Class. 
 Book.. 
 
 £(?/0^3 
 
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 Copyright]^* 
 
 COPyRIGHT DEPOSm 
 

 COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY RUTH MARY WEEKS 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 £C!.A31G429 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Author's Note v 
 
 Editor's Introduction vii 
 
 I. Foreword i 
 
 II. The Hand of Iron 6 
 
 III. The Public School 24 
 
 IV. A School for the Plain Man ... 38 
 V. Trade Education and the Woman . 57 
 
 VI. In the Country ■ . . 74 
 
 VII. Trade Education and Organized La- 
 bor 91 
 
 VIII. Trade Education and Socialism . . 102 
 
 IX. Foreign Trade Schools 109 
 
 X. American Experiments 149 
 
 XI. The Type of Trade School Needed 
 
 in the United States 167 
 
 XII. Choosing a Vocation 181 
 
 XIII. Conclusion 190 
 
 XIV. Bibliography on Elementary Voca- 
 
 tional Education 195 
 
 Outline 203 
 
AUTHOR'S NOTE 
 
 The author is indebted to the late Stadtrat Emile 
 Munsterberg of Berlin, Monsieur Et. Martin 
 Saint-Leon of Paris, Mr. C. W, A. Veditz of 
 Washington, Miss Alice Barrows of New York, 
 and many school officials at home and abroad 
 for aid in collecting material for this volume ; to 
 Dr. Richard T. Ely of Madison, for helpful review 
 of the present text ; and to her mother, Mrs. E. R. 
 Weeks, for constant critical assistance in prepar- 
 ing the manuscript for publication. 
 
 Ruth Mary Weeks. 
 May 6, 191 2. 
 
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 
 
 It seems to be difficult for us to learn that human 
 institutions may not be borrowed outright. The 
 sight of some new form of efficiency in our neigh- 
 bors over the sea stirs the conscious progressives 
 at home to minute and wholesale imitation. This 
 is particularly true where we feel second-rate, — 
 in art, science, and education. In politics and 
 industry, we are a trifle cock-sure of ourselves 
 and copy scarcely at all ; but elsewhere we tend 
 to be over-impressed by foreign example. 
 
 The history of conscious educational reform in 
 America offers many illustrations of indiscrimi- 
 nate institution-matching, all the way from the 
 kindergarten to the university. There have been 
 large gains, of course ; but we have paid an un- 
 necessarily high price in maladjustments. If only 
 we had noted the essential elements of foreign 
 experience and moulded the institutional forms 
 to suit our own population and national ideals, 
 we could have made our institutions far more 
 effective. 
 
 Just at the present hour, when we are assum- 
 ing a vast program of vocational education, we 
 
 vii 
 
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 
 
 should have a particular care as to the way in 
 which we are influenced by European experience 
 and example. The social currents of our own life 
 can no more be neglected in the construction of 
 new human institutions, than the laws of gravi- 
 tation in the building of material structures. It 
 is all a matter of concrete conditions — the place 
 where we build, the materials used for construc- 
 tion and the purpose we have in mind. Our hu- 
 man conditions never are coincident with those 
 in any European country, and we ought at the 
 very outset to assume that no European system 
 of vocational training will wholly fit our needs. 
 This might be laid down as a first principle. 
 
 We shall of course need to study foreign prac- 
 tice. A truly rational progress is always founded 
 upon the lessons of experience, and when we 
 have had little of our own, we are bound to un- 
 derstand that which belongs to others. But cer- 
 tainly we need to give as close study to our own 
 social and economic conditions as to the educa- 
 tional devices of a foreign land, for whatever we 
 see in the latter must be transmuted in terms 
 of the former. In no other way can we render 
 foreign experience into practice economically and 
 stably valuable for ourselves. 
 
 Just because the following monograph presents 
 
 viii 
 
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 
 
 the problem of vocational education with an ap- 
 proach and emphasis opposite to that of much 
 current discussion, it is offered to the educational 
 public with a special faith in its worth. The vol- 
 ume is more than a stimulating presentation of 
 facts and generalizations; it exemplifies a method 
 of studying a vital institutional problem that 
 ought to gain a wider acceptance among our 
 educational reformers. 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 The fact that only nine per cent of the pupils 
 who enter the early grades of American public 
 schools finish a high school course should be the 
 cause of serious concern to every citizen. The 
 taxpayer may well ask himself why he contrib- 
 utes over twice as much for the support of sec- 
 ondary schools that benefit one tenth of the pop- 
 ulation as for that of those in which most chil- 
 dren receive their only education. The educator 
 must marvel that, with all the care and money 
 lavished on our higher institutions of learning, 
 they prove so unattractive to the majority of our 
 children. And the worker for the public weal 
 can find but a slowly widening outlook for social 
 betterment when so small a per cent of the next 
 generation are availing themselves of the means 
 of improving their condition. 
 
 That the public school is the corner stone of 
 American democracy, has been reiterated until 
 
 I 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 it is the merest platitude, but like most plati- 
 tudes, it is absolutely true. If the people are to 
 govern, they must know how to govern. 
 
 The present is a time of feverish activity in 
 all lines of philanthropic work. Social settle- 
 ments flourish. The juvenile court is an estab- 
 lished factor in legal procedure. Prisons are 
 transformed into reformatories. Charity organ- 
 ization societies coordinate the work of a hun- 
 dred different agencies for alleviating distress. 
 And while these various agencies have been 
 helping the victims of society, they have learned 
 a great lesson. The cause of the distress they 
 strive to eliminate is in almost every case igno- 
 rance. The ignorant mother fed her baby soured 
 milk and it sickened. The ignorant consumptive 
 slept in darkness and filth, with closed windows, 
 and died. The ignorant voter sold his franchise 
 to a boss and stole from his own pocket. The ig- 
 norant public allowed dark, unsanitary tenements 
 to be built in its midst and found itself confronted 
 with a slum problem. The ignorant immigrant 
 contracted himself to a master for half a man's 
 wages and his family starved. The ignorant 
 parent took his child to work with him in the 
 factory and reduced his income. Less obvious 
 examples do not lack. Ignorance — public or 
 
 2 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 private: at this door can be laid most wrongs 
 and most endurance of wrong. If, then, to borrow 
 Emile Munsterberg's phrase, "The aim of social 
 work is to make itself superfluous," the way to 
 effect a fundamental betterment in social condi- 
 tions is to combat ignorance. No matter how 
 picturesque, no matter how intelligently con- 
 ducted and undoubtedly beneficent such enter- 
 prises as reform schools, juvenile courts, poor- 
 relief agencies, tuberculosis camps, and the like 
 may be, their results are at best patchwork. 
 They are necessary ; they are magnificent ; they 
 are indeed educational : but they do not strike 
 to the bottom. They make suffering more toler- 
 able ; and they also serve to show what an amaz- 
 ing number of things humanity needs to be 
 taught. 
 
 It is true that the proportion of grammar school 
 to high school enrollment has tripled in the last 
 fifty years. Yet is it a too paradoxical inversion 
 of cause and effect partly to explain our previous 
 growth in high school attendance by the wide 
 extension of free school facilities which has taken 
 place in this last half-century.? And is there not 
 reason to doubt whether, under the present re- 
 gime, this growth will or should continue .<* In 
 other words, in settled communities where there 
 
 3 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 are educational opportunities for all, has not the 
 attendance upon high schools of the orthodox 
 academic type reached a comparatively steady 
 ratio to population ? 
 
 Thus we return to the point that because ed- 
 ucation is the only sure instrument of progress, 
 it ought to cause grave concern to every person 
 interested in the welfare of our country that as 
 yet so small a per cent of our children take full 
 advantage of the opportunities liberally offered 
 them. 
 
 The object of this book will be to explain why, 
 in the opinion of the author, the attendance in 
 our upper grades is so small ; in what points our 
 schools fail to meet the needs of our people ; and 
 how the course of instruction may be made more 
 practical and thus hold children in school until 
 such time as they are better trained for citizen- 
 ship. It will also attempt to place the movement 
 for trade education in relation to other social 
 movements of the day. This discussion will be 
 illustrated by a comparison with foreign methods, 
 based on personal investigations of French and 
 German schools. 
 
 Of necessity, these pages must repeat much 
 that is an old story to students of the question. 
 Indeed, the present work represents not so much 
 
 4 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 new arguments and conclusions, as a marshaling 
 of old facts in a somewhat more comprehensive 
 array than has yet been attempted. However, 
 as Charles Warner wrote four years ago in 
 Charities and the Commons, " Although the in- 
 adequacy of the public schools, as they are now 
 conducted, to meet fully the greatest educational 
 need of our times, is generally admitted, it may 
 be questioned whether the influences that have 
 brought about the development of a one-sided 
 system of education, strong in the literary and 
 scientific elements but weak and ineffective in 
 vocational aims and results, are fully understood ; 
 whether the ultimate effect upon the productive 
 industries, upon commerce, and upon society of 
 a continuance of such a scheme of education, is 
 generally appreciated; and whether the respon- 
 sibility of state and municipal authorities in the 
 matter is recognized." 
 
II 
 
 THE HAND OF IRON 
 
 ** A rational system of education will take account of changes 
 in society and keep pace with their evolution." — Astier. 
 
 Your true pedagogue is essentially a man of the 
 world. He looks abroad to see the life for which 
 he must train his pupils and thereby shapes his 
 program. Before we can intelligently criticize 
 our school system, we must formulate a defini- 
 tion of society to serve us as a touchstone. Judg- 
 ing by the direction of the most vigorous crea- 
 tive activity of the present day, we may say that 
 we live in The Age of Industry. As feudalism 
 was the supreme offering of the ninth and tenth 
 centuries to history, so our industries will be our 
 contribution to progress. Into them go the im- 
 agination, the inventive genius, the daring of the 
 American people. 
 
 Our industry has peculiarities which distin- 
 guish it from that of the Middle Ages, when 
 Holland and Belgium and Italy were humming 
 workshops and the merchants were princes even 
 as they are to-day. Then men labored with their 
 
 6 
 
THE HAND OF IRON 
 
 two hands, and from their skillful finger tips there 
 passed into their work something of the very life 
 and thought and feeling of the craftsman, until 
 every most trifling product, every cluster of stiff 
 roses carved on some blackened stick of furni- 
 ture, every curious bird and beast tucked into 
 the stonework of old churches, seems humanized. 
 But industry has long since ceased to employ the 
 hands of its workers. It uses more and more the 
 iron hand of the machine. To write, to sew, 
 to embroider — M. Brizon ^ details a dozen pro- 
 cesses in which the machine with an almost un- 
 canny dexterity supplants human fingers. With 
 what vividness was the saying, ** The man does 
 not work ; he watches the machine work," brought 
 home to me in a New Haven screw factory ! 
 There in a long dark room stood row after row 
 of machines, all operating with a low, clicking 
 sound. Each row represented the entire process 
 of manufacture, from the time the steel wire was 
 wound off a reel into the first apparatus to the 
 moment when a completed screw dropped into 
 a box behind the last machine. Several girls 
 walked about the room and transferred boxes of 
 
 1 Fierre Brizon, SiuthoToiL^apJ>rentissa^g: Hier — Aujourd''- 
 hui — Demain and professor in the Ecole pratique d'Industrie 
 de Rennes. 
 
THE PEOPLE»S SCHOOL 
 
 half-finished screws from one machine table to 
 the next. This was their whole occupation. The 
 reason for this was suddenly apparent when a 
 long jointed arm of steel stretched out slowly 
 from one machine to the box of raw material on 
 the next table. A two-fingered hand at the end 
 of the arm closed on a screw, lifted it with pre- 
 cision, opened its clawlike fingers, and dropped 
 the bit of steel into position. As these hundred 
 iron hands silently performed an almost human 
 function, something of the terrible power of ma- 
 chinery over the human lives that obey its dic- 
 tates and surrender their minds to its mind was 
 impressed upon me. 
 
 This possible subservience of the man to the 
 machine is the point where education must act 
 for the protection of humanity against automa- 
 tonism. The machine is in reality an extended 
 hand, just as the pen is merely an extended fin- 
 ger. As the finger obeys the dictates of the 
 mind, so in turn does the pen. We are not domi- 
 nated by our writing apparatus, but dominate it. 
 Man is continually appropriating parts of his en- 
 vironment and so joining them to his body. The 
 typewriter, for instance, is a more skillful, elabo- 
 rated hand which enables the mind to dominate 
 more perfectly its writing apparatus. Larger and 
 
 8 
 
THE HAND OF IRON 
 
 more complicated machines are also only ex- 
 tended hands developed to give the intellect 
 greater freedom in carrying out its inspirations. 
 Yet, far from giving greater freedom to the 
 operator, the machine often kills life and intel- 
 ligence. The weary operative in the cotton mill 
 comes home from his day-long crossing and re- 
 crossing of shuttles, stupefied, incapable of rous- 
 ing himself to social pleasures without alcoholic 
 stimulus. The one hundredth of a shoemaker 
 clips on buttons year after year until his mental 
 horizon is bounded by the circumference of a 
 button. The man is dominated by his machine ; 
 instead of his using the hand of iron for his own 
 purposes, it has him by the throat. 
 
 In commerce, the bookkeeper, the clerk, even 
 the directing manager himself become slaves of 
 the business organization, of routine, of a dis- 
 embodied machine. For what is any machine 
 but routine immutably fixed in wood and steel ? 
 In every department of public service, the wheels 
 of institutionalism grind on, relentlessly crushing 
 personality and overwhelming individual initia- 
 tive by their tremendous inertia. 
 
 Extreme specialization in industry has turned 
 man into a human tool instead of an independ- 
 ent, self-directing individual. Machinery has ren- 
 
 9 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 dered a long apprenticeship and the mastering 
 of all the details of a trade unnecessary. A 
 worker can learn a single process in a few days 
 and begin remunerative work at once. But the 
 narrowing results of over-specialized labor soon 
 begin to show. It becomes impossible to teach 
 him more of the trade in general, because his 
 brain is stunted, and all his life he remains an 
 unskilled laborer in a poorly paid, deadenmg po- 
 sition. If the operative enters the factory very 
 young, and if he survives until he is sixteen, his 
 brain becomes so atrophied that unless he has pre- 
 viously learned to read and write, he can never 
 acquire even these rudiments of an education. 
 
 With the introduction of this extreme speciali- 
 zation in industry has come a general decay in 
 the old forms of apprenticeship that were once 
 the safeguard against its dangers. Formerly a 
 laborer learned a whole trade ; he was resource- 
 ful ; he could turn from one occupation to another; 
 at least he understood the relation of the opera- 
 tion he performed to the entire process of manu- 
 facture. He had some intelligence about his work, 
 some relation to the finished product. But the 
 day of small employers with small shops, where 
 apprentices could be profitably received and 
 thoroughly instructed, is past. 
 
 10 
 
THE HAND OF IRON 
 
 There remain amazingly few industries which 
 still take apprentices. Investigation shows that, 
 out of four hundred establishments in Ohio, only 
 sixty had apprenticeship systems and only three 
 aimed to turn out first-class mechanics. It is true 
 that certain large corporations, such as the New 
 York Central Railroad, have regular schools of 
 their own for training apprentices, but as one 
 shop comprises many trades, this is possible only 
 where very large numbers are employed, and even 
 then is such an expensive undertaking as to bur- 
 den any but the wealthiest company. William 
 Dooley, of the Lawrence Industrial School, claims 
 that only one third of one per cent of men be- 
 tween fifteen and twenty-four receive instruction 
 bearing upon their occupation, and the educa- 
 tional path of even this infinitesimal fraction is 
 rough and crooked. Union men give little ade- 
 quate help to raw recruits, as they fear to create 
 competitors for their own positions. Large con- 
 cerns find the rush of production too great for 
 them to spend time and material on apprentices. 
 It pays better to put a man at once to work on 
 some swift minute process, which he can learn 
 without practice and perform without waste; and 
 the narrow margin of profit in many smallershops 
 also leads their owners to use " little workers " 
 
 II 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 on odd jobs with no educative value, but from 
 which direct financial profit accrues to the busi- 
 ness. The baker's boy is seen running errands 
 instead of being taught to bake bread ; the child 
 in the mill stands by and hands bobbins to the 
 man at the spinning-machine — a necessary link 
 in the process of manufacture, but not an employ- 
 ment calculated to develop an intelligent, self- 
 supporting adult worker. 
 
 At the present time, when there is the great- 
 est temptation to the abuse of apprentices, we 
 find no laws on our statute books to protect the 
 child in industry and to procure him proper trade 
 instruction. Formerly the law was very strict in 
 this regard. An employer could not receive ap- 
 prentices into his shop without giving proof of 
 his ability to instruct them. The number of ap- 
 prentices per shop was limited to insure each one 
 his share of attention, and failure to perform his 
 duty toward his apprentices cost the employer 
 the privilege of receiving them. Before entering 
 upon the practice of his vocation, the apprentice 
 submitted, to a committee of judges chosen from 
 the master workmen in his trade, a finished piece 
 of work as guarantee of his capacity. Thus were 
 the intelligence of the individual worker and the 
 Standard of the trade safeguarded. This medi- 
 
 12 
 
THE HAND OF IRON 
 
 eval system fell into gross abuse, but the abuse 
 was due to a fault, not in ideal, but in adminis- 
 tration. The system was designed to uphold ex- 
 cellence in workmanship, but the unregulated 
 corporations, or free guilds, dominated by the 
 employing class, used it to uphold their own 
 power, and so brought about stagnation in indus- 
 trial methods. 
 
 But the day of apprenticeship is, as we have 
 said, over. It is not now a question of writing 
 laws to protect apprentices still left in isolated 
 industries. It is a question of what is to take the 
 place of old-time apprenticeship as a training for 
 life work ; of what is to insure us a generation 
 of competent laborers, of inventive workmen, not 
 mere cogs in the machine but workMEN who 
 will contribute creative mental effort to the pro- 
 gress of industry. 
 
