government's intention to found a national university. In it I saw plainly our superficiality in looking at things, and the educational chaos in which our country flounders. I wished that our government would give some of its care to our elementary schools — that is, to the young-sters, to the children who are the hope of the country and the pillar of its future. Let us leave the university aside for the present, and begin by strengthening the foundation before the roof...

How I wish the government

would think of founding a higher college to graduate capable teachers and educators and train them in the newest scientific methods. But it appears we are content with the present condi-tion of our schools; otherwise we would think of renewing them and raising their standard and the morale of their teachers.

I do not blame the teacher at all; had the opportunity been

given him to learn, he would have learned and acted. In vain do we try to raise the general standard of our country and our society while our schools remain as they are and our children stay neglected and despised.

Blessed is the people that gives first place to its children and its little sons: it is a people that works for life, for the future, for immortality.

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