Collection: Directories and Documents > Nevada County News & Advertisments

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Title: 1877 Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Nevada County News & Advertisments # of Pages: 238 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-07-14 06:12:44 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 04:08:54 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 04:08:54

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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11 JANUARY 13, 1877 GRASS VALLEY UNION gave the stove a wrench and so the stove got busted. The swinging sign in front of the office traveled up toward Den. Meagher’s place as if it were looking for something warm. The doors of the editorial office were forced open, exposing our editor, for a few moments to the biting blasts of Winter. Yet amid all this wreck we sat calmly still and felt perfectly assured that Tilden has been fairly elected President and that he will be peaceably inaugurated on the Fourth day of next March. GRASS VALLEY SCHOOL HOUSES AND SCHOOLS.—The editor of the Nevada Transcript has been casting esthetic eyes over the school houses of Grass Valley, and he pronounces those houses as not quite up to the mark in architectural design. We must admit that there are buildings in the world ore celebrated as specimens of the grand and sublime in architecture than are the school houses of Grass Valley. As our school houses could not hope to rival St. Peter’s nor St. Paul’s nor the Cathedral at Milan they concluded to be plain and not to try to put on any airs. We hope that our school directors will continue in the plain way both as to school houses and to what the school children are taught. We would not see any ginger bread and scroll work ornamenting (great Caesar what a misnomer!) the outside of our school houses or the inside of the heads of our school children. If it were among the possibilities to make our school houses take the very top of the architectural heap, then we would advise our Board of Education to sail into the architecture business; but we want to see no efforts that will reach only half way. We regard plain and comfortable schoolhouses, such as Grass Valley has, sufficient for he plain educational purposes such as the common schools are designed to subserve. The editor also thinks that the Grass Valley schools are deficient in the supply of outline maps, globes, charts and other necessary “apparatus.” We do not agree with that proposition. We think there are generally too many tools in the school houses, so many that the use of none are sufficiently learned. All these things serve but to stuff facts into brains, whereas the prime object in teaching should be to get those brains into correct and logical habits of thinking. We are clearly of the opinion that too many books, too many studies, too many aids to study, too much grading is sone in all our common schools. All these things seek to make a system by which all pupils are cut off or stretched out to the same mental length... . The editor also takes upon himself some alarm lest in a case of panic of fire the egress from the High School room would not be sufficient, thereby endangering the valuable lives of the children wo are seeking knowledge in that room. Thee are stairways and lost of windows there. Not one of the students of that institution but can jump through one of those windows, turn a double summersault and light squarely on the feet when the ground is reached. The Transcript man is unnecessarily alarmed. Then again we have a decided opinion of an editor who, in visiting such schools as Grass Valley has, stops to look at the architecture of hose buildings. There are living statutes in those buildings, when the school marms are around, which should attract the esthetic eye more than the shape of a house or the absence of a few outline maps. No Grecian chisel ever sculptured such capitals surrounding such columns, nor such lines of graceful outline as can be seen by looking at these statutes. No one with a soul above a plate of raw oysters should want pretty houses and more maps and globes, when the insides of the schools are so gracefully decorated. We pause. FALLING OF THE BAROMETER.—One of our barometrical machines fell yesterday. It fell about six feet. We don’t regard this fall as a sign of rain. The machine was simply lifted off from the hook on which it hung, by the wind, and went down to the floor of the balcony. We did not examine to see if it broke itself by the fall—we hope it has, sine it has been but a deceiver all this Winter. Our other barometer, that does not hang outside, having the field all to itself, proceeded to rise, and thus proclaim continued dry weather.