 In spite of the success that attends modern 
 production, results of the subservience of the man 
 and his mind to the machine are not far to trace. 
 Enter a large department store and walk past 
 counter after counter heaped up with salable 
 wares. Banal, senseless stuff, much of it! That 
 a great improvement in some sections of pub- 
 lic taste has come about of late is not to be 
 denied. Arts and crafts work of a very acceptable 
 
 13 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 character is to be seen jumbled together with 
 flamboyant rubbish masquerading under the name 
 of art. Go into the furniture section : simple, 
 sensible, mission wood forms a restful oasis in 
 the gimcrackery. And yet even these promising 
 departures from current bad taste seem to have 
 no force left over to carry production beyond 
 the first side-step. A new style once discovered, 
 it is duplicated and reduplicated ad nauseam. 
 Moreover, are not our most beautiful modern chairs 
 and tables copies of this or that antique fashion } 
 The china section is crowded with reproductions 
 of Sevres, of luster, of Wedgwood ware. The 
 most harmonious rugs are antique or imitation 
 thereof. 
 
 Walk down a residence street built some years 
 back before the reproduction of older architec- 
 tural styles came into vogue. What meaningless, 
 formless houses! What unmitigated plainness 
 or what ugly, helter-skelter application of inap- 
 propriate ornament ! How self-contained the colo- 
 nial mansion around the corner seems ! Its walls 
 and chimneys, porches and shutters, belong to- 
 gether. It is unified, artistic, fills the eye as a 
 whole. But even in the newer streets lined with 
 such houses of individual, though borrowed, 
 beauty, one has a curious impression of incon- 
 
 14 
 
THE HAND OF IRON 
 
 gruity. A Southern house with spacious galleries 
 fronts an old English manor ; a Swiss chalet and 
 a Queen Anne brick stand side by side. A Re- 
 naissance palace holds itself compactly aloof from 
 a rambling Spanish Mission in stucco. And 
 on opposite corners are a Jewish synagogue 
 in perfect imitation of the Parthenon, and a 
 Methodist church in German Gothic. One rubs 
 one's eyes in wonder if this be a sober everyday 
 street or an architectural mask-ball. One expects 
 to see the residences whip off their motley and 
 appear in modern American garb. But, no I There 
 is no American garb for them to put on. Our 
 civilization has not yet expressed itself in stone. 
 It is not yet thoroughly enough unified, and when 
 it departs from beaten tracks, falls into chaotic 
 scrollwork and the like. 
 
 In such generalizations, it is possible to over- 
 state grossly. To much that is said in the pres- 
 ent chapter, the reader must make his own men- 
 tal reservation. There is fortunately a reverse to 
 the picture, but at this moment we are concerned 
 with the darker side and with the reasons for its 
 dimness. The inartistic, heterogeneous character 
 of the bulk of our manufactured articles is par- 
 tially traceable to the facts of production dis- 
 cussed in the foregoing pages. The first principle 
 
 15 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 of art is unity, wholeness. The work of art is an 
 integral thing, the perfect expression of a com- 
 plete thought or feeling. The man who deals in 
 little scraps of life can never produce anything 
 artistic. He can never write a novel — only a 
 string of disjointed scenes. He can never paint 
 a picture — only a huddled group of unrelated 
 objects. He can never compose a melody — only 
 a succession of isolated notes without cadence. 
 Does he turn himself to humble decorative arts, 
 the quality that fuses diverse parts together into 
 a harmonious whole will be equally lacking. The 
 border of Brussels lace has its laws of fitness as 
 well as the symphony. The carved center table 
 has the same claim to integrity as the drama. 
 
 But what of the producers of our laces and 
 center tables, of our crockery and wall paper ? 
 Do they deal in complete thoughts and feelings } 
 Do they deal in wholes, or only in scraps of life.^ 
 Follow a simple article like a china tea cup 
 through its creation in a New Jersey factory. 
 Does it grow gradually beneath the hand that 
 conceived it till it stands fragile and perfect, the 
 line of gold within the delicate bowl prophetic of 
 bright amber drafts, the handle molded for the 
 touch of slim fingers, and the slender spray of 
 flowers without the brim suggesting the evanes- 
 
 i6 
 
THE HAND OF IRON 
 
 cent aroma of the tea ? No ! the process has been 
 most unpoetical. The cup has passed through a 
 hundred hands on its way to the delivery room. 
 One man worked the clay ; another molded it ; 
 another painted the flowers by a prescribed pat- 
 tern ; another thrust it into the baking-oven ; 
 another watched it and took it out, and so on till 
 we reach a person whose entire function has been 
 to put on the tiny spot of gilt in the center of 
 each blossom. All day long he has done nothing 
 but apply gilt dots to flowers on tea cups of 
 whose origin he knows little, and of whose desti- 
 nation he cares less. If some one should invent 
 a machine that could apply gilt dots with unfail- 
 ing accuracy, the man would disappear from in- 
 dustry and no one be the loser. That he is a man 
 counts for nothing. How can the laborer who 
 makes so microscopic a part of an object con- 
 tribute to its artistic quality.? Of course he is 
 expected to contribute nothing. He is blindly 
 following the plan of another. Yet he is study- 
 ing in the industrial school which must shape 
 our national taste. He is dealingwith mere scraps 
 of his trade. When called upon to construct a 
 tea cup of his own, will it not be an ill-assorted 
 patchwork of forms and lines and colors } 
 
 A more obvious result of the entire separation 
 
 17 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 of the worker from the finished product is a cer- 
 tain deterioration in output which is prevented 
 only by the greatest diligence on the part of in- 
 spectors and foremen. Here, too, caution must 
 be taken not to overstress a partial explanation 
 for a situation dependent on many causes. But it 
 is only natural — mankind not yet being en- 
 dowed with those ethical qualities that entail 
 blind, minute, impersonal right doing — it is only 
 natural that a man who adds a single spot of gilt 
 to a tea cup will take less interest in having that 
 cup perfect in every detail than if the entire 
 article were the work of his own hands and 
 would be known and criticized as his. In fact, 
 " Tom Jones, his cup " will be much better made 
 than " Tom, Dick, Harry, and nobody knows or 
 cares whose cup." In these days of enormous 
 factories and antagonism between labor and capi- 
 tal, we have lost much of the old personal interest 
 in the honor of the firm which might once have 
 taken the place of individual pride and bound 
 every hand over to his best effort in even so small 
 a matter as gilt dots. Therefore we have much 
 that is shoddy and ill-made turned out upon the 
 market, and as the market has a voracious, indis- 
 criminative appetite which manufacturers do not 
 neglect to stimulate, much that is hideous, use- 
 
 i8 
 
THE HAND OF IRON 
 
 less, and undurable finds its way into our homes. 
 The consuming and producing public are the same ; 
 their respective taste and intelligence is a closed 
 circle. 
 
 This specialization is not only anti-artistic but 
 anti-progressive. True it is that one cause of our 
 industrial advance has been the specialization of 
 hand processes until one man, in performing the 
 same operation a thousand times a day, at last 
 reduced it to such simple terms that a machine 
 could take it over. But in the course of this de- 
 velopment, we have lost humanly while we gained 
 mechanically. In the past, the great inventions 
 have come from the ranks of the workers. And 
 though invention is becoming more and more a 
 special profession, still, if we reduce this labor- 
 ing public to automatic, unthinking machines, 
 we are shooting a heavy bolt across the door of 
 progress. 
 
 We do not need to go farther into the discus- 
 sion to infer that society has created a mighty 
 tool whose use we have not yet mastered, and 
 which therefore bids fair to master us, — the iron 
 hand of the machine. It is a case of how to pre- 
 vent the tail's wagging the dog. To control and 
 best utilize the mighty equipment which industry 
 possesses, it goes without saying that we need a 
 
 19 
 
THE PEOPLE»S SCHOOL 
 
 skillful, intelligent labor force. That we seriously 
 lack such a force is proved by the complaints of 
 employers on every hand. C. W. Cross, superin- 
 tendent of apprentices for the New York Central 
 Railroad, reported some time ago that their shops 
 were in straits for lack of well-prepared machin- 
 ists. Mr. Thurber, of Ginn & Company, says : 
 " In our work, we need skilled, thoroughly trained 
 workers whom we find it more and more difficult 
 to get. There have been times when, if there 
 had been a place where we could send a promis- 
 ing man to learn things thoroughly, we would 
 have sent him at our own expense and paid him 
 a salary to go." 
 
 The National Educational Association, in its 
 1909 report, publishes the startling figures that 
 fifty per cent of our skilled mechanics are for- 
 eign-born and trained and that ninety-eight per 
 cent of the foremen in New York manufactories 
 were educated across the water. In other words, 
 Americans to fill such positions are not to be 
 found. The demand for skilled workers is other- 
 wise proved by the flourishing of private techni- 
 cal and commercial schools for adults who are 
 trying to make up for lost time and fit themselves 
 for the jobs they see monopolized by their alien 
 rivals. 
 
 20 
 
THE HAND OF IRON 
 
 The American Federation of Labor, alive to 
 the interests of American workers, has appointed 
 a committee to look into the question of indus- 
 trial training. One reads daily in the papers, one 
 hears daily at the dinner table, discussions of the 
 incompetence of workmen. At afternoon tea, 
 dainty my lady can talk of nothing but " stupid 
 Jane" and "inefficient John." There is even 
 very grave suspicion whether, if my lady were 
 deserted by Jane or John, she could wield do- 
 mestic implements with greater effectiveness. 
 
 If we doubt the testimony of employers, we 
 need only to mark the rapidly increasing force 
 of vagrants who rotate each year from coast to 
 coast; we need only to remember the unemployed 
 for whom, during moderate prosperity, it is more 
 and more difficult to procure work, and whose 
 numbers in times of acute crisis in any special 
 branch of industry are appallingly augmented. 
 It is necessary to ponder on these peculiarly 
 modern phenomena alone to become convinced 
 that there is a tremendous industrial misfit be- 
 tween man and job. The two problems have 
 many aspects which are beside the question here, 
 but it is safe to say that the chief cause of chronic 
 unemployment is lack of training for definite 
 work, and that a common cause of acute unem- 
 
 21 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 ployment is minute specialization. The unintel- 
 ligent specialist when thrown out of one occupa- 
 tion finds it impossible to turn to any other, and 
 must laboriously acquire a new specialty or lie 
 idle till such time as there is again room for him 
 in his old trade. I have seen a comparatively 
 high-grade worker idle for almost a year, because 
 he was too old to be taken in as a beginner in 
 some other industry. Business is very cruel to 
 the old ; it will not waste time sharpening a worn 
 tool when bright, new ones can be had. 
 
 The overcrowding and consequent underpay- 
 ing of the nonindustrial pursuits is another sure 
 sign of maladjustment. For certain manual work 
 it is impossible to find American labor, and were 
 the positions not filled by the ever-arriving im- 
 migrant of doubtful capacity, industry would 
 come to a standstill for the want of any helpers, 
 good or poor. 
 
 In short, the industrial situation may be 
 summed up as follows : standards of production 
 are open to improvement ; employers are finding 
 it difficult to procure intelligent, skilled, resource- 
 ful workmen, capable of turning from one branch 
 of a trade to another, and of advancing from less 
 to more skilled positions ; an ever-swelling class 
 of unskilled laborers is being created ; the num- 
 
 22 
 
THE HAND OF IRON 
 
 bers of the unemployed are growing; and many 
 manual tasks would remain undone were it not 
 for the influx of only half-desirable foreigners. 
 
 In spite of the fact that we have ridden on 
 the crest of prosperity, in spite of the fact that 
 as a manufacturing country we stand among the 
 first, the far-sighted man will herein detect symp- 
 toms of disintegration. Although we are con- 
 fronted by no such " crisis in apprenticeship " 
 as has destroyed the century-long French pre- 
 eminence in hand industries, the political scien- 
 tist may well strive to forestall that conceivable 
 event. As a nation we desire to be self-sufficient ; 
 as a people we desire to be strong and intelligent. 
 The dominant factor in our national development 
 we must not neglect. Certain social phenomena 
 of poverty and crime are manifest among us, 
 phenomena which have absorbed the attention 
 of the public to the exclusion of the deeply un- 
 derlying fact that, living in an age of industry, 
 we have not yet learned how to be wisely indus- 
 trious. Apprenticeship is a dead letter. Where 
 shall we learn.? 
 
Ill 
 
 THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 
 
 The American belief in humanity is embodied 
 in our public schools. Biologists tell us that 
 children are born much more nearly equal than 
 we have dreamed, and that not nature, but star- 
 vation has produced the myriad of stunted beings 
 who cumber society with their unprofitable lives. 
 To smelt this crude ore of human possibilities 
 into serviceable gold, we have public schools. 
 The creed our fathers held, when they declared 
 for liberty and equality, is still ours. We believe 
 that all men have a right to be of as much use 
 as they can in the world, and we prove our faith 
 in the perfectibility of all our people by investing 
 in their education. 
 
 Therefore the public school labors to open the 
 doors of culture to every child within its juris- 
 diction. Equality of worldly goods we cannot 
 have; but at least in the schools we shall have 
 democracy of training. An ideal type is held 
 before us as the goal of study — the ** all-round 
 man." No undemocratic limitations must be put 
 
 24 
 
THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 
 
 upon the growing boy. His education must be 
 fitted to the highest as well as to the lowest circle 
 in which it can be his lot to move. Therefore 
 early decision upon a future calling is discour- 
 aged, lest perchance a Shakespeare should tie 
 himself to carpentry before his genius comes to 
 Hght. And so, having insecurely bagged that 
 slippery eel, general intelligence, the high school 
 graduate sallies forth upon the world in search 
 of what fate sends his way to do. Unawares that 
 ** insecurely" slipped into the sentence. Just as 
 unexpectedly an undemocratic element has crept 
 into education through the would-be democratic 
 effort to keep it the same for all. 
 
 Naturally enough, when men first struggled 
 for freedom, it was in the realm of abstract know- 
 ledge that they found themselves least bound by 
 the limitations of everyday life. Rich and poor 
 could multiply with the same accuracy and, when 
 polished to the proper brightness, read literature 
 with the same fervor. On this wide common, 
 they could disport themselves untrammeled 
 by the economic facts that sent one to schoal 
 in broadcloth and the other in shoddy woolen. 
 Mastery of these cultural branches had also been 
 the mark of gentility, and to introduce into popu- 
 lar education everything previously monopolized 
 
 25 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 by the upper classes was the first step of liberal 
 reformers. Much the same process has been 
 repeated in establishing higher education for 
 women, and, of late, in the education of the negro. 
 Those coveted branches long appropriated by 
 men were studied with avidity to the exclusion 
 of many things important to the well-being of 
 women ; and too many a negro, in order to be 
 exactly like the whites, has striven after Latin 
 and Greek to the detriment of his own best in- 
 terests. As we find conceptions of woman's edu- 
 cation calculated to make women resemble men, 
 just so the democracy of the founders of our 
 present generally accepted theory of education 
 seems to have been to elevate "the masses" by 
 recasting them in an "upper-class" mold. Thus 
 the public school is the embodiment, at once, of 
 a democratic attitude toward men, but a most 
 undemocratic view of the social organization. 
 
 The result of this experiment is "class educa- 
 tion " in our secondary schools. At most, only 
 ten per cent of the pupils of the ward schools go 
 through the high schools. Three fourths of the 
 pupils enrolled in the first year of the high schools 
 drop out before the end of the course. Among 
 those who remain, more than half are girls, and 
 of the typical graduating class the majority either 
 
 26 
 
THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 
 
 go to college or enter professions and commerce. 
 In other words, only those who are destined for 
 professional and commercial life attend the pub- 
 lic high schools, or the training given therein fits 
 pupils for and directs them towards professions 
 only. The truth holds much of both hypotheses. 
 Uniformity, always infinitely undemocratic, has, 
 in the methods of our really excellent high schools, 
 proved unfair to an overwhelming majority of 
 our children, who, because they belong in a walk 
 of life for which the secondary schools do not 
 fit them, drop out with the bare rudiments of a 
 general education, long before they are prepared 
 for the intelligent citizenship upon which the 
 security of our government depends. 
 
 A glance at the average high school curric- 
 ulum, from the point of view of the more than 
 seven millions of our citizens who are employed 
 in industrial and manual pursuits, explains the 
 situation. Mathematics and history, science, 
 language and literature meet our eye. But the 
 unlettered laborer looks in vain for something 
 that will make his son a better locksmith or 
 bookbinder, and he ponders deeply on the prob- 
 lem of how his boy can afford to spend four years 
 in the pleasant pursuit of culture, while he him- 
 self is waxing old and less able to care for his 
 
 27 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 family, and may even need support before the boy 
 is in a fair way to make a living. It is snobbish 
 to suppose that the average working parent is 
 not interested in the welfare of his children; 
 that he always sends them to work when the age 
 of compulsory school attendance is over, through 
 selfishness alone. If the poor father has any 
 hope at all, it is usually for his little ones. He 
 will sacrifice much and work early and late that 
 they may have a better chance than he. It is 
 safe to hazard that, next to earning bread for the 
 morrow, there is no subject on which he does 
 more thinking than the future of his children. 
 
 The workingman, then, has decided against 
 the high school. An ignorant decision ? Perhaps 
 not so altogether philosophical and fine-spun as 
 the one you, intelligent reader, are making by 
 the warmth of your fireside, sunk in an easy- 
 chair, secure of your future, and dallying with 
 this book half quizzically as with a subject that 
 arouses curiosity, but not your vital interest. But 
 he has experienced the hard facts of life, and 
 knows that how to earn a living and earn it well 
 is the paramount question which must be settled 
 before love and happiness and beauty, before life 
 itself can begin. You tell him that if his child 
 remains in school, he will be able to earn more 
 
 28 
 
THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 
 
 in the end than if he goes at once to work and 
 climbs the industrial ladder without further edu- 
 cation. You tell him that his boy will be able to 
 turn his hand to many jobs ; that he will have 
 more general ability, more chances. But he 
 knows that production demands men who can 
 do some one thing skillfully. He sees that skill 
 is not so easily mastered ; and he fears to have 
 his boy lose time which should be devoted to 
 acquiring dexterity that can command a man's 
 wages for him when he is a man. You suggest, 
 again, that if the child stays in school, he will 
 be able to raise himself above the level of manual 
 toil, and will in this field certainly outstrip the 
 untutored applicant for work. Yet perhaps the 
 rough-handed laborer will know how commerce 
 is already over-full of helpers, and how at the 
 skirts of the genteel professions trails a great 
 army of unnecessary, unsuccessful men who 
 hover ever between industry and gentility, 
 crowded from the latter by competition and shut 
 from the other by inclination and unfitness. 
 
