From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for March 15, 1912:

• “Today has been a busy day for the high school teachers at the University [at the ninth annual conference of Kansas teachers]…. Manager W. O. Hamilton talked on high school athletics, Economics as a high school study was urged by Professor F. W. Blackmar, and Professor Edna Day spoke about Domestic Science in schools. Dr. Churchill King was the principal speaker of the conference today. ‘There is too much sentimentalism in the work of education,’ asserted Dr. King. ‘I once heard a dean of a college say that you could not hold the students responsible for what they did while at school. The idea is that they should have all the freedom of men and all the irresponsibility of boys. This is impossible. They can not have both together. I say that those set apart from the productiveness of society should not be drunken and dissolute men.'”
• “Superintendent L. W. Mayberry of Iola, who spoke yesterday afternoon before the high school conference at the university, hit some of the vital questions which are being discussed in Kansas today. There having been much agitation as to the use of supplementary text books in schools and also recently in Douglas county spelling bees have been creating attention. ‘From experiments in our district,’ said Professor Mayberry, ‘we have found that the students learn to spell faster and better without the use of the speller. In picking the words for spelling lessons the teachers chose the words that are more adaptable to the everyday use of the child.'”