All the agitation going on over the State for an 8-months school term doesn’t set well with Plummer Stewart, Charlotte lawyer, chairman of the Mecklenburg County Board of Education, and a man who has been closely identified with school work for 10 years or more. Stewart believes in the six-months term and insists that the thing to do is to fill our schools with good, efficient teachers, and make our schools better instead of longer. There are sections of the State, according to Stewart, where a longer term than six months is not advisable.
School work and farm work, says Stewart, should go hand in hand. He is everlastingly tired of these so-called humanitarians parading the State in opposition to children working. Eight months of school in one year is too long and is more likely to make school work burdensome and cause the children to lag in their studies than if efficient work is done in six months’ time. With an eight-months school term, three of the months in which there would be no school would be June, July and August, when farm work is light and there would be little for the children to do.
Any school district, says Stewart, can have an eight-months term if it wants it. Why, then, all this agitation over an eight-months school term? he asks.
There are a lot of folks who will agree with this Charlotte attorney when he argues that with less machinery and more efficiency, more attention to mind training and less attention to classification and certification, fewer text books, and fewer agitators, the State can get along very well with its educational work, under Superintendent A.T. Allen, one of the best school me in the State.
From page 3 of The Courier, Asheboro, N.C., Thursday, Dec. 24, 1925
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn91068009/1925-12-24/ed-1/seq-3/
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