 Why shut from the other by inclination } Is 
 not the whole atmosphere of the classroom in 
 our high schools anti-industrial ? Is not the em- 
 phasis ever upon intellectual achievements in 
 the realm of letters and art and abstract science ? 
 
 29 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 Does not the butcher's or the machinist's boy 
 seem to breathe another ether here than in his 
 own home ? What use has the school world for 
 the facts of his father's life ? What use has his 
 father's life for the facts of the school world ? 
 Use enough, if he saw the truth ! But he rarely 
 sees it. And does he not naturally infer some 
 innate difference between these two sections of 
 life, and also the superiority of the school world, 
 with its beauty, its wealth of new information, 
 its quick interchange of thought with eager fel- 
 low students, and its inspiration from sympa^ 
 thetic teachers glad to foster a growing taste foi 
 culture ? What do we do to convince pupils that 
 Shakespeare is as much in place on a tinsmith's 
 table as on a jeweler's? What do we do to in- 
 terest them intelligently in the pursuits at which 
 one half of them must spend their lives, and, as 
 ex-President Roosevelt puts it, to cure them of 
 the idea that to earn twelve dollars a week and 
 call it a " salary " is better than to earn twenty- 
 five dollars and call it *' wages " ? 
 
 Manual training advocates will here slip be- 
 tween the lines the plea that their departments 
 inculcate respect for labor, and that they offer 
 the practical application of theoretical knowledge 
 for which we so loudly clamor. The question is, 
 
 30 
 
THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 
 
 indeed, of great interest at this point in the dis- 
 cussion. The manual training teacher has grasped 
 a great psychological truth ; he stands for bal- 
 ance, for purposeful use of the finely adjusted 
 bodily mechanism with which we are endowed. 
 There is a bit of the ancient Greek in his demo- 
 cratic view of personality, of body and mind as 
 an interacting whole. But he too ranks with the 
 " generalists." His work is but practice work, 
 designed to foster an all-round facility of hand, 
 important as a means and fatal as an end. 
 
 When manual training was first introduced 
 into high schools, its strictly developmental func- 
 tion in the curriculum was mistaken for practical 
 trade instruction by many parents in a class 
 whose children had not hitherto gone to high 
 school, and a large increase in enrollments fol- 
 lowed. But when the public saw that, valuable as 
 the new experiment was and is, it was not the 
 threshold to industry, that an apprenticeship was 
 still imperative before wage-earning could begin, 
 the disproportionate increase in school attend- 
 ance merged into the normal increase, and the 
 situation remained almost as before. Classes 
 have, indeed, been organized in many schools 
 which "^prove not only developmental but of im- 
 mediate practical service, and these classes have 
 
 31 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 held many a child in school who would otherwise 
 have gone at once to work. In this regard, girls 
 have fared better than boys, for manual training 
 for girls has invariably taken the form of sew- 
 ing, cooking, or millinery. But these studies, as 
 well as sloyd, electricity, ironwork, and sometimes 
 even the long-established commercial courses, 
 count little in the school credit systems. In this 
 forward step we are again dragging the old ball 
 and chain of wrong emphasis. For while learn- 
 ing should teach us to bring to bear upon our life 
 work " the best that is known and thought in the 
 world," we are still leading too many of our child- 
 ren away from their life work ; leading them to 
 ' suppose that it is really unworthy, by putting it 
 in a secondary position in our courses of study. 
 
 For the same reason that so few children enter 
 the high school, many drop out at the end of the 
 first year. The boy, especially, finds the high 
 school course too often unadapted to his wants. 
 In the first place, boys are outnumbered, for since 
 the economic pressure is not yet so great upon 
 girls, they stay longer in school. In three cases 
 out of four, also, the instructors are women. 
 There is no doubt that the influence of women 
 on adolescents is strong and good, but the exces- 
 sive feminization, too often seen in curricula 
 
 32 
 
THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 
 
 framed by them for pupils, the majority of whom 
 are girls, makes the boy feel awkward and out 
 of place in the program. Because literature is so 
 often taught from a feminine point of view, with 
 which the decidedly non-soulful, normal boy is 
 utterly out of sympathy, he comes to the errone- 
 ous conclusion " that it is all rot anyway," and 
 misses the inspiration, the glimpse into a world 
 of keener beauty and the future fund of resource 
 within himself that a manly love of reading 
 should bestow. He becomes restless under the 
 routine of work ; he does not see where it is 
 tending ; he stops studying, and his school at- 
 tendance becomes a mere wearisome seat-filling. 
 Or perhaps there is an occasional holy infant 
 who, though uninterested, studies his lessons 
 just to get them, for, being good, he does as he 
 is told and asks no questions. Fortunately this 
 type is rare. You may browbeat girls ad libitum : 
 not all girls, but girls in general. They are of 
 the accommodating sex. Custom and heredity 
 have made them pliable. But the boy is a stiff 
 sort of twig and hard to bend. The mill may 
 grind on ; he remains obstinately irreducible, 
 and quits school after a while because he sees 
 " no sense in it," and longs for something "worth 
 while " on which to lavish his young energy. 
 
 33 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 The author once had in an English class a 
 splendid sort of chap, though crude as yet. One 
 day he came with shining eyes to tell of a wonder- 
 ful chance to earn sixty dollars a month that had 
 just been offered him, and that looked a glitter- 
 ing independence to a boy whose father had never 
 allowed him any command of money. Except in 
 wood-turning where he led his class, his work 
 took, for the moment, no alluring form. He 
 needed schooling, needed it badly; but I found 
 it hard to answer when he said with sudden pene- 
 tration, *' See here, I know I 'm raw and green 
 and use bad grammar off and on. But I 'm not 
 doing any good here. Maybe it 's my fault, but I 
 can't seem to hitch on, and all I learn in high 
 school won't help me to make more than sixty a 
 month when I begin. It's all right for Dodge 
 and Kelly and those fellows who are going to 
 college or into the law. But dad can't send me 
 to college. I've got to earn my grub right off 
 and I might as well start in." Nothing will hold 
 a boy when independence calls, except the surety 
 of greater profit to himself or a strong personal 
 interest in his work. Both were supplied to 
 "Dodge and Kelly " by their careers. They could 
 refer present dryness to the future for illumina- 
 tion. But our ordinary boy was getting all the 
 
 34 
 
THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 
 
 education he would ever have and naturally de- 
 manded that it be worth "more than sixty a 
 month." It is needless to say that sixty dollars 
 a month is an exceptional alternative to further 
 schooling. As Dr. Kingsbury's^ investigations 
 in Massachusetts prove, an errand or office boy's 
 job is nearer the average. But whatever the bait, 
 and however short-sighted the choice, the motive 
 for leaving school remains the same, and is 
 equally imperious. 
 
 The lack of practical interest in high school 
 work is too often intensified by a lack of vitality 
 in teaching, from which the college preparatory 
 student suffers as much as the boy destined for 
 industry. In the same spirit which omits practi- 
 cal branches from the curriculum, the instructor 
 often fails to make constantly the connection 
 between what is taught in school and the actual 
 facts of the children's experience. History gets 
 to be a world shut in between the covers of a 
 book. Physiology and hygiene are something to 
 recite about and not to apply to the ventilation 
 of one's bedroom. Mathematics becomes an ab- 
 stract juggling with figures. Even literature, 
 that hardest of subjects to kill, falls into the cate- 
 
 1 Susan Myra Kingsbury, of Simmons College, investigator 
 for the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Education. 
 
 35 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 gory of things to be learned and not lived, and, 
 instead of opening their eyes to the undreamt 
 wonder of the world, succeeds merely in giving 
 children a positive distaste for books. Against 
 this petrifaction of school work, every instructor 
 fights. Live teachers die hard, if we may put it 
 so. But a huge machine, such as the ward schools 
 of a large city, or the numerous departments in 
 a high school, acquires tremendous momentum. 
 The wheels once started, a course of study once 
 drawn up, the thing moves on irresistibly, flat- 
 tening out individual method, and conforming 
 all to the preconceived pattern. And still this 
 mechanization, which victimizes, first teachers, 
 then pupils, is necessary in the administration 
 of large scale education. System we must have, 
 only, please God ! let us not magnify the system 
 into an end, a something valuable in itself to 
 which our pupils can be sacrificed. M. Brizon 
 has astutely remarked, "It is convenient, no 
 doubt, to have recourse to routine ; but the school 
 is not made for the convenience of the masters ; 
 it is made for the best development of the vary- 
 ing faculties of the pupils." Yet when the class- 
 room fills five or six times a day with thirty new 
 faces, is it not natural that after draining his 
 energy in the mad attempt to be a hundred and 
 
 36 
 
THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 
 
 fifty people, to understand a hundred and fifty 
 needs and feelings, to lead a hundred and fifty 
 lives, the master will some day fall back into the 
 arms of routine which makes all things plain and 
 easy ? Will he not some day, unable to keep in 
 touch with his pupils, begin to teach the course 
 of study for its own sake ? Will he not begin to 
 show signs of Irritation with the pupils whom it 
 does not fit ? Will he not call them dull and stu- 
 pid, and even end by disregarding them entirely? 
 And will not the children who come from his 
 hand be clipped and trimmed out of originality 
 into uniformity, as like as possible to the Imagi- 
 nary Pupil for whom too many a course is planned, 
 and who has no more actual existence than the 
 Economic Man of the old economists ? 
 
 We have ridden our favorite hobby a little 
 aside the question, but not so far that a straight 
 bridle path will not bring us out again on the 
 main track, and set us jogging toward the old 
 point that our expensive high schools are "class" 
 schools whose pupils are drawn largely from one 
 class of society, and which produce solely appli- 
 cants for that class; and that the boasted de- 
 mocracy of popular education has evolved a sys- 
 tem which "prepares for everything in general 
 and nothing in particular." 
 
IV 
 
 A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 
 
 While pedagogues were arguing behind dosed 
 doors the perennial question of the Humanities 
 versus the Modernities, the facts of life, which 
 have an inveterate habit of keeping in advance 
 of thought, came knocking without and crying, 
 " In God's name, open ! Dispute no more whether 
 air or water is most necessary to our children's 
 life, but bethink you what meat you will set be- 
 fore them, for they are sore hungry and would 
 eat ! " The facts of life and their good friend 
 common sense demand a school for the plain man. 
 Industry no longer trains its workers ; and yet 
 they must be trained. M. Astier and his col- 
 leagues ^ have struck the sensible and philosophi- 
 cal note with French directness when they main- 
 tain that " in our epoch of feverish activity, we 
 cannot leave to routine the task of regulating 
 commercial and industrial operations. Science 
 is the prime factor in all progress." Industry 
 needs not only the scientific knowledge of its great 
 
 1 Astier et Cuminal, L'' Enseignement Technique. 
 
 38 
 
A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 
 
 directors, but the scientific, understanding spirit 
 of every man along the line. 
 
 To foster this spirit is the duty of educational 
 institutions from primer grade to university. The 
 movement toward such an orientation of studies 
 is well begun in our colleges, and schools of 
 this, that, and the other practical branch spring 
 into existence in every state. The link between 
 theory and practice should be drawn even closer. 
 Many of the lower schools also must grow into 
 laboratories of industry where skill of hand and 
 skill of mind are taught and our young folk learn 
 that intelligence and daily living should be syn- 
 onymous. Then only will the high school ideal 
 be fitted to the demands of our society. Then 
 only shall we supply to the world what the world 
 asks of us — a skilled worker. To beat about the 
 bush no longer, common sense demands trade 
 education. 
 
 The voices which stoutly declared that the 
 standard of scholarship was sure to fall when 
 manual training entered school curricula now 
 rise again in lamentation. Prophecy is an uncer- 
 tain role ; and an advance verdict as to the in- 
 fluence of trade education on general scholar- 
 ship may turn out as wide of the mark as the 
 premature fusillade against manual training. But 
 
 39 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 the writer finds it natural to hope that a salutary 
 reaction on educational methods will follow the 
 establishment of trade high schools. 
 
 In the first place, the dominance of the college 
 preparatory ideal, against which so many princi- 
 pals are now struggling, will be permanently 
 broken. In academic high schools, a single eye 
 can be kept upon college as the end of every 
 course, with the conceivable result of a far more 
 thorough college preparation than at present. 
 In the trade school, the child to whom college is 
 a mere disturbing impossibility, will be free to 
 study what he needs. Class education, you say ^ 
 One sort for the laborer ; another for the brain 
 worker ? But we agreed that differentiation was 
 essential to democracy, and that no class educa- 
 tion could be so disastrous as that invidious 
 species which now masquerades amongst us as 
 "popular." And will it not be infinitely fairer to 
 all concerned when fewer things are studied, but 
 are studied well .-* When each child gets his due 
 instead of being fed an indigestible mixture of 
 what is good for each .-* When the college pre- 
 paratory student need not waste time on sketchy 
 courses he will duplicate later in detail } When 
 the manual worker will not consume costly time 
 stolen from his trade, in mastering branches that 
 
 40 
 
A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 
 
 belong to another scheme of life than his ? And 
 when the harassed teacher will no longer be dis- 
 tracted by the necessity of basing a general in- 
 telligence course on college entrance require- 
 ments, and of teaching everything superficially 
 because he must teach enough to meet at some 
 point the needs of every part of his mammoth, 
 heterogeneous class ? 
 
 Here we may note that trade schools mean 
 smaller classes, and more of that personal rela- 
 tion between teacher and pupil which makes for 
 vividness, originality, and inspiring work, and 
 whose absence is accountable for the impersonal 
 dryness of so much teaching. The Philoctetian 
 bowlings of academicians, wounded in their dry- 
 as-dust supremacy, must again drop into silence. 
 
 Each argument advanced for manual training 
 holds in the case of industrial training with three- 
 fold force. The child is essentially creative and 
 practical. Theoretic teaching needs illustration 
 to have weight with him ; and he needs a physi- 
 cal outlet for his ideas. What general manual 
 training adds to the curriculum of an academic 
 school, trade work would contribute in the indus- 
 trial school, with the advantage of even greater 
 interest and vitality. Even academic education 
 will emerge from an alliance with trade instruc- 
 
 41 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 tion, strengthened, deepened, and dignified, and 
 will but come more fully to its own. 
 
 However the balance of power among scho- 
 lastic principalities may settle itself after the 
 new invasion, the world at large will reap sub- 
 stantial benefits therefrom. Obviously, larger 
 numbers of children will go through high school, 
 numbers steadily increasing as the profitableness 
 of trade education becomes manifest. Reason 
 would prove the point beyond cavil had we not 
 French experience with actual vocational schools 
 to fall back upon.^ In 1905, the number of sec- 
 ondary schools in France had quadrupled since 
 the recent establishment of professional educa- 
 tion ; the number of pupils had quintupled. This 
 disproportional increase came almost entirely in 
 the trade courses, which were, as they still are, so 
 utterly inadequate to accommodate the demand 
 that there has always been a long waiting-list. 
 The ratio of graduates to first year enrollment 
 proved correspondingly larger in these practical 
 schools, and the comparatively high percentage 
 of attendance was a sign of the favor the work 
 found in the eyes of children and parents. 
 
 This favor is principally due to the greater 
 wage-earning capacity of the trade school grad- 
 
 1 Rene Leblanc, V Enseignement Professionnel en France. 
 
 42 
 
A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 
 
 uate as compared with the young worker who 
 has spent the same number of years in a shop. 
 Suppose, for instance, that, of two boys who 
 leave the primary school at thirteen, one goes at 
 once to work in a furniture factory and begins to 
 earn money for himself, and the other is sent for 
 three years to the cabinetmakers' school. The 
 young apprentice twits his comrade over the lat- 
 ter's dependence, while he, young lordling of his 
 franc or two a day, has money to spend. After a 
 while, the other boy graduates from trade school 
 and comes to work in the same shop with his 
 friend. At first, he is a little slow and wasteful, 
 not being used to the rush of competitive pro- 
 duction and the economies of business. His wages, 
 in the beginning, are lower than those of the 
 more adroit apprentice, who twits him further on 
 having been three years at school to learn a trade 
 which he cannot practice so well as one who never 
 had a day's more schooling than the law requires. 
 But at the end of a year, the young graduate has 
 caught up with trade conditions. He shows a re- 
 markable intelligence and adaptability. He has 
 ideas for this and that bit of decoration. A fel- 
 low workman is sick and it develops that he can 
 take the place, not so well as a skilled hand, but 
 far better than the average apprentice. He is val- 
 
 43 
 
THE PEOPLE^S SCHOOL 
 
 uable to the shop and forges ahead, till, of a sud- 
 den, the once scornful friend wakes up to the 
 fact that he has been left far behind in the race 
 for advancement, and that, while his own wages 
 remain at much the same level, those of the trade 
 school graduate are already in advance and show 
 every prospect of further rise. The purchasing 
 power of money is too different in France and 
 America to make actual figures illuminating, but 
 the gist of many tables is embodied in this sup- 
 positious instance.^ 
 
 The superior workmanship betokened by great- 
 er wage-earning capacity is explained by compar- 
 ing the training these two boys received. One 
 was started and kept at work on some simple, 
 easily acquired process, which he will go on per- 
 forming for the rest of his days. The other has 
 not only sharpened his wits by general instruc- 
 tion, but studied his trade in all its bearings. He 
 learned to know a dozen implements instead of 
 one ; to understand a dozen operations. He fol- 
 lowed the product from its inception in the mind 
 of the designer to its completion and transfer to 
 the school salesroom. He designed himself almost 
 everything which came from his hand, and took 
 
 1 For items see Pierre Brizon, Vapprentissage and the re- 
 ports of the French Minister of Education. 
 
 44 
 
A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 
 
 that pride in the material expression of his own 
 ideas that leads more surely than any other mo- 
 tive to care and finish. Making a piece of furni- 
 ture is more to him than a boresome stint to be 
 done before coveted francs can be acquired. He 
 has a personal, intelligent interest in his task. 
 He can take hold of a new process with ready 
 comprehension, and, when thrown out of work 
 in one branch of the trade, he can fall back upon 
 another. He is independent and destined to rise 
 in his profession, just as surely as the average 
 untrained worker is nailed to his first, poorly paid 
 job, and so swells the class of the permanently 
 unskilled who crowd the market and lower wages 
 in good times, and in seasons of depression form 
 that menacing, hungering army of the unem- 
 ployed. 
 
