The Madeira School

It is a wonderful thing to have been associated with a good school for fifty years in this great democratic society of ours. It is also a wonderful thing to have been a teacher for sixty years. I began teaching in 1896, the year I graduated at Vassar College. I look back over these sixty years with great satisfaction and great happiness. My own life has coincided in years with the great modern world, for I was born in May, 1873, and all historians are agreed that there have been more changes in the world since 1870 than there were in the world up to 1870. I was 83 years old on May 19th of this year, and I have seen all these changes in the world. I have seen the coming of the telephone, the automobile, the radio, the aeroplane, the moving picture, and television. Although we have all the devices of science, I do not think we have changed very much as people. I still think that the subjects we are taught have not changed. I still think that learning is a rigorous process and that it always will be. I believe the education that I had as a child is the best kind of education one of happiness, one of precision, one of training the mind. I think there will never be another kind. My father became an invalid when I was twelve years old. He was then 46 years old. He had tuberculosis of the lungs and cirrhosis of the liver. He had been in the Civil War for four years. During the last years of the war he was a prisoner of war in Libbey Prison in Richmond, Virginia, for nine months. The treatment of the prisoners there was pretty dreadful and it was there...