# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1905_S170
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

170 Proceedings of the 26th General or

"These two pamphlets had been written at our committee's request and lay out for free distribution.

"Second, through our school exhibit we also wanted to furnish proof to our opponents and to the whole world that our schools are neither mere religion schools nor mere German schools, but that in them solid work is done in the English language as well, in arithmetic, in geography and local history, in short in every school subject — solid work, so solid that people could not withhold their recognition from us. Many thousands of papers in German and English, in arithmetic, in geography and local history, in natural history and botany, in penmanship and drawing, gave a glimpse into the capability of our schools.

"Of the many thousand visitors to our exhibit, many gained a more or less deep impression and expressed a favorable judgment.

"In the two large books in which visitors to our exhibit entered their names (there are more than 14,000 of them), many favorable remarks are found about our school work, and not only from people from our own congregations, but also from strangers from every corner of the world, and among these from a good many experts. Such people as the United States Commissioner of Education, W. Harris, of Washington, and Dr. Rud. Tombo of Columbia University, also visited our exhibit and spoke favorably of it.

"The former wrote to a member of our faculty: 'I have visited the Lutheran school exhibit twice, with growing interest.'

"Dr. Rud. Tombo wrote a longer article entitled 'A Walk Through the Palace of Education in St. Louis.' In it he devotes the following remarks to our school exhibit: 'There is only one exhibit I must still briefly mention, one that admittedly falls outside the framework of the country's so-called public school system, but is no less interesting for that: I mean the exhibit of German-American parochial schools. In a spacious hall, close to one of the main entrances to the Palace of Education, 263 parochial schools of the German Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States have put on an exhibit from which a breath of the German spirit reaches us at once. Here we find system. Here we found the thoroughness so sorely missed in the public schools —