 Perhaps French workers may not have per- 
 ceived all this ; but they have seen beyond a 
 doubt that, because he can produce at once upon 
 entering the shop, it is easy for the trade school 
 graduate to get a job. No time need be wasted 
 in breaking him in, for, in spite of his faults, he 
 is not raw ; and though the verdict of employers 
 is far from unanimous in all details, the consen- 
 sus of opinion is that, if the trade school gradu- 
 ate adapts himself to actual industrial conditions, 
 
 45 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 he makes up for early lack of dexterity and, in 
 the end, far outstrips all his competitors. Ger- 
 man opinion has already crystallized into legisla- 
 tion which renders industrial training obligatory, 
 and in our own country many a scattering proof 
 of the employer's recognition of its value is given 
 by half-time classes for apprentices. 
 
 Of course not every trade school graduate 
 achieves complete success, for there is no magic 
 in industrial training that can develop inferior 
 endowments to a high level of efficiency. Hered- 
 ity may be molded, but not eradicated. Yet the 
 child of mean ability may perhaps receive from 
 such education the greatest proportional benefit. 
 As mental defectives are awakened through con- 
 crete manual exercises, so the pupil of limited 
 capacity may be roused by practical instruction 
 to make the most of himself, and thus escape the 
 failure that awaits undisciplined mediocrity. 
 
 Trade education is not a paying investment for 
 the individual only. " In the international struggle 
 for commercial supremacy the balance must tip 
 in favor of the land whose workers are most skill- 
 ful and intelligent." With our toilers lies the stan- 
 dard of national handicraft. It lies with them to 
 support this standard against foreign labor at 
 home and abroad. Not all the tariff bulwarks in 
 
 46 
 
A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 
 
 the world can forever protect us against the en- 
 croachments of superior production. Dam the 
 currents of industry as we will, they set inevitably 
 toward quality. Germany has stolen the French 
 market out of the very lap of protection. How 
 gloriously "fit " must a nation be which can look 
 forward to free trade, as many a wise judge of 
 things maintains America is doing ! How sinewy 
 in every limb, firm knit for the race, steady-eyed, 
 bold-hearted, with no load of incompetence upon 
 her shoulders ! Such a load, alas ! we shall carry 
 so long as the sins of Europe are visited upon us 
 by unchecked immigration and so long as we grind 
 men and women to a worse semblance of things 
 unhuman in our own factories, and make no effort 
 to counteract by schooling the benumbing effects 
 of unenlightened toil. 
 
 No little contribution toward our national pros- 
 perity will be that content with manual labor 
 which should come from viewing it in school as 
 a worthy end of intellectual study. Much slipshod 
 service is now rendered by persons who look upon 
 manual work as a mere stepping-stone to some- 
 thing else, or as a makeshift for those who fail of 
 rising higher. Woman's temporizing position in 
 industry half explains her lower wages, and many 
 a man fails of success because he gives inferior 
 
 47 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 execution to what he deems inferior work. Man- 
 ual labor is not a coil to be shuffled off at the first 
 opportunity, but something that will remain with 
 us always until we cease to need our bodies for 
 other than vegetative purposes and become, as 
 some pessimistic magazine scribbler has predicted, 
 a degenerate human barnacle on the machinery 
 by which we live. Rather than this, let us set all 
 our writers plowing; our Rothschilds and Car- 
 negies to hoeing beans ; and put fire to offices, 
 libraries, schools, and the whole paraphernalia of 
 finance and culture. There will always be work 
 for hands to do, and the public welfare demands 
 that the men who perform it be as manful as any 
 other. Here, as elsewhere, we can afford to have 
 no contemptuous slovens. 
 
 To usher the young person into active life, 
 equipped with the wherewithal to live, concerns 
 not merely the economic efficiency of our workers; 
 not merely the quality of production ; not merely 
 our national supremacy in trade. It concerns the 
 moral integrity of our people. Whenever the cor- 
 ner stone of a new reform school is laid, the gods 
 must ask each other laughingly, ** How many more 
 Elmiras will it take to show these mortals that 
 one trade school is worth six reformatories ? " 
 Human interest is a crab which, crawling back- 
 
 48 
 
A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 
 
 ward, makes many a false start before it gains its 
 end. Just now, it has taken a long look at crime, 
 seen something very real and true about its causes, 
 and, whirling round back end toward the goal of 
 righteousness, has begun plowing away with ter- 
 rific kickings and much flying-off of industrial sand 
 and pebbles. But where is the queer fish coming 
 out ? At the reformation of an ever-recruited band 
 of criminals ! When a man has sinned, we see 
 clearly the whys and wherefores ; see that most 
 men fall into crime because they cannot make an 
 honest living ; ^ resolve to teach the poor souls a 
 trade; hurry them off to an Elmira in order to do 
 it, and send them forth in seventy-four cases out 
 of a hundred, completely reformed, with habits of 
 application and a steady job. " A fine work!" 
 says humanity; "a noble, inspiring work!" A 
 noble work it is, and its best results will have been 
 attained when the public has the genius — or 
 common sense — to infer: if lack of a trade, if 
 distaste for work, if habits of shiftlessness, bring 
 a man to crime, why not teach a trade, why not 
 give love for work, why not inculcate industry 
 before the man becomes a criminal, and there- 
 by save him and society the cost of sin ? The 
 
 1 Only two per cent of criminals in Massachusetts prisons have 
 a trade. 
 
 49 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 criminal is a misfit. Alter him if you conveniently 
 can, but cut out no more men on that pattern. 
 Nay ; alter the pattern, if you must let the misfits 
 go. The still unspoiled stuff of humanity is your 
 paramount concern. Leave over patching and 
 darning ragged individuals, and bethink you how 
 you will save the whole ones from tatters. To keep 
 the normal individual 7iormaly this is the problem 
 of the social worker. 
 
 "Everything," a witty lady once remarked, 
 — " everything is done for ragamuffins, but my 
 ordinary little boy has to struggle along as best 
 he can." When we have learned to do for the 
 ordinarily good and bright boy what we do, too 
 late, for truant Jim and pilfering Joe, we shall 
 find more than one probation officer drawing 
 better pay at another job. The child now comes 
 out of school at a critical age. Child labor laws 
 may, at first, keep him out of work, or the cir- 
 cumstances of his parents, coupled with lack of 
 interest in any definite occupation, may lead him 
 to idle away his most formative years. His youth^ 
 condemns him at best to juvenile pursuits where 
 employment is unsteady and the ever-shifting 
 environment conduces to anything but applica- 
 
 ^ Boys are not wanted in skilled industries till they are six- 
 teen. Massachusetts Commission on Industrial Training. 
 
 50 
 
A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 
 
 tion and firmness of character. If he lives in 
 the city, he is subject to a thousand rapidly 
 multiplying temptations. He is released from 
 the discipline of the school and at the same time 
 begins to have less respect for home restraints. 
 Parents assume a different attitude toward him 
 when he becomes a bread-winner. He has prac- 
 tically no guidance, and the large increase in re- 
 cent years in child criminality proves that he has 
 often fallen a victim to his adventurous inex- 
 perience. 
 
 The case against child labor is too long and 
 too well understood to bear repeating. Every 
 one knows how much more heavily the strain of 
 overwork tells upon children than upon adults. 
 All need repose to repair waste tissue and expel 
 the poison of fatigue. But the child must not 
 only repair : he must build new tissue. No won- 
 der that the growing boy or girl, confined for a 
 long, hard day in a factory, falls speedily a prey 
 to nervous and gastric troubles. No wonder his 
 growth and intelligence are stunted, for the food 
 which he consumes, the energy which generates 
 within him, must go into work and systemic re- 
 pairs, instead of into building new muscle and 
 brain cells. In spite of all our knowledge and 
 conviction, however, child labor laws fail of en- 
 
 51 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 forcement for lack of complementary measures. 
 But compulsory education, especially if extended 
 beyond the grades, will never be effective until 
 parents recognize that going to school is more 
 profitable than immediate work. Until that time 
 will they evade the law; and until children 
 can actually gain increased wage-earning capa- 
 city in the school, it will be an open question 
 whether we can claim the right of compelling 
 their attendance. How much more must this be 
 true if school unfits them for their proper task! 
 The social advantages of sojourn in the trade 
 school are not merely negative. Watch a room- 
 ful of children engaged in some practical work. 
 How bright and eager they are! They are having 
 a good time, as children have a right to do, even 
 in school. The pleasure which children take in 
 the practical part of their work spills over onto 
 the rest of the course. They see the "hang of 
 things" better. Their mathematics, drawing, and 
 history have an obvious use — also less obvious 
 ones of which they do not dream, but which func- 
 tion quietly and surely. Unconsciously during 
 the years while the child is learning his trade, 
 he is developing inner resources of culture. He 
 gets into his mind something to fill it in leisure 
 moments, something to think about. Perhaps he 
 
 52 
 
A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 
 
 learns in English class to love reading, a dura- 
 ble treasure that will last his lifetime. Not his 
 the helpless, spoiled-baby type of mind which 
 waits blankly to be entertained. He can amuse 
 himself, and needs no tawdry picture show or 
 corner saloon for recreation. His life is no longer 
 flat and monotonous. His work is no longer 
 deadening. He knows his machine as well as his 
 work. He knows his materials, and as he toils 
 mechanically, perhaps his mind follows them 
 back to the mine or the jungles of the Amazon. 
 Lives have been spent to get them ; life is spent 
 to shape them. And when the factory has done 
 with them, they will go here and there over 
 the world, to pay life back for what they cost. 
 He understands the whole process of manufac- 
 ture in his shop, and labors, not as a blind pis- 
 ton in the engine, but as a co-worker toward an 
 intelligible end. Not mere dead wood and iron, 
 but something live and real and interesting is 
 passing through his hands ; something stimulat- 
 ing withal. He is master of his tool, master of 
 the iron hand ; and work becomes exhilarating. 
 All of which is most fantastic, says the hard- 
 head. Will the fellow make better nails for such 
 untimely ruminations.? Certainly no worse ones; 
 the business of nail-making leaving a great deal 
 
 53 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 of room for thought, room better filled with fan- 
 tasy than with mere echoes of hammering. 
 
 Place in our times for fantasy there surely is; 
 place for what is better and deeper — imagina- 
 tion. There is, indeed, something ill-nourished 
 in the aspect of modern life, an insipidity, a mo- 
 notony of design, a thinness of texture in the 
 tapestry which bespeaks weavers of meager soul. 
 The richness of perception, the spontaneous joy 
 in nature, the freshness of mind and heart, the 
 bubbling, blossoming fullness of life wrought into 
 the nai've scenes of an antique arras across which 
 the Lady, the Lion, and the Unicorn move nobly 
 and gayly through meadows full of stiffly grow- 
 ing flowers and wee frisking animals ; the boun- 
 tiful heaping-up of beauty in the wreathed frames 
 of fruit and blossom which encircle the madon- 
 nas of Delia Robbia ; the splendid lavishness of 
 thought displayed in the tracery of a slim sword 
 hilt from old Florence, — where does this find a 
 counterpart among the products of our trades- 
 people ? 
 
 Of course a great deal of sentimental whimper- 
 ing about the " good old times " has been done 
 by pseudo-historical folk. Even a sturdy spirit 
 like William Morris fell to dreaming over a golden 
 age of England which was, in reality, leaden 
 
 54 
 
A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 
 
 enough. But all these plaints contain a kernel of 
 justice. In the study of past ages, we look upon 
 the oases and reclaimed land of character. That 
 certain tracts were once desert is not the terrible 
 thing, but that a tract, once fertile, should fall de- 
 sert again. And in the light of the Italian Renais- 
 sance ; indeed, to go no further back than our 
 own day, in the light of the greater " resource- 
 fulness " of continental as compared with Ameri- 
 can environments, our daily life and all its ad- 
 juncts smack dull and flat. The toiler must needs 
 season his existence with the acrid vinegar of 
 dissipation, lurid theatres, and yellow journal- 
 ism. We sadly need to dream a bit at our work ; 
 to vivify our common round. Nowadays, in every 
 circle, we live in low relief. From Singapore to 
 Paris, we wear the same cut of clothes, the same 
 cut of thoughts. Ideas flatten themselves out 
 thin as they diffuse over the globe. Convictions 
 lose their depth and crispness. Even progressive 
 Professor Royce, of Harvard, bewails the pas- 
 sing of provincialism with the rich and stimulat- 
 ing variety of mind and manners it insures. Uni- 
 formity, the world-old bugbear, has stepped out 
 of the cosmic closet to rattle its dry bones 
 amongst us, and the whirring of factories is but 
 music for its dancing. 
 
 55 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 Against the leveling and numbing influence of 
 industry, at least, the trade school would fight. 
 Among men whose surroundings have stolen from 
 them the right to even common thoughts, the 
 trade school would work for a vast spiritual en- 
 richment. In relation to their work, this deepen- 
 ing of experience would be greatest. Though 
 trade instruction could not break down the thick 
 walls of specialization, could not bring the man 
 into closer physical relation to the finished pro- 
 duct of his toil, it could tie him to it by a firm 
 bond of understanding. It would open up to him 
 a world of thought where he dreamed no thought 
 existed. It would interest him in a world of homely 
 things which now he deems unworthy of his inter- 
 est, in stocks and stones and bars of steel. And it 
 would teach him to express himself in these ma- 
 terials of industry, putting into them the fancy, the 
 feeling, the loving care which would make our 
 articles of commerce justify their etymology by 
 being truly things of beauty, "bits of art." 
 
TRADE EDUCATION AND THE WOMAN 
 
 The great question mark with which to-day punc- 
 tuates many an ancient usage is largest and 
 blackest after the word woman. "The Wo- 
 man Problem," "The Family," "The Economic 
 Dependence of Woman " are expressions which 
 stand daily in the press, which fall daily from the 
 lips of preachers and lecturers ; and the increasing 
 urgency of the cry, " Votes for Women," proves 
 that some readjustment is necessary if balance 
 amid present unrest is to be preserved. 
 
 Discussion of the woman question rages hottest 
 about the point which links it to our subject of 
 trade education. What the woman's rights advo- 
 cate calls the economic dependence of female on 
 male, or, in simple terms, the fact that the aver- 
 age girl must marry to make a living, is said to 
 have caused the age-long subjection of woman to 
 man. Just as the monopolist employer can defi- 
 nitely fix living conditions for the workers in his 
 trade, so have men, since the beginning of time, 
 ordered matrimony and the life of woman after 
 
 57 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 their own liking. To keep women docile in their 
 semi-slavery, their development as individuals has 
 been subintentionally retarded by their masters. 
 Now, however, that education has penetrated the 
 feminine ranks, discontent breaks forth. The his- 
 tory of all slave rebellions repeats itself. Women 
 have come into greater knowledge and are de- 
 manding freedom. Against this wall between wo- 
 man and freedom, the efforts of reformers bat- 
 ter with deadliest energy. To hang no longer on 
 a future husband for a livelihood has seemed to 
 the harassed and downtrodden female the open 
 sesame to self-respect and liberty. But economic 
 dependence of some sort she can never escape. 
 Every one, whether man or woman, is econ- 
 omically dependent, — on an employer, on a cor- 
 poration, on consumers, or on the general public. 
 The real point of difficulty is that in woman's 
 legitimate trade, progress has been barred. The 
 homemaker, housekeeper, and mother often lose 
 touch with the currents of contemporary life and 
 fail completely of being " human beings " be- 
 cause all their effort and time are consumed in 
 laboriously performing the operations of their 
 trade in the same unsystematic, wasteful manner 
 in use in the Middle Ages. Because of this fail- 
 ure of the household to keep pace with general 
 
 58 
 
TRADE EDUCATION AND THE WOMAN 
 
 industrial and social development, women have 
 begun to find it too restrictive. They recognize 
 that they are being cut off from fullness of ex- 
 perience by so-called home duties, and are refus- 
 ing, in many cases, to enter an unprogressive 
 employment whose ante-diluvian methods of 
 work kill personality and efficiency at once. 
 
 Of course the question is infinitely more com- 
 plicated than the above statement would imply, 
 just as life is deeper than the outline drawings 
 whereby we explain its forms. A psychological 
 factor has helped to keep housekeeping a rudi- 
 mentary social organ, and to prevent woman 
 from escaping out of this atrophying business 
 into any other. Nature combined with the sel- 
 fishness of men in this regard. It is natural for 
 a woman to be a mother, and she is willing to 
 make a great many sacrifices to secure this end. 
 But when at last she awakened to a recognition 
 of the fact that her sacrifices were unfitting her 
 for motherhood ; when she saw that by remain- 
 ing a household slave, chained forever to the un- 
 skilled work of a slave, she was thereby sacrific- 
 ing her children as well as herself, then woman 
 felt no longer her previous satisfaction in moth- 
 erhood at all costs. She began to remember, like 
 Ibsen's Nora, that first of all she was a human 
 
 59 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 being with the right and the duty of life. She per- 
 ceived that to be fully human preceded all func- 
 tions, however proper, which belong to a human 
 being. "This business of motherhood can wait 
 till I am fit for it," she thought. "First, I must 
 breathe and move and think as becomes a woman 
 and not a drudge. Drudge in mind and body.*^ 
 Drudge and mother? The terms are mutually 
 exclusive ! I will set about escaping drudgery." 
 
 Set about it she has and in deadly earnest. 
 She has gone to work in industry where she ex- 
 pects to be treated as a twentieth-century indi- 
 vidual. The domestic servant is withdrawing 
 her protection against kitchen work. Woman 
 forms trade unions and battles manfully for 
 justice. She organizes women's clubs. She agi- 
 tates for the ballot. 
 
