As one of my editors, typically American, said to me: "It isn't worth all the trouble that you put into it." Yet no single department ever repaid the searcher more for his pains.

Save for assistance derived from a single person, I had to do the work myself for all the years that the department continued.

It was apparently impossible for the American to work with sufficient patience and care to achieve a result.
We all have our pet notions as to the particular evil which is "the curse of America," but I always think that Theodore Roosevelt came closest to the real curse when he classed it as a lack of thoroughness.
Here again, in one of the most important matters in life, did America fall short with me; and, what is more important, she is falling short with every foreigner that comes to her shores.
In the matter of education, America fell far short in what should be the strongest of all her institutions: the public school.

A more inadequate, incompetent method of teaching, as I look back over my seven years of attendance at three different public schools, it is difficult to conceive.

If there is one thing that I, as a foreign-born child, should have been carefully taught, it is the English language.
The individual effort to teach this, if effort there was, and I remember none, was negligible.