Sierra+Simmons

//** Education System **// //** Governments have taken measures to insure public education, assisted or free. If the United States was not the first, it has made the most progress, until now there are about 17,000,000 children enrolled in the common schools **////**. The normal schools have multiplied fast. "These schools have trained the teachers to make the best of their opportunities for the education of the young, and nowadays the important duty of teaching is not left to men who can do nothing else, as was the case not much longer than a half-century ago. These normal trained teachers have brought the best methods to their aid in their work. The methods are so numerous that we cannot go into detail here. The comfortable, well-lighted school-room of to-day and the excellent school-books are among the results. It is difficult to make easily appreciable comparisons in a few words; but it may be said that the sc **////**hools are more carefully graded, fewer pupils assigned to each teacher, much oral instruction, scientific study, and physical exercise introduced, so that, while the school year has been shortened, holidays multiplied, and the hours of school attendance lessened, yet in the short school year of to-day more than double the ground is covered that was covered in the long school year of the olden time. Colleges and universities have grown up in all quarters, not a few of them with very rich endowments. **//  //**Protestant Work Ethic **// //** Protestant Work Ethic, in sociological theory, the value attached to hard work, thrift, and efficiency in one’s worldly calling, which, especially in the Calvinist view, were deemed signs of an individual’s election, or eternal salvation. The Protestant ethic is a set of moral and social values encouraged by the leaders of the Reformation, a religious revolution that took place in Europe during the six **// //** teenth century. Among those who dire **// //** ctly influenced the Protestant ethic were Martin Luther (1483–1546), John Calvin (1509–1564), John Knox (1513–1572), Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), and Conrad Grebel (c. 1498–1526). Their Protestant successors were Methodist Church founders John (1703–1791) and Charles Wesley (1707–1788). These religious leaders stressed the holiness of daily life, the importance of education and study, and the necessity of personal responsibility. They contended that the person who is hardworking, thrifty, and honest will be of value to his or her community and to God. **//

   //** Ralph Waldo Emerson **// //**Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on 25 May 1803 in the Puritan New England town of Boston, Massachusetts to Ruth née Haskins (d.1853) and Unitarian minister William Emerson (d.1811). Young Ralph had a stri **// //**<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">ct but loving upbringing in the household of a minister who died when he was just eight years old. It was the first of many untimely deaths of Emerson's relatives. While his father had died young, he was very close to his mother, siblings, and Aunt Mary Moody who had a great and positive influence on his intellectual growth. Early on young Waldo as he like to be called started keeping journals and later would base many of his essays on his thoughts and observations expressed therein. While his writings were sometimes criticised as being too abstract, he was an eloquent and popular speaker. **//

//**<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; font-size: 120%;">Abraham Lincoln **// //<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">** Lincoln was born on Feb. 12, 1809, in a log cabin in Hardin (now Larue) County, Ky. Indians had killed his grandfather, Lincoln wrote, "when he was laboring to open a farm in the forest" in 1786; this tragedy left his father, Thomas Lincoln, "a wandering laboring boy" who "grew up, literally without education." Thomas, nevertheless, became a skilled carpenter and purchased three farms in Kentucky before the Lincolns left the state. Little is known about L ** ////<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">** incoln's mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln. Abraham had an older sister, Sarah, and a younger brother, Thomas, who died in infancy. ** // <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">//**In 1816 the Lincolns moved to Indiana, "partly on account of slavery," Abraham recalled, "but chiefly on account of difficulty in land titles in Kentucky." Land ownership was more secure in Indiana because the Land Ordinance of 1785 provided for surveys by the federal government; moreover, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 forbade slavery in the area. Lincoln's parents belonged to a faction of the Baptist church that disapproved of slavery, and this affiliation may account for Abraham's later statement that he was "naturally anti-slavery" and could not remember when he "did not so think, and feel."**// <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">//**Indiana was a "wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods." The Lincolns' life near Little Pigeon Creek, in Perry (now Spencer) County, was not easy. Lincoln "was raised to farm work" and recalled life in this "unbroken forest" as a fight "with trees and logs and grubs." "There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education," Lincoln later recalled; he attended "some schools, so called," but for less than a year altogether. "Still, somehow," he remembered, "I could read, write, and cipher to the Rule of Three; but that was all."**// <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">//**Lincoln's mother died in 1818, and the following year his father married a Kentucky widow, Sarah Bush Johnston. She "proved a good and kind mother." In later years Lincoln could fondly and poetically recall memories of his "childhood home." In 1828 he was able to make a flatboat trip to New Orleans. His sister died in childbirth the same year.**// <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">//**In 1830 the Lincolns left Indiana for Illinois. Abraham made a second flatboat trip to New Orleans, and in 1831 he left home for New Salem, in Sangamon County near Springfield. The separation may have been made easier by Lincoln's estrangement from his father, of whom he spoke little in his mature life. In New Salem, Lincoln tried various occupations and served briefly in the Black Hawk War (1832). This military interlude was uneventful except for the fact that he was elected captain of his volunteer company, a distinction that gave him "much satisfaction." It opened new avenues for his life.**// <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;"> <span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">

http://www.biography.com/people/abraham-lincoln-9382540