 Not all of her methods are so praiseworthy. She 
 escapes marital obligations by divorce. She avoids 
 bearing children. She avoids marriage altogether, 
 or, once married, manages her home so poorly 
 that it might as well not exist : witness the mere 
 fact that in New York City the largest percent- 
 age of undernourished school-children come from 
 moderately well-to-do families ^ ; and witness also 
 the number of incorrigible children voluntarily 
 
 1 Investigation by the Board of Health, 1907. 
 60 
 
TRADE EDUCATION AND THE WOMAN 
 
 surrendered to our juvenile courts by respectable 
 parents. 
 
 Thus the lack of progressive intelligence in 
 homekeeping has had the twofold result of driv- 
 ing the woman out of the home in protest against 
 its narrowness, and of frequently making the 
 home and the family institution, as we know it, a 
 failure. But if, as we hear nowadays ad nauseaniy 
 the family is the essential social unit ; then it is 
 not against marriage, not against that economic 
 dependence of women which has been so cruelly 
 exploited, that the fundamental reformer must 
 struggle. Family life needs modernization. The 
 present industrial employment and the contin- 
 ued unmarried state of so many women may be 
 viewed as an unorganized strike against the injur- 
 ious labor conditions in their proper trade. It is a 
 necessary protest against wrong — but, a tem- 
 porary condition which will pass away when right 
 is once established. 
 
 The integrity of the family depends, first, 
 upon modifying the form of the institution to 
 allow woman human freedom, and, second, upon 
 recognition of the fact that family life is a fit 
 scene for the play of intelligence. Woman's edu- 
 cation should be designed " not to lead her per- 
 manently away from the home, but to teach her 
 
 6i 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 how to bring the best from the outside world 
 into the home." The first step is the mechan- 
 ical one^ — to bring homekeeping methods up to 
 date, and so leave the mother a little leisure for 
 life contacts. 
 
 Here is the mission of the domestic science 
 courses for girls. Housework need be drudgery 
 no longer when intelligence and system are in- 
 troduced into it. The application of scientific 
 study to domestic economy may perhaps do for 
 the whole industry the same thing which science 
 has done for every other line of modern business. 
 Perhaps much of the purely mechanical work will 
 be taken over by machinery or by special agen- 
 cies. "Where one woman now uses a potato-parer, 
 meat-grinder, bread-maker, biscuit-ringer, auto- 
 matic cleaner, dish-washer or washing-machine, 
 instead of the simple knives, choppers, bread- 
 boards, irons, brooms, pans, washboards, and 
 human hands of our forefathers, everyhousehold 
 will boast these conveniences and many another." 
 Perhaps we may come to the conclusion that for 
 a woman in every kitchen in every dwelling in 
 every block in a city street to spend the same 
 hour performing an operation, which one of them 
 could perform for the whole block by means of 
 a simple machine, is an unwarrantable waste of 
 
 62 
 
TRADE EDUCATION AND THE WOMAN 
 
 time, strength, and mentality. The thought of a 
 dozen women steaming and stewing over a dozen 
 dinners which could, in many respects, be better 
 cooked by one alone, may drive us to cooperative 
 housekeeping of some hitherto unheard-of kind. 
 One hesitates to predict what the future will 
 bring forth in a field so hedged about with thorny 
 prejudice and with real difficulties. But that 
 some simplification of housework must take place 
 is so certain that the particular form may safely 
 be left for the specialist to discover. 
 
 Mere simplification is not enough : we must 
 persuade woman that housekeeping is interest- 
 ing. Women have been trying to escape from 
 housework because they see in it no scope for the 
 imagination. When the drudgery is obsolete and 
 housekeeping is recognized and taught as a 
 science, the four walls of a home will no longer 
 be a prison for the ambitious wife, but a labor- 
 atory to which she brings for testing all the most 
 progressive thought of the world. 
 
 It is not in the sphere of domestic economy 
 alone that the trained woman will find room for 
 deepest study. The education of her children can 
 much less afford to be haphazard than the order- 
 ing of her kitchen. The illuminating distinction 
 between efficiency and passive goodness is no- 
 
 63 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 where better shown than among mothers. How 
 many little monsters grow up under the care of 
 merely ''good women"! How many weaklings! 
 How many stunted natures ! When Hamlet asks 
 the prying emissaries of his uncle to play upon 
 a recorder, Guildenstern replies, " Believe me, 
 I cannot. I know no touch of it, my lord. I have 
 not the skill." 
 
 Then Hamlet : "Why, look you now, how un- 
 worthy a thing you make of me ! You would 
 play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, 
 you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, 
 you would sound me from my lowest note to the 
 top of my compass ; and there is much music, 
 excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot 
 you make it speak ! 'Sblood I do you think that 
 I am easier to be played on than a pipe ? " 
 
 No one would dream of trying so simple a 
 thing as piano playing without practice, but to 
 nourish costly human bodies, to build a precious 
 human life — for this, instinct must suffice. Mo- 
 ther love may be omnipotent in romantic fiction, 
 but it will never tell the ignorant woman to scald 
 her baby's milk bottle unless she knows the dan- 
 gers of unscalded bottles ; and all the fondness 
 in the world, and even all the old-fashioned skill 
 at making individual dishes, will not tell her how 
 
 64 
 
TRADE EDUCATION AND THE WOMAN 
 
 to set a nourishing meal before her children un- 
 less she knows something of the ingredients of 
 food and the chemical needs of the body. If a 
 teacher must study for years to instruct the child 
 an hour a day in some limited subject, how much 
 more careful training must the person require 
 who is to control the child during its earliest and 
 most formative years, give it character, and mold 
 its whole attitude toward life? The realms of 
 psychology, philosophy, history, literature, biol- 
 ogy, and hygiene must be exhausted to give the 
 growing child his due. No mere grown-up know- 
 ledge of these subjects will suffice. The princi- 
 ples of child growth and of child pyschology 
 must be conned by the mother no less carefully 
 than by the teacher. She must know the mater- 
 ial with which she works ; know its laws. She 
 must be an expert, for no race was ever greater 
 than its mothers. 
 
 New York City has at length discovered that 
 more than love is needed in rearing children, 
 and has not only instituted courses for young 
 mothers, but sends a nurse into tenement houses, 
 where a new baby has come, to instruct the 
 mother by word and example as to its proper 
 care. Would it not save public expense as well 
 as babies to give this training earlier and to every 
 
 6s 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 woman ? I know it is the practice in some circles 
 to scoff at mothers' classes and mothers' clubs. 
 Like alchemists of old before science reached a 
 solid basis, many members of mothers' clubs try 
 not a few ludicrous and fantastic experiments. 
 But the greenness of their wisdom is not the im- 
 portant thing. It is a hopeful sign that they have 
 begun to think about the question at all. 
 
 You mother who never punished your child 
 unjustly in anger and so undermined his respect 
 for your judgment and authority — I do not write 
 for you. You other mother who never humored 
 the baby at your breast and lost him forever, or 
 during years of bitter struggle, that great gift 
 of self-control, you too have, perhaps, been in- 
 telligent without set instruction in the mysteries 
 of human growth. But how many of us are in- 
 telligent ? Do not think of yourself, O reader 
 who were born wise! but of Mrs. X, who has 
 just left the room, and who, we all know, was 
 born foolish and yet accepts with easy-going 
 complacency the responsibility of children up to 
 any number the *' Lord may provide." 
 
 Are the domestic science and motherhood 
 courses the only trade instruction desirable for 
 girls > What will be the effect on them of busi- 
 ness and industrial training ? Will this tend 
 
 66 
 
TRADE EDUCATION AND THE WOMAN 
 
 merely to increase the army of single women, to 
 entrench woman more firmly in every form of 
 industry and make her so contented in her self- 
 supporting existence that she will be slow to ex- 
 change her freedom for the necessary depend- 
 ence and limitations of a child-bearing woman ? 
 The answer is yes and no ! Fortunately the 
 author has no wish to dogmatize as to particular 
 methods in a case where so little experimentation 
 has been done. It is possible that the practice of 
 housekeeping will so evolve that all women need 
 not cook and sew just because they are women. 
 This question of the woman in industry is a 
 difficulty which must be frankly acknowledged. 
 It is well that women are able to support them- 
 selves. Many a rash marriage, many an uncon- 
 genial one is prevented by the independence 
 with which a wage-earning woman can await her 
 happiness. Women also find in pre-marital years 
 of wage-earning, a disciplinary training in or- 
 derly, methodical habits which is invaluable to a 
 future wife and mother whose autocratic position 
 in the household might tempt her to unsystematic 
 work. ** It is noticeable," says Helen Bosanquet,^ 
 " that girls who are engaged in skilled industries 
 are better fitted for their home duties afterwards 
 
 * Helen Bosanquet, The Family. 
 
 67 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 than girls engaged in rough and unskilled work." 
 And surely better fitted than untrained girls pre- 
 viously occupied at nothing ! 
 
 Yet the hard-headed man sometimes objects 
 that a program for thorough trade education 
 may suit boys, who are a stable industrial factor, 
 but that it is useless to teach a girl her whole 
 trade, because she so seldom needs it. The ques- 
 tion is more than economic ; such instruction 
 trains her mind to unified thinking — a habit 
 surely priceless whether the concrete problems 
 of her trade are of further use to her or not. 
 
 Viewed, however, from the economic side, the 
 question of the woman in industry is seen to be 
 more than training for a brief business career to 
 be terminated by marriage. It is roughly esti- 
 mated that at least fifty per cent of women 
 workers are over twenty-five years of age. This 
 indicates five to ten years previously spent in 
 wage-earning, and suggests that no small propor- 
 tion of this fifty per cent will continue indefin- 
 itely self-supporting. For these women life pre- 
 sents a masculine problem, and the trades upon 
 which their future safety and comfort depend 
 must be taught well at all hazards, even if time 
 forces the sacrifice of strictly feminine branches. 
 Better do well one thing and that the most ur- 
 
 68 
 
TRADE EDUCATION AND THE WOMAN 
 
 gent, than half perform two tasks, however im- 
 portant the second may appear. The principles 
 laid down in this chapter stand as our ideal ; but 
 education, like politics, must be wisely oppor- 
 tunist. We cannot deny the fact that many 
 women are engaged not in their natural trade, 
 but in a multitude of industrial and mercantile 
 pursuits ; and common sense demands that school- 
 ing should prepare them unequivocally for what 
 they do instead of for what some one may think 
 they ought to do. 
 
 Even the girl to whom industry is but a tem- 
 porary means of livelihood presents a more com- 
 plicated problem than that of her own personal 
 welfare. From the Kansas City Labor Herald 
 we quote a union man's opinion that, " When we 
 consider the fact that the average time worked 
 by a woman or girl is computed as five years, it 
 is easy to see that a long apprenticeship cannot 
 be served, and any school training which will as- 
 sist her to earlier efficiency must be favorably 
 received by us." May not the industrial tran- 
 sient be worth training for the sake of those with 
 whose wages she competes } Not industry alone 
 would profit by the greater capacity of its women 
 workers which would follow the opening of trade 
 schools for girls. Every worker, man or woman, 
 
 69 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 would profit thereby, for at present the most 
 ruinous competition with which skilled labor 
 meets is the cheap unskilled labor of women. 
 Because they are untrained, women can command 
 only the lowest wages ; because they are untrained, 
 they fall quickly into cheap specialties and do not 
 raise their wages ; because they are untrained in 
 mind as well as in hand, their trade union organi- 
 zations are not usually compact enough for power ; 
 and because they often take a temporizing view 
 of labor, which no instruction overcomes by in- 
 terest in the thing itself, they care little about 
 self-improvement and are so uncertain a factor in 
 industry that their lower wage is explained if not 
 excused from the employer's point of view. 
 
 From whatever standpoint we survey the 
 matter, it presents one unchanging aspect. That 
 women are in industry to stay — as a class if not 
 as individuals — seems an established fact. And 
 so long as they are in industry, they deserve as 
 adequate training for their tasks as men. 
 
 Two other arguments for vocational training 
 of women (whether domestic or industrial) force 
 themselves upon our notice. As has been said in 
 another connection, trade schools ought to secure 
 a respectful attitude toward work. If more of 
 our young women took some personal interest in 
 
 70 
 
TRADE EDUCATION AND THE WOMAN 
 
 housework ; if more of them were trained to man- 
 age a house economically and even to do the work 
 well and expeditiously themselves, they would be 
 willing and able to marry on less and begin more 
 simply than many a young person now thinks of 
 doing in some walks of life. Thus perhaps some 
 of the justly deplored late marriages, with their 
 correspondingly decreased birth rate, might be 
 avoided. Our ethical concept has in this case 
 gone in advance of the biological evolution. We 
 must not try to force it too far ahead, or nature 
 will pull us up short rein by some signal warning. 
 
 The problem of late marriage is bound up 
 closely with a still graver question upon which 
 trade education should have an even deeper and 
 better influence — that travesty of marriage, pro- 
 stitution. Prostitution is a survival of primitive 
 polygamy and later concubinage, monogamy as 
 a type having been slow of development, being 
 still, indeed, far from perfectly developed in hu- 
 man ideals and conduct. And modern social or- 
 ganization impedes its development in many 
 ways; nay, almost inevitably prolongs the bar- 
 baric system amongst us. 
 
 How } 
 
 Prostitutes may be classified as : (i) Naturally 
 depraved ; (2) girls who have been betrayed and 
 
 71 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 left helpless ; (3) girls who have a strong distaste 
 for work ; (4) girls who, through inefficiency or 
 underpay, cannot earn by legitimate means enough 
 to live. The last groups are larger than one likes 
 to think, because their sin is so manifestly the 
 fault of the society which has allowed them to 
 grow up untrained in the matters whereon their 
 life and safety depend, and which purchases its lux- 
 uries a little cheaper by the sacrifice of some under- 
 paid sales-clerk, sewing-woman, or factory girl. 
 
 Before these unfortunates have drifted to wreck 
 on the shores of our city life, the trade school 
 will come to their aid. The indolent girl who de- 
 spises labor will there learn that work is honor- 
 able, and will conceive an intelligent interest in 
 some worthy pursuit. The inefficient girl may ac- 
 quire industrious, regular habits and become able 
 to earn her livelihood. If she has an excitable, 
 unsteady temperament, application to practical 
 work should give her better poise and at least 
 some permanent interest to counterbalance her 
 fever for excitement. It is the old question of 
 prevention or cure ; trade or reform schools. The 
 young learner would find her dangerous period 
 of almost unremunerative apprenticeship materi- 
 ally shortened by attendance upon a trade con- 
 tinuation school, because, when working and 
 
 72 
 
TRADE EDUCATION AND THE WOMAN 
 
 studying simultaneously, she could forge ahead 
 more rapidly toward the point where earnings and 
 expenditures balance. For the woman who is so 
 underpaid that she cannot live or cannot dress in 
 accordance with the requirements of her trade, or 
 whose average salary gives her no chance for the 
 recreation and pleasure which a healthy nature 
 craves, there are only two lines of hope: self- 
 help through trade union organization, and public 
 opinion which shall refuse to patronize business 
 concerns that underpay their women. For trade 
 union action, intelligent workers are required. 
 We have, alas ! no quicker nostrum for the crea- 
 tion of that social sense in which all prostitutes 
 will find their chief salvation than slow education 
 of the public to a better understanding of the 
 dangers and terrors of this evil which menaces 
 not merely the health, happiness, and morality 
 of a fraction of our women, but the whole future 
 stamina of our race. But we maintain that, in 
 the present state of chaos and difficulty, the 
 Vocational School will be a great help and a pow- 
 erful deterrent for the girl whom unguided cir- 
 cumstance now throws into the undertow of civili- 
 zation, since it will give every girl an honorable 
 pride in independence and the ability to keep her- 
 self independent. 
 
VI 
 
 IN THE COUNTRY 
 
 "Agriculture underlies all industries and draws upon all 
 sciences." — Wickson.1 
 
 In the preceding chapters we have spoken of 
 the seven million or more persons who are en- 
 gaged in American industry. There is an even 
 larger class for whom the vocational school would 
 be invaluable — the farmers. One third of our 
 population still lives upon the land ; and many 
 more than the ten and a half million agricultural 
 workers enumerated by the last census can and 
 will sooner or later turn to the country for sup- 
 port. 
 
 But in spite of this preponderance of rural 
 population, our civilization is distinctly metro- 
 politan. The current of modern improvement 
 has served to draw country districts nearer and 
 nearer the city. The city, on the other hand, 
 overflows its suburbs and covers the country 
 with a thin metropolitan veneer. This is inimical 
 to the growth of a healthy country life rooted in 
 
 1 Mr. Wickson in Cyclopedia of American Agriculture, 
 
 74 
 
IN THE COUNTRY 
 
 the soil and drawing therefrom spirit and sus- 
 tenance, for, in fact as in fiction, there is a genu- 
 ine pastoral element, which has its own laws 
 of development, and which is too precious to 
 smother under any city-made mantle of pro- 
 gress. 
 
 The disappointing inapplicability of our long 
 cherished idyllic theory of country life to the 
 bare, hard round of drudgery which its reality 
 discloses, has helped to retard our appreciation 
 of this element. Probably there is no more fruit- 
 ful field for social work than the village, particu- 
 larly the old established village. The human 
 stock needs replenishing. Existence is stagna- 
 tion. There is no society — how can there be 
 where there is no continual supply of fresh in- 
 terests to interchange ? — and since the school- 
 ing of the average country child stops early, he 
 never acquires those inward resources which 
 solitude demands. Owing also to this lack of 
 education, country districts resent innovation, 
 and are slow to improve their methods of work 
 and conditions of living. 
 
 The youth and energy of the country has 
 found the path of least resistance to be quitting 
 rather than reconstructing country life. Thus 
 we have seen in the last fifty years an exodus 
 
 75 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 cityward, and westward, which has produced the 
 twofold result of city congestion and under-de- 
 velopment of rural resources. This exodus has 
 been stimulated by educational ideals as well as 
 by economic pressure. Little has been done by 
 the schools to make farming seem an oppor- 
 tunity for ambition and talent. Few educational 
 and cultural advantages have been available for 
 the farmer, whereas the city is in itself a lib- 
 eral education. The largeness of urban life has 
 seemed intimately bound up with its superior 
 business opportunities. The introduction of farm 
 machinery, and the factory production of much 
 which was formerly made in the household, has 
 greatly reduced the demand for country labor ; 
 hired help find their uncertain and at best un- 
 steady employment more and more unsatisfac- 
 tory and are easily tempted to the comparatively 
 sure and continuous work of industry. Because 
 of discriminative transportation rates to larger 
 centers, industry has left the small towns, re- 
 moving not only the demand for workmen, but 
 also the market for farm products, to the distant 
 city. With this decline in the home market, the 
 less desirable land can no longer compete with 
 fertile regions, and many farms in New England, 
 New York, and even Ohio, have been aban- 
 
IN THE COUNTRY 
 
 doned. The farmer has either gone to the city, 
 or pushed westward where land is new, cheap, 
 and more plentiful, and intensive methods are 
 not yet necessary in order to produce a crop. 
 But now that our new territory is taken up, while 
 at the same time our population steadily increases 
 and a larger food supply is daily becoming neces- 
 sary, we must expect a change. Much abandoned 
 land will again be brought under cultivation, 
 much exhausted land will be reenriched, and 
 more careful, scientific agriculture will develop. 
 Education is already paving the way to the 
 reconstruction of farming methods, but education 
 has as yet touched only the overseer, the gentle- 
 man farmer. As Dean David Kinley puts it, 
 education is lifting farming from the grade of 
 manual labor to that of a technical calling or 
 profession. Schools of agriculture are gradually 
 raising their standards of admission until aca- 
 demically they stand or expect to stand on the 
 same level with engineering colleges. With such 
 institutions this discussion is not concerned. We 
 stand for the plain man ; the average workman, 
 the average small farmer or even farm hand. 
 He too needs training if agriculture is to form a 
 trustworthy substructure for our industrial civil- 
 ization. 
 
 77 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 Neglecting to train our farmers means as basic 
 and certain a destruction of natural resources 
 and reduction of national prosperity as the de- 
 molition of every forest. The soil is our funda- 
 mental support. We are its creatures ; our fac- 
 tories are busy with its products ; indeed, human 
 life is little more than shaping what the soil 
 supplies us in a formless state. Who is the keeper 
 of this life-giving mother earth ? The farmer. 
 And what have we done to make sure that he 
 will not kill the goose that lays our golden egg ? 
 We have a habit of educating those who perform 
 the secondary human functions ; but the vital 
 primary ones are left entirely to untutored im- 
 pulse. 
 
 The nature of farm work renders special train- 
 ing for it imperative. Though the division between 
 labor and capital is at length asserting itself in 
 this field, the farmer's work is usually self-di- 
 rected and unspecialized. Upon one man depends 
 the success of many acres. He must understand 
 trade upon trade, drawing from all the sciences 
 alike, sending out ramifications into every depart- 
 ment of knowledge. An acquaintance with local 
 soil and climate and their bearing on crop raising ; 
 with the chemistry of soil and crops ; with ways of 
 preventing depletion of the soil through exhaus- 
 
 78 
 
IN THE COUNTRY 
 
 tion and erosion ; with the principles of drainage 
 and irrigation, and of animal and plant physiology, 
 care and breeding ; with the pests and diseases 
 which attack vegetation and the methods of fight- 
 ing them, — these are but a few things upon which 
 the successful farmer or even intelligent farm 
 worker can scarcely afford to be ignorant. Yet all 
 of these are topics for which widely diversified in- 
 struction is necessary, topics whose frontier of 
 knowledge is rapidly advancing and for which no 
 hereditary or legendary information can suffice. 
 Finally, successful farming demands a far-seeing 
 and daring mind. The saving from a larger outlay 
 which may increase the net profits in far greater 
 proportion is a subject upon which the untrained 
 rustic is hard to convince. Perhaps even more 
 difficult to understand is the point where the law 
 of diminishing returns becomes operative, the 
 point beyond which intensive methods do not 
 bring a paying return. 
 
 *' The increasing capitalization of agriculture 
 necessary to secure the greatest long-run profits 
 is putting agriculture more and more into the 
 hands of educated men of means. Capitalization 
 always places a premium upon intelligence," is 
 the dictum of Dean Davenport. Unless we edu- 
 cate all farmers instead of merely those gentle- 
 
 79 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 men farmers who find their way to our colleges 
 and universities, the inevitable development we 
 have already witnessed in industry may also 
 be expected in farming ; and we may anticipate 
 a twentieth-century feudalism in land ownership 
 and the rise of an agrarian proletariat. In mani- 
 pulating this proletarian labor, those same prob- 
 lems which now obtrude themselves in connec- 
 tion with unskilled industrial labor may be ex- 
 pected to present themselves. 
 
 That we may forestall such a consummation ; 
 that we may never come to carry such a burden 
 of agrarian as of industrial incompetence ; that 
 the national farming resources may be most fully 
 and conservatively developed ; and that the ex- 
 travagant exhaustion of our fertile soil by unen- 
 lightened cultivation may no longer continue, 
 the United States needs some systematic agri- 
 cultural education which shall reach every rural 
 inhabitant. 
 
 It is difficult to determine what form of agri- 
 cultural training should be introduced into coun- 
 try schools, but certain principles to govern such 
 instruction may safely be predicated. Professor 
 Earle Barnes makes a suggestive distinction be- 
 tween educative and uneducative work. " Work 
 ceases to be educative when we have mastered 
 
 80 
 
IN THE COUNTRY 
 
 it completely, when its processes have become 
 purely reflex and it ceases to engage our thought." 
 It is not alone mechanical work, such as that 
 of the ticket chopper, which soon loses all edu- 
 cative value. Any task in which the worker 
 does not continually find new outlooks widening 
 before him, in which he does not every day re- 
 adjust his mental viewpoint to meet some new 
 contingency, in which (to borrow from nature 
 an expression of the perfect adaptation to en- 
 vironment which precludes further progress) 
 he vegetates — any such task is not merely 
 uneducative but stultifying as well. Work may 
 become uneducative without being thoroughly 
 mastered if its thought possibilities are undevel- 
 oped by the worker ; and it is just here that the 
 country schools must strive for the uplift of rural 
 intelligence. The ** hay-seed " is not a hay-seed 
 because he comes from the country, but because 
 humanly, intellectually, he has vegetated and 
 gone to seed. 
 
 To open up to the farm population the cultural 
 value of their work is the first object of the 
 country school ; and this can be done only by 
 giving rural education a new direction and alter- 
 mg Its ideal. The same subjects may be taught, 
 but they will be taught in terms of the country. 
 
 8i 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 The grammar grades should most emphatically 
 not attempt to give training in general farming 
 methods or in agricultural theory. Children are 
 interested in concrete vital phenomena, not in 
 laws, and nature study should be used to excite 
 the intelligent interest of the pupils in the life 
 about them. But the manual training for these 
 elementary grades might have a local and prac- 
 tical bearing. In place of the purely formal exer- 
 cises so common in schoolrooms, the class might 
 draw subject-matter from practical problems of 
 the farm, and build fences, drains, and roadways 
 instead of constructing useless wood, paper, or 
 metal objects. The school-garden is an infinite 
 resource ; and could be made practical by select- 
 ing for successive years the different crops suit- 
 able to the locality. 
 
 In addition to freshening the grammar grades 
 in country schools with a breath of the woods 
 and hills, and with the scent of good red earth ; 
 in addition to turning the child's mind toward the 
 beauty and wonder of the natural world, we must 
 also give him special training for his life work. 
 This will begin in the high school. 
 
 This school must of course offer general aca- 
 demic branches, as these are the prerequisites 
 of farming intelligence. But in addition to this 
 
 82 
 
IN THE COUNTRY 
 
 general information and mental drill, the agri- 
 cultural problems of the locality should be cov- 
 ered. As Liberty Hyde Bailey justly declares, 
 the country high school must not attempt to do 
 superficially what the college does exhaustively. 
 Let it eschew broad and theoretic surveys and 
 do thorough work on definite, significant local 
 problems. 
 
 In both grammar and high schools, also, vari- 
 ous academic branches can be given a distinctly 
 vocational turn without detracting from their 
 value as mind trainers or sources of information. 
 Geography, like charity, may well begin at home ; 
 the farm, village, township, county, state, nation, 
 and continent seems a logical order of study. 
 Map drawing would in this way assume a won- 
 derful vitality by having a basis in visible things. 
 In geography, as it is often taught, we see the 
 grown-up impulse to present a subject analyt- 
 ically, symmetrically. But the natural progress 
 of child thought is from the known to the un- 
 known. Comprehensive unity the child cannot 
 appreciate ; but coherence of the new with the 
 familiar is needed to maintain interest. Arith- 
 metic can easily deal with farm problems. Choice 
 of reading, too, is a fruitful field. Why should 
 not the English course include books which 
 
 83 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 bring out the wealth of rural life ? — not books 
 that sentimentalize over the country ; pupils 
 will be quick to detect the false and artificial 
 note, — but those which impart a new and deeper 
 meaning to nature, which open up rural oppor- 
 tunities heretofore undreamed of, and give an 
 impulse toward creative thinking about his en- 
 vironment that will endure beyond school years 
 and make the farmer's life a growth and a con- 
 tinual education. 
 
 The movement for better rural education is 
 already widespread. Practically every state in 
 the Union has farmers* institutes designed to 
 arouse interest in scientific agriculture and to 
 popularize scientific treatment of especially im- 
 portant farm problems. The National Depart- 
 ment of Agriculture and many state departments 
 are unflagging in disseminating literature and 
 giving consultation. Experiment stations have 
 given incalculable stimulus to up-to-date farming 
 in adjoining districts. Colleges of agriculture are 
 everywhere enlarging their extension work to 
 include lectures on agriculture, traveling schools, 
 and one, two, and three week courses held either 
 at the college or throughout the state. Minne- 
 sota, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, Wis- 
 consin, Alabama, Georgia, and New York have 
 
 84 
 
IN THE COUNTRY 
 
 promising systems of so-called agricultural 
 schools of the high school type, and in many 
 other states agricultural courses have been added 
 to the curricula of existing high schools. An ex- 
 tensive effort is being made to equip elementary 
 school-teachers for presenting agricultural sub- 
 jects. In thirteen states, teaching of agriculture 
 in rural schools is required by law, while in thirty- 
 one it is encouraged. Gardening is becoming a 
 feature in many progressive schools, and, though 
 the experiment is limited in extent, it is unlim- 
 ited in results, as is proved by the social and 
 moral effect of the gardens in De Witt Clinton 
 Park, New York, in Weccacoe Square, Philadel- 
 phia, and in Dayton, Ohio. It is a curious fact, 
 however, that school-gardening has been largely 
 confined to city schools and betterment agencies, 
 and that its educational and practical value in 
 rural communities has been little recognized. 
 Where gardening is not done in connection 
 with school-work, home gardening for boys and 
 girls is widely encouraged by the competitive 
 corn and tomato clubs. The general interest in 
 nature study, which even extravagant faddists 
 have not been able to discredit, is our longest 
 step forward in the way of better rural school- 
 ing, because it means a transforming of the 
 
 8s 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 spirit and a redirecting of the method of edu- 
 cation. 
 
 Marvelous and inspiring as are the strides 
 which the movement for agricultural education 
 has made and is making in the United States, 
 we must not allow them to blind us to the fact 
 that, after all, we do not insure to every farmer 
 adequate preparation for his work. The special 
 college of agriculture is out of the question for 
 the average country boy. Little use is made of 
 rural common schools as training for farm life 
 and the agricultural high school is still a rarity. 
 "Probably not one farmer in twenty-five ever 
 attends a farmers' institute." ^ A somewhat 
 larger fraction, but still a fraction, read intelli- 
 gently the government bulletins. The short 
 courses and special lectures offered by institutes 
 and colleges are not and cannot be a systematic 
 preparation for agriculture. They merely solve 
 the concrete difficulties of farming for the per- 
 son who has already encountered them in prac- 
 tice. The fundamental, thorough, and comprehen- 
 sive system which shall give us a competent rural 
 population has not yet been evolved. Yet this 
 preliminary agitational work is an invaluable test 
 of the feasibility of scientific agricultural train- 
 
 ^ Report of U. S. Bureau of Education^ 1909, chap. XI. 
 
 '^6 
 
IN THE COUNTRY 
 
 ing, prepares the public mind for the adoption 
 of an adequate system, and should determine 
 the exact form to be assumed by such a system. 
 We are, so to speak, breaking up and preparing 
 the soil for the new educational crop. 
 
 Other countries have gone further than we in 
 the matter. France has established schools of 
 agriculture in every province, schools which have 
 encountered a great deal of local prejudice, but 
 which are raising French farming to a higher 
 level of efficiency. Belgium has followed and im- 
 proved upon French example. The name of Swit- 
 zerland is synonymous with scientific agriculture ; 
 and while an American is poor on five acres a Ger- 
 man would be independent. The disparity cannot 
 be explained away by the different standards of 
 living. It is partly traceable to the new effort 
 on the part of German, and notably Prussian 
 organizations, to educate the farmer for his voca- 
 tion. Austria has over one hundred and ninety- 
 five schools in which agricultural subjects are 
 taught. Holland and Denmark show an equally 
 advanced attitude toward agricultural training, 
 and in the British Isles, the movement is gain- 
 ing ground. In England and Wales, itinerant 
 lecturers under the auspices of the county coun- 
 cils go out from the university or agricultural 
 
 ^7 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 college center to give instruction to local classes 
 extending over several weeks. Special problems, 
 such as milk handling, are discussed through- 
 out one course. These instructors also supervise 
 the work done in local agricultural continuation 
 courses, night classes, and popular lectures, and 
 they advise about the management of the gar- 
 dens which are becoming a more and more com- 
 mon feature of English country schools. 
 
 Canada uses the school-garden to good effect. 
 Her rural schools have regular courses in agri- 
 culture supplemented by work on an experiment 
 farm. The advantages of rotating crops, of fertil- 
 ization, of proper choice and care of seed are il- 
 lustrated in the most conclusive manner by main- 
 taining two sets of fields for every point to be 
 proved. In one field crops are rotated during a 
 certain term of years, while that adjoining is 
 planted year after year to the same crop and soil 
 exhaustion becomes evident in the inferiority of 
 its yields. One crop is adequately fertilized ; the 
 adjoining one is not ; and the pupil has ocular 
 proof of what increase in net profit the greater 
 outlay has produced. One field will be sowed 
 with new, selected, fumigated seed ; the adjoin- 
 ing one with old seed. This system is revolution- 
 izing Canadian farming, and is making of our 
 
 88 
 
IN THE COUNTRY 
 
 sister republic on the north a dangerous poten- 
 tial competitor for future American food mar- 
 kets. 
 
 The question of agricultural education is, how- 
 ever, in the last analysis more than economic. 
 We need it not so much that we may raise more 
 corn and wine, but that we may raise better men 
 and women in our country districts. Any work 
 is to be judged rather by the human being it de- 
 velops than by its material output. And the hu- 
 man resources of country life, we have as yet 
 neglected. Our rural populations are not rooted 
 to the soil. The country road which passes by 
 the author's ancestral home shows scarce a fam- 
 ily which has lived more than twenty years upon 
 the land. Most of the places have changed hands 
 within the past ten years. New names, new faces 
 — a continual flux ! And what of the neighbor- 
 hood which for a century has not outgrown this 
 fluid transitional stage ? Barren of association, 
 barren of traditional ideals, what formative influ- 
 ence can it exert upon the character of its people 1 
 What love or respect can they have for its beau- 
 ties ? What intelligent policy of conservation can 
 this shifting population maintain ? The land is 
 harried by a succession of transient farmers ; its 
 woods are leveled ; its hills unveiled. Their past 
 
 89 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 is dead; their future, a matter of indifference. 
 The farmer's sole thought is to get all he can at 
 any cost ; he, too, will soon move on. 
 
 The life of such a place is raw and tasteless ; 
 it lacks the mellow savor of a community which 
 has been a slow accretion of all that was best 
 and most enduring in many decades of human 
 growth. It lacks social solidarity ; it lacks stan- 
 dards. Its language has no earthy tang ; its bad 
 grammar never rises to the dignity of dialect. 
 Perhaps such a neighborhood escapes the stag- 
 nation of the isolated village where a static inbred 
 population is year by year deteriorating ; but it 
 represents an equally undesirable extreme. Be- 
 tween the two there lies the mean of true agra- 
 rian self-realization. 
 
 Education for the farmer must not lead him 
 away from the farm, but teach him to bring the 
 best from the outside world into farm life. Perhaps 
 then we may hold our population generation after 
 generation on the ancestral acres, and produce 
 that solidity of race, that richness of association 
 and legend which make for the beauty of some 
 European countries and give the life of the peo- 
 ple that perspective which Hawthorne has said 
 is necessary to the production of a national liter- 
 ature, 
 
VII 
 
 TRADE EDUCATION AND ORGANIZED LABOR 
 
 Notwithstanding reports to the contrary, or- 
 ganized labor favors trade education. At the 
 Washington Conference of Labor Leaders, it was 
 resolved that industrial training, beginning in the 
 higher grammar grades, should become a part of 
 the public school system, and that school atten- 
 dance up to the age of sixteen years should be 
 made compulsory. The meeting of the Federation 
 of Labor at Toronto reinforced the Washington 
 resolution. It may be objected that the Federa- 
 tion is more conservative than the average trade 
 union, and hence, though officially labor's organ, 
 not really representative of union sentiment. The 
 precise weight of this objection can be measured 
 by the results of a canvass of New York State 
 unions. Out of twenty-four hundred and fifty or- 
 ganizations, fifteen hundred favored preparatory 
 trade schools for children from fourteen to sixteen; 
 and twelve hundred and thirty-two of these also 
 favored special trade schools for boys from sixteen 
 to eighteen years of age. 
 
 91 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 Nevertheless we often hear that trade unions 
 oppose any extension of apprenticeship and are 
 much more hostile to free trade education. That 
 they have sometimes looked with disfavor upon 
 potential competitors, in the fear that they will 
 depress the union wage, is undoubtedly true ; and 
 certain labor organizations have adopted a medie- 
 val policy of limited apprenticeship recalling that 
 which formerly undermined the usefulness of 
 guilds. The wronged person is rarely wise in his 
 first efforts at redress. This restriction upon ap- 
 prenticeship is not, however, nearly so important 
 or so sweeping as is popularly supposed. Ralph 
 Albertson, of Filene's department store, Boston, 
 states that no trade union restricts the number 
 of apprentices to less than seven per cent of the 
 adult workers and that twenty per cent is the 
 usual union regulation ; whereas the actual num- 
 bers employed in the best trades still left for ap- 
 prentices are: 5.86 per cent in machine trades, 5.70 
 per cent in plumbing, and 1.3 per cent in the build- 
 ing trades. While the danger of overproduction is 
 as real in the labor market as in that of manufac- 
 ture, experience has taught that in both it is subj ect 
 to rational control, and the antagonism to more 
 thorough methods of apprenticeship comes from 
 a decreasing number of unintelligent laborers 
 
 92 
 
TRADE EDUCATION AND LABOR 
 
 whose sense of grievance is real and poignant, but 
 whose rudimentary vision of cause and effect is 
 still blinded by resentment. 
 
 From a Middle Western labor council comes a 
 liberal statement upon this most mooted point in 
 all union discussions of industrial education. Sup- 
 plemental trade schools "have proved a great 
 benefit to apprentices who may, by the limits of 
 the shop they are working in, or from other causes, 
 be denied the advantage of getting into close con- 
 tact with all the branches of their work ; and as 
 a preliminary training they would give the pro- 
 spective mechanic such a grounding in his elemen- 
 tary work that it would seem advisable to allow all 
 or part of the time spent in the school to count 
 on his apprenticeship term." 
 
 The process by which this decision was reached 
 reveals the real attitude of the average union man. 
 Believing that union labor has a valuable contri- 
 bution to offer the projector of a program for in- 
 dustrial training, and hoping to create a new block 
 of active public opinion in favor of such training 
 in Kansas City, the author sent questionnaires to 
 every trade union in the city and asked the Indus- 
 trial Council to take a definite stand upon the 
 matter. The first response from many of the 
 locals was a suspicious negation due to ignorance. 
 
 93 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 Letters arguing /r^ and con poured into the au- 
 thor's mail — the hottest negatives often furnish- 
 ing factual evidence in favor of trade schooling. 
 Discussion in the Industrial Council v^ras warm 
 and marked, not by opposition to vocational train- 
 ing, but by fear of " some nigger in the wood pile." 
 Finally the Council appointed a committee to 
 study the subject in detail and report its progress 
 at successive meetings. The result of this study 
 is indicated above, and probably represents the 
 attitude not merely of labor leaders, but of 
 unionists who have given the subject thoughtful 
 consideration. The committee further recom- 
 mended that the Industrial Council urge the es- 
 tablishment of part-time trade schools, " provided 
 the trade instructors were chosen from the best 
 men now at work in industry and provided the 
 Council were given some share in shaping the 
 general policy of the schools." The original hesi- 
 tancy of the unions is thus seen to have been com- 
 mendable fear of indorsing an ill-defined program, 
 a fear that vanished before a clear-cut plan with 
 measurable consequences. 
 
 Great difficulties undoubtedly present them 
 selves in grounding vocational schools. The train- 
 ing must fit the needs of the region or it will 
 merely graduate candidates for unemployment. 
 
 94 
 
TRADE EDUCATION AND LABOR 
 
 Suppose the industry of a region changes. Can 
 the school follow quickly enough ? Suppose new 
 methods of manufacture are introduced. Can the 
 school afford to scrap at once its out-of-date but 
 expensive machinery as a factory would do and 
 thus keep pace with business development ? How 
 to divide pupils among the different branches ; 
 how to prevent overcrowding with its subsequent 
 oversupply of pupils from popular classes ; how 
 to guard against the subtle temptation to over- 
 emphasis offered to the principal by iron and wood 
 industries which lend themselves well to class- 
 room work ; how, in short, to articulate the school 
 and the industry so closely that no superfluous 
 worker will be produced — these are all questions 
 indicative of grave dangers, dangers which make 
 the labor union justly oppose, not the trade school 
 ideal, but certain types of trade school which in- 
 volve them. This is the reason why French work- 
 ingmen's organizations have shown real hostility 
 to vocational schools whose enrollment is indepen- 
 dent of the need for new workers in industry. This 
 is also the reason why our own labor unions look 
 askance at really effective trade courses which 
 rotate apprentices weekly between school and 
 factory. Such an arrangement as the Fitchburg, 
 Massachusetts plan, with its alternate weeks of 
 
 95 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 classroom study and actual wage-earning, means 
 at bottom that twice as many workers are being 
 trained as can be ultimately utilized. Against 
 such playing into the hands of the employer, labor 
 naturally protests. 
 
 But over against these dangers stands the fact 
 that it is not skilled but unskilled labor which 
 menaces the union wage. ** We have too many un- 
 trained boys already in our trade," writes many 
 a union secretary. Though it be true that many 
 industries must have unskilled helpers, we need 
 not acquiesce, nor will the union man, awake to 
 the true interest of his class, acquiesce in the plea 
 that because there is a certain amount of un- 
 skilled work to be done, a whole section of human- 
 ity must forever be kept ignorant in order to per- 
 form it. Such inferior positions may well be held 
 temporarily by beginners in industry who, later, 
 will pass to higher tasks and make room at the 
 bottom of the ladder for new aspirants. Further- 
 more, as far as the eye of the present can reach, 
 men will always be unequally able to profit by in- 
 struction and the less apt must content them- 
 selves with comparatively unskilled work. The 
 trade school gives every man a chance to make 
 the most of himself, but does not, cannot war- 
 rant that the " mosts " will be alike. 
 
 96 
 
TRADE EDUCATION AND LABOR 
 
 Another trouble, which is sure to arise in the 
 course of effective trade school management, is 
 that unions oppose the sale of school products. 
 The words "institution-made goods" are familiar 
 to all who have followed the course of prison re- 
 form and have noted the untimely check which, 
 because of an unlucky complication of issues,^ 
 progressive methods in penitentiaries have often 
 met at the hands of manufacturers and unionists 
 alike. That the goods are made in an institution 
 is not the union objection, but that they some- 
 times sell at a price which cannot cover a living 
 wage for independent workmen in competing 
 factories. When a fall in market prices and subse- 
 quent reduction in wages seems imminent, pri- 
 son goods are compelled by law to retire from 
 the field, and many criminals fall idle in confine- 
 ment or are occupied at trades which can be 
 of little service to them after discharge. Al- 
 though the temptation partly to recoup the 
 public treasury for an outlay quite independent 
 of sales is easy to understand, there is no reason 
 why prison goods should be marketed so far be- 
 low the real cost of production ; and an enlight- 
 ened opinion will repair this blundering action 
 
 ^ Such as the related but entirely separate question of leas- 
 ing convict labor to private contractors. 
 
 97 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 and attack the real crux of the matter, regulation 
 of prices. The question of school-made goods is 
 susceptible of the same sort of regulation. It is 
 obviously undesirable for a school to become a 
 money-making institution ; speed and economy 
 would soon usurp the place of careful education. 
 But there is no reason why the prices of school- 
 made goods should not follow the market, since 
 no private profit impels to underselling the legi- 
 timate producer. 
 
 It was not, however, because there were no 
 well-grounded arguments against it that the 
 American Federation of Labor declared in favor 
 of public vocational instruction. These hard> 
 handed men recognized that labor would benefit 
 thereby, not only in myriad indirect reactions 
 upon the laboring man and his living conditions, 
 but directly in a higher wage. That competence 
 is better paid than incompetence is self-evident, 
 and the proof which, in economics, even an axiom 
 seems to require is furnished by comparison of 
 the wages of trade school graduates and ordinary 
 apprentices. The Massachusetts Commission on 
 Industrial and Technical Training publish the fol- 
 lowing table based upon a study of two thousand 
 wage-earners in Massachusetts : — 
 
 98 
 
TRADE EDUCATION AND LABOR 
 
 Age 
 
 Wages per week of 
 
 Wages per week of 
 
 mere apprentice 
 
 Trade School Graduate 
 
 H 
 
 $ 4.00 
 
 
 IS 
 
 4-50 
 
 
 i6 
 
 5.00 
 
 
 17 
 
 6.00 
 
 — 
 
 18 
 
 7.00 
 
 $10.00 
 
 19 
 
 8.50 
 
 11-75 
 
 20 
 
 9-50 
 
 15.00 
 
 21 
 
 9-50 
 
 16.00 
 
 22 
 
 11.50 
 
 20.00 
 
 23 
 
 11-75 
 
 21.00 
 
 24 
 
 12.00 
 
 23.00 
 
 25 
 
 12.75 
 
 31.00 
 
 The depressing effect on wages in industry of 
 the low rates due to overcrowding in non-indus- 
 trial lines, particularly clerical, would be in some 
 measure counteracted by attracting into trade 
 those very competitors before whom some short- 
 sighted union men tremble, but who might per- 
 form the additional service of superseding the 
 cheaper labor of the immigrants who menace 
 American standards in many vocations and pre- 
 sent a problem with which unions cope valiantly 
 but ineffectually. 
 
 A less obvious feature of the effect on wages 
 of better trade instruction is its bearing on inter- 
 
 99 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 national competition. Unless the American la- 
 borer wishes to be superseded on his own soil by 
 the output of some clever toiler across the sea, 
 he must be cleverer than his distant rival. But 
 until he has as good a training as is given to 
 workmen abroad, he will be no more certain of 
 his job than if that foreigner were standing at his 
 elbow asking for it. 
 
 If the future of labor is to lie in the hands of 
 labor, then labor must be wise. When the work- 
 ing man can afford to remain longer in school, he 
 will learn to use his head as well as his hands, 
 and the union needs heads fully as much as hands. 
 At present, half its strength goes to self-educa- 
 tion. To raise the standard of living of its mem- 
 bers, to teach workers the value of their labor, to 
 open their eyes to what constitutes decent condi- 
 tions of work and pay, to arouse them to the 
 need for organization, and to drill them in effect- 
 ive methods of cooperation are the prime tasks 
 which confront the labor union, and especially 
 the labor union in immigrant neighborhoods. The 
 real champion of Americanism is the American 
 laborer ; and in fortifying American standards, 
 the struggle of the union will find its strongest 
 support in the trade school. 
 
 Not only higher standards, but the thought 
 
 100 
 
TRADE EDUCATION AND LABOR 
 
 power which breeds sane and rational methods 
 of accomplishing them, will be the property of a 
 better educated working public. With training in 
 history and civics and hygiene comes a widening 
 of outlook which will elevate union effort from 
 the level of self-seeking to that of civic enter- 
 prise. Let the rank and file come into the organ- 
 ization equipped, not only with the information 
 necessary to secure their own advancement, but 
 with some knowledge of the place of that ad- 
 vancement in the social and industrial whole, 
 and the union will prove an invincible force 
 both for workingmen's betterment and for public 
 welfare. 
 
VIII 
 
 TRADE EDUCATION AND SOCIALISM 
 
 Socialism is a philosophy of intelligence. 
 
 It is not a leveling down of society. It is not 
 absolute communism. It is not a scheme of spo- 
 liation devised by the "have nots" to enrich them- 
 selves at the expense of the " haves." It is not 
 a system of governmental paternalism and indi- 
 vidual inertia. Its ideal is not drab uniformity. 
 
 Benjamin Franklin once said of a plan, whose 
 adoption he had unsuccessfully defended, that 
 the extreme diversity and contradictorinessof the 
 arguments urged against it proved to him the 
 soundness of his proposition. The socialist might 
 lay the same flattering unction to his soul, as at- 
 tacks against his theory of life are so opposite in 
 nature as to refute each other. This is due to a 
 general misconception of what his theory is. 
 
 Some one has jestingly remarked that every 
 thinking man is a socialist, whether he knows it 
 or not. In a measure this is true, for every think- 
 ing man believes in equal opportunity for all : 
 not in equality — but in opportunity to make the 
 most of those diverse, unequal abilities latent 
 
 1 02 
 
TRADE EDUCATION AND SOCIALISM 
 
 within us. What philosophy calls self-realization 
 is the socialist's ideal. Nothing could be more 
 inimical to self-realization than the perfect uni- 
 formity of communism or the absolute license of 
 nihilism. Socialism would proceed by another 
 road. Man in society must at the same time be 
 free to grow up to his individual limits. 
 
 That he is not at present free to do so is the 
 socialist's contention. Private ownership of cap- 
 ital in land and in the instruments of production 
 has given certain individuals power to determine 
 the living conditions of great masses of people ; 
 and the competitive organization of business has 
 forced them into using this power to grind down 
 the working public to a level where real living is 
 impossible. Socialism would transfer from pri- 
 vate hands to the general public the ownership 
 of such capital. This, according to John Spargo,^ 
 does not mean entire abolition of property lines. 
 Only as private property gives control over hu- 
 man life, or reaps social values, is it a menace. 
 Monopolies belong to the public : small indepen- 
 dent industries might well be left to private initia- 
 tive subject to governmental regulation. 
 
 Some persons, indeed some socialists, see in 
 
 ^ John Spargo, exponent of American socialism, in an ad- 
 dress at Vassar College, 1907. 
 
 103 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 socialism a purely proletarian movement. This is 
 a narrow view. Socialism is not a class philosophy, 
 but a universal philosophy. Matthew Arnold, 
 the apostle of culture, pleads that our inequal- 
 ity " materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our 
 middle class, and brutalizes our lower class," and 
 it is for the sake of all humanity that the socialist 
 desires the abolition of private profit which, he 
 maintains, robs master and servant alike. Society 
 will be far richer when the lives now blighted by 
 adverse economic environment reach full fruition 
 of their powers. 
 
 With the case for or against socialism we are 
 not here and now concerned, but the bearing of 
 this most significant of contemporary propaganda 
 upon the question of industrial education cannot 
 be ignored. We are tending toward a more and 
 more socialistic form of society. The fact that the 
 party polls every year a larger and larger vote is 
 the most negligible proof that this is true. So- 
 cialism's gains have come in the main through 
 agents without the ranks. The concentration of 
 capital we have witnessed in the United States 
 during the last quarter of a century has paved 
 the way to a socialization of commerce and indus- 
 try which is already taking place. Governmental 
 supervision is a pseudo-ownership, examples of 
 
 104 
 
TRADE EDUCATION AND SOCIALISM 
 
 which confront us on every hand. Once the re- 
 sponsibility of the state in this regard is estab- 
 lished, real ownership will follow where regulation 
 proves inadequate. Natural resources are thus 
 more and more appropriated by the state. Muni- 
 cipalites are managing their public utilities. 
 Plank after plank in the socialistic program has 
 found its way into German, English, and Ameri- 
 can legislation in the shape of extended suffrage, 
 initiative and referendum, employer's liability 
 laws, old age pensions, accident and sick insur- 
 ance. Even in our homes we feel the socialization 
 of living. Not only are we dependent upon the 
 outer world for our supplies, but milk inspectors, 
 pure food laws, building regulations, and health 
 boards attest social responsibility for individual 
 welfare. 
 
 All this means an increasingly complicated 
 system of government requiring greater efficiency 
 on the part of officials, and greater and greater 
 civic spirit and intelligence in the citizens who 
 elect and censor them. How well is a republic, 
 where less than one fourth of the voters ever pass 
 beyond the fifth or sixth grade in grammar school, 
 prepared to solve these vast and delicate gov- 
 ernmental problems } The socialistic state re- 
 quires high-grade citizenship. It requires a think- 
 
 105 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 ing and an acting public ; and especially does it 
 demand that the public should think and act along 
 the lines in which vocational schools should train 
 their pupils. 
 
 The crux of socialism is of course economic. 
 The socialist must understand industry in order to 
 realize his ideal without injustice : not merely that 
 particular little industrial pigeonhole in which 
 he finds his daily bread, but the whole trade sit- 
 uation. Specialization has multiplied class antag- 
 onisms, and just so long as we have an unintelli- 
 gent working population whose vision is bounded 
 by the special process at which they toil, who do 
 not understand the work and function of all fac- 
 tors of production and distribution, so long shall 
 we have irrational demands from labor and irra- 
 tional outbreaks ; so long shall we have an ever- 
 growing mass of workers given over to an abor- 
 tive, half-baked socialism, which comes to little 
 more than nihilism, violence and damaging of 
 property in the end. When, however, as Mr. 
 Spargo points out, discontented persons are wise 
 and educated enough to see their position in its 
 historical perspective, there is no class hatred for 
 the capitalist on the part of the worker. Then he 
 judges institutions and not men ; and would in- 
 troduce his reforms through legislation fair to 
 
 1 06 
 
TRADE EDUCATION AND SOCIALISM 
 
 laborer and capitalist alike. Labor has a voting 
 majority, and the only safe thing for capital is to 
 educate labor broadly and thoroughly. 
 
 It is not alone in realizing the socialistic ideal 
 that intelligent citizenship is imperative. If labor 
 is to own capital and conduct industry, it will be 
 necessary that the workers understand the whole 
 process of manufacture and marketing. Can the 
 academic high school or even industry itself teach 
 them this .'* And when government officials are 
 managing directors of commercial enterprises, the 
 stockholding voter must keep a watchful and 
 seeing eye upon the administration of the pub- 
 lic's business. ''There is no such thing as an 
 automatic democracy : the price of liberty will 
 always be eternal vigilance." ^ 
 
 If we ever have a socialistic state, progress 
 will no longer be stimulated by desire for private 
 gain. In place of love of profit must come love of 
 perfection and the intelligence which sees beyond 
 personal concern to the general good. Can six 
 years in grammar school inculcate this ? 
 
 The socialists themselves are the first to rec- 
 ognize that the corner stone in their edifice is 
 education. " Anything which raises the standard 
 of life, morality, and mentality of the workers, 
 
 * Spargo: Socialism. 
 10/ 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 makes them increasingly fit to assume complete 
 controloverindustry," says Robert Hunter.^ That 
 vocational training is the surest means to this 
 end was the thought of the Radical Republican 
 and Socialist Congress at Dijon when it declared 
 in favor of obligatory industrial education. 
 
 1 Robert Hunter, Socialists at Work, 
 
IX 
 
 FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 
 
 It is not enough to believe in the efficacy of trade 
 education. Faith may suffice for religion, that 
 glorious realm of the still unrealized ideal ; but in 
 practical affairs, we demand sight, proof, fact. 
 Therefore the advocate of industrial training 
 turns to actual working examples, namely, the 
 trade schools of Europe, for his best argument 
 as to its feasibility. Moreover, at this moment, 
 when American interest in industrial education 
 far outruns the definite formulation of our con- 
 cept as to what such training should comprise 
 and a rosy glow of enthusiasm lights up clouds 
 of theory, renewed study of the well-tried Euro- 
 pean systems is a propos. France and Germany 
 are emerging from the educational renaissance 
 at whose beginning we find ourselves. Lack of 
 perspective and of thorough investigation pre- 
 vents us from judging rightly the effectiveness 
 of our first experiments in trade instruction. But 
 the oversea school presents no such difficulty. 
 There we read plainly the failure of methods on 
 
 109 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 trial in our own country. There we see large- 
 scale experimentation with appreciable results, and 
 gain a criterion for testing the worth of our own 
 gropings. There we learn what painstaking study 
 of the business world must precede the drafting 
 of a successful program. 
 
 Trade schools for beginners may undertake to 
 supplant or to supplement apprenticeship. Ger- 
 man schools belong as a rule to the second, 
 French, to the first, class. Among German schools 
 there are two types: the Berlin continuation 
 school, which supplements apprenticeship by gen- 
 eral intelligence courses and relies upon the child's 
 labor in his master's shop to give him trade prac- 
 tice ; and the Munich institution, which includes 
 practical work in the curriculum. 
 
 These three forms of the industrial school are 
 the product of equally distinct ideals. That of the 
 French educator is a skilled artisan ; Berlin has 
 in view a well-informed worker; while Munich 
 strives to produce a useful man. 
 
 /. Paris 
 
 At thirteen, the Parisian child of poor parents, 
 having mastered the three R's and got a smatter- 
 ing of French history, completes his required 
 schooling. A few years ago only two courses then 
 
 no 
 
FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 
 
 opened before him : to go at once to work or to 
 continue a purely academic education through 
 the public high school and fit himself for com- 
 merce or clerical positions. But this was at last 
 found unsatisfactory. The majority of French 
 children, as is true of children in any other land, 
 are destined for industry. The schools not only 
 failed to train them for this, but actually rendered 
 them unwilling to do manual work for a living. 
 Despising their only means of subsistence, hun- 
 dreds of girls went on the streets to avoid " de- 
 grading drudgery," ^ and thousands of boys found 
 themselves unable to obtain places in the al- 
 ready overcrowded clerical and professional field. 
 Meanwhile there developed in industry a crisis 
 unparalleled in the history of other countries 
 and threatening to destroy the century-long 
 French preeminence in hand industries. Appren- 
 ticeship had become a dead letter and speciali- 
 zation had so degraded the quality of labor that 
 employers were confronted by an absolute lack 
 of skilled workers. Meanwhile the colleges were 
 turning out theorists and overseers, who found 
 themselves in the anomalous position of hav- 
 ing no one to oversee. On the other hand, 
 
 1 See Prostitution des Enfants, Eugene Prevost, Avocat k 
 la Cour d'Appel, Paris. 1909. 
 
 Ill 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 unemployment assumed the proportions of a 
 Problem. 
 
 In the face of German competition, public in- 
 terest rose to fever heat and so remains to the 
 present day. All over France trade schools have 
 been established which aim to meet the desire 
 for popular education^ and to replace the old- 
 time apprenticeship as a preparation for business. 
 These have proved utterly inadequate in number 
 to supply the demand for skilled workers. The 
 situation is aggravated by two imperfections in 
 the child labor laws, which have, on the one 
 hand, allowed many children to work before they 
 have acquired the rudiments of an education ; 
 and, on the other, forced them, as is indeed the 
 case in our own country, into the lowest of un- 
 skilled labor which offers no prospect of advance- 
 ment and substantially unfits the little worker 
 for other and better paid positions. 
 
 Alarmist literature and agitated discussion of 
 the subject abound, discussion originating with 
 educators, employers, and social students alike. 
 A special League for the Encouragement of 
 Apprenticeship has been formed. The only ele- 
 ment, in fact, which is not yet fully aroused to 
 the necessity for trade instruction is organized 
 labor ; and it is safe to say that the unions do not 
 
 112 
 
FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 
 
 object to trade schools per se, but fear that the 
 capitalists will use them to train cheap labor to 
 complete with union workers.^ 
 
 Meanwhile a fire of criticism, favorable and 
 adverse, is directed toward the elementary 
 schools now in existence. It is with this voca- 
 tional school for the plain man, with the actual 
 classroom experience of its pupils and the proved 
 successes and failures of this experience as a pre- 
 paration for trade life, that the present chapter 
 is concerned. Paris boasts fourteen such institu- 
 tions ^ which children may enter upon completion 
 of the grammar grades, each having for its object 
 the training, not of overseers, but of ordinary 
 workmen. 
 
 In the land which, next to Italy, has made art 
 most nearly conterminous with life and which 
 has more than once in philosophy and govern- 
 
 1 In Paris 124 out of 229 trade unions voted in favor of 
 trade school work. 
 
 2 For boys : courses in the metal trades, pattern -making, 
 decorative art, industrial design, pottery, sculpture, cabinet- 
 making, surveying, mechanics, electricity, and the book in- 
 dustries. 
 
 For girls : trade and domestic science work, including cut- 
 ting, sewing, lingerie, tailoring, embroidery, pressing, corsets, 
 vests, artificial flowers, industrial design, pottery, fine art, book- 
 making, typewriting, stenography, laundry work, general house- 
 work and cooking. 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 ment pushed symmetry to the breaking point, 
 one finds, naturally enough, the two salient 
 features of the schools to be emphasis upon ar- 
 tistic values and close correlation of all parts of 
 the curriculum. Both these features are particu- 
 larly marked in the Ecole Estiemie, a boys* school 
 devoted to all trades connected with book- 
 making. 
 
 A glance at the course of study brings home 
 the complexity of the business world which the 
 pupils enter upon graduation. The subject of 
 typography comprises four distinct trades : type- 
 setting, type-founding, printing, and stereotyp- 
 ing. Lithography is split into lithography proper, 
 lithographic script, stone engraving, and litho- 
 graphic printing. Engraving covers wood engrav- 
 ing, engraving in relief, copper plate, and photo- 
 engraving, and printing from copper plate ; while 
 binding is divided into binding and gilding. Four 
 years of eleven months each are required to gain 
 a certificate of apprenticeship in any of these 
 trades. Sunday is the only holiday and the school 
 holds from 8.30 in the morning till 6 at night. 
 
 The mornings are devoted to theoretical work : 
 the afternoons, to practical instruction, except 
 for a slight preponderance of practice in the last 
 years. Each trade has its own shop for practical 
 
 114 
 
FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 
 
 work in charge of special instructors, and during 
 the first four months of the term, the new pupils 
 attend in rotation all the workshops in the school 
 and thus make choice of a profession. 
 
 In spite of the complexity of the problem, the 
 course of study is a coherent unit. The morning 
 lessons in theory (comprising French, general 
 history, geography, history of art and of the book 
 industry, mathematics, physics, chemistry, zool- 
 ogy, drawing, modeling, writing, and original 
 design) are the same for all pupils in the first 
 two years. In the third and fourth years, pupils 
 are grouped in three sections which handle sub- 
 jects bearing most directly upon the individual 
 trades. In the case of the lithographers, en- 
 gravers, and gilders, designing predominates ; 
 with the typesetters, it is French, and general 
 information ; while the printers and founders 
 study in more detail physics, chemistry, and 
 mechanics. This orientation of theory towards 
 practice does not begin in the third year, how- 
 ever. With the opening of the first year, the 
 pupil finds that what he learns in one course is 
 not so much isolated knowledge, to be saved up 
 till that class and its quizzes come round again, 
 but something he will take up and use when the 
 bell has tapped and his next period begins. 
 
 115 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 The principles of plane geometry as studied in 
 the first year are applied, in the courses for geo- 
 metrical design, to the composition of vignettes, 
 margins, and covers. Flowers, treated scientifi- 
 cally in botany under one instructor, are drawn 
 and modeled from nature in other classes ; form 
 the subjects for the conventionalized tail-pieces, 
 illuminations and fancy initials which the stu- 
 dents design in the third and fourth years under 
 a still different teacher ; and are then used as 
 working plans in shop practice. The different 
 styles discussed in lectures on the history of art 
 are actually copied in drawing-class ; are modern- 
 ized and adapted to the needs and materials of 
 particular trades as original designs ; and then 
 put to use in the various ateliers. Where the 
 designs for shopwork are not made in the draw- 
 ing-class, they are still made by the pupil him- 
 self and are applications of the principles there 
 laid down. Although they also set up after mod- 
 els, typesetters often design their "ad's" and 
 pages ; gilders, their stamps ; and type-founders, 
 their fancy type ; while engravers execute their 
 own drawings. Physics and chemistry are not 
 only taught parallel with botany and zoology, 
 where they are of constant use in explaining the 
 phenomena of growth and decay, but are made to 
 
 ii6 
 
FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 
 
 apply to the concrete problems of photography, 
 engraving, etching, founding, and machine opera- 
 tion. History and geography are connected in 
 like manner. History and the history of art are 
 made interdependent. The history of the book 
 industry draws from both sources. Classes in 
 French utilize material from every other depart- 
 ment for composition subjects, for dictation, and 
 for illustration of grammatical rules. In short, 
 what is learned in the theoretical courses under 
 one teacher is applied in an original design under 
 another, and in the afternoon, put into practice 
 in the workshops. The constant effort is to de- 
 velop originality and creative power in each 
 pupil, and, because the whole course hangs to- 
 gether, he is helped to constructive thinking 
 which will make connections for itself. The 
 children see where their work is tending and of 
 what practical use it will be to them. They are 
 therefore interested and intelligent. Because 
 everything they turn out in the shops represents 
 their cumulative effort, they take that pride in 
 the finish and artistic quality of their product 
 which has hitherto given to French hand indus- 
 tries world-wide supremacy. 
 
 A further correlation takes place between the 
 practical work in separate trades. The printers 
 
 117 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 use in their presses what the compositors have 
 set up with type from the founding class. This 
 is illustrated by the engravers with cuts used in 
 the courses for impression taking. Perhaps the 
 printed book or pamphlet then goes to the bind- 
 ing-rooms and is at last finished and gilded by 
 pupils in still another trade. Thus, not only does 
 each pupil feel that his work has a definite prac- 
 tical outcome, but a whole class may work to- 
 gether to produce that which can be put to direct 
 use somewhere else, and ultimately serve to 
 arouse esprit de corps in the entire school body. 
 
 Examination of the work of the different de- 
 partments shows how closely consideration for 
 artistic values is woven into every portion of the 
 individual courses. Each practice class spends a 
 large portion of its time in considering the 
 special art problems of its trade. The pupil must 
 learn to reproduce the ordinary objects of his 
 drawing-class with the tools of his calling : the 
 graver's awl, the lithographer's pencil, the gilder's 
 stamp. He must apply here, through a new me- 
 dium, the principles of beauty he has elsewhere 
 evolved, and is brought to see that a catalogue, 
 a poster, an advertisement, is governed by the 
 same laws as the painter's masterpiece. 
 
 In the Ecolc Boiille are taught the marvelously 
 
 ii8 
 
FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 
 
 many trades involved in the making of a single 
 piece of furniture, beginning with the designing 
 and following through the making of the frame, 
 the molding in plaster of the prospective orna- 
 ment, the actual carving of the wood after the 
 plaster model, the inlay, and the iron, brass, and 
 nickel work, down to the polishing and varnish- 
 ing. Here, too, the emphasis is upon the artistic 
 and creative sides of production. Mr. Brizon 
 states the purpose of the school to be " to train 
 workers able to conserve the traditions of taste 
 and the superiority of the peculiarly Parisian in- 
 dustry of artistic furniture." To conserve the tra- 
 ditions of the glorious past in French furniture, 
 the school has a special exhibit room illustrating 
 various styles famous in the history of the indus- 
 try. This set of replicas, made in the school, is 
 supplemented by a collection of casts representing 
 types of ornamentation. In speaking of the equip- 
 ment of any Parisian school, one must always 
 bear in mind the great museums of the Louvre 
 and of Cluny, which are arranged to be patently 
 educative and which are used much more exten- 
 sively for school purposes than any remotely 
 comparable American collections. All these fac- 
 tors skillfully employed by the teacher of art 
 and industrial history, serve to steep the pupil, 
 
 119 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 not only in ideas, but in the fact and spirit of his 
 trade as an artistic development. The last year 
 of the course is devoted to modern styles in fur- 
 niture-making, and the pupils are encouraged to 
 create for themselves, on simple lines, designs 
 which sustain the standards and modernize the 
 spirit of the great artists with whose work they 
 have become familiar. 
 
 This effort on the part of the instructors in 
 art fits compactly into the scheme of the practice 
 work, in every branch of which the pupils execute 
 after approved models for the first two years and 
 design for themselves during the last. This plan 
 is intended to combat the disintegrating tenden- 
 cies in modern'f urniture-making — slavish imita- 
 tion of old models and flashy novelty in orna- 
 mentation. It is hoped that by a study of the 
 history and theory of former styles, the pupils 
 will be led to imitate, not the patterns, but the 
 spirit and the methods of the old masters ; and, 
 in the same way that Louis XIV's great cabinet- 
 maker, Boulle, developed a style appropriate to 
 the civilization in which he lived, themselves 
 come to understand what is suited to the life of 
 the modern household. 
 
 The course in wood carving illustrates the 
 general plan of treating art in connection with 
 
 120 
 
FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 
 
 practice. The elementary exercises are naturally 
 directed toward the mastery of tools and mate- 
 rials. When a tolerable degree of skill is acquired, 
 the pupil begins to design for himself. Suppose 
 a chair is given for decoration. He applies what 
 he has learned in drawing to make a sketch for 
 the proposed ornamentation of a leg. This he 
 must model in clay to get a good idea of the form 
 and test the applicability of his flat design to 
 sculptured relief. He then makes a plaster cast 
 of his corrected model and from this pattern ex- 
 ecutes his carving. More advanced students carve 
 from a sketch without plaster pattern, but not 
 until their sense of form and body is as well de- 
 veloped as that of outline. 
 
 Not only is every course in every Parisian school 
 colored by regard for artistic values,^ but the aim 
 is also to combat specialization in its narrowest 
 sense. The hours devoted to practical instruction 
 are not exclusively occupied by bench work, but 
 comprise the technical instruction necessary to a 
 perfect understanding of the work in hand in its 
 relation to the trade as a whole. The effort is also 
 toward varied practice. The copper-plate printer in 
 the Acole Estienne^ for example, is given practice 
 
 1 There are also successful schools for both boys and girls 
 which teach industrial design as a special trade. 
 
 121 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 on job work as well as Mitions de Itixe^ on visiting- 
 cards and bills, on illustrations and maps, whereas, 
 were he serving an apprenticeship in a shop, he 
 would learn only the specialty of that shop. 
 Courses for artificial flower-makers teach, like- 
 wise, all sorts of flowers, on the branch, after na- 
 ture, and for the modes. The student of jewelry 
 specializes at either the hand or machine process, 
 but becomes familiar with both methods, as well 
 as with the manufacture of the stamps used. 
 General trade intelligence and not particular 
 manual skill is the end in view ; yet the proper 
 basis for manual dexterity is given in the thor- 
 ough understanding of all processes and in the 
 constant use of real machines and real trade 
 materials. 
 
 Teaching a complementary trade not closely 
 allied to one's specialty is a feature peculiar to 
 the Ecole Boulle. This is the same for all pupils 
 — hammered brass and copper. The children 
 spend an hour a week for three years at this, 
 and while they do not attain great skill, they are 
 capable of turning what they learn to practical 
 use in case work fails them at any time in their 
 trade. This brass and copper practice was chosen 
 both on account of the comparative ease with 
 which some degree of proficiency can be acquired 
 
 122 
 
FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 
 
 and because the recent revival of interest in hand- 
 hammered goods gives certainty of finding odd 
 jobs. 
 
 As attendance upon trade schools is not com- 
 pulsory in France, sweeping inferences as to re- 
 sults are dangerous. Some phenomena are, how- 
 ever, obviously attendant upon the foundation of 
 trade schools. The school enrollment has risen 
 greatly ; and the percentage of daily attendance 
 and the ratio of graduation to first year enroll- 
 ment is higher for vocational than for academic 
 schools. M. Brizon quotes in his Appre7iticeship: 
 Yesterday — Today — To-morrow ^ the opinions 
 of employers and educators that the ultimate 
 wage-earning capacity of the trade school grad- 
 uate is considerably above that of the average ap- 
 prentice. A majority of the Parisian manufac- 
 turers* associations have unanimously expressed 
 themselves as favoring public industrial educa- 
 tion, but their commendation of the ideal is tinged 
 with an ever-recurring criticism of present trade 
 school methods The furniture workers maintain 
 that, although the trade school graduate is less 
 adroit at first, because of his general education he 
 is better later on than an apprentice. The heavy- 
 iron workers find that, though in the end he shows 
 himself more intelligent, the trade school youth 
 
 123 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 is at first wasteful and hence paid less than an 
 apprentice who has been in industry while his 
 colleague was at school. Dressmakers prefer 
 trade school graduates because they produce at 
 once ; jewelers, because they are all-round work- 
 men. But printers, photographers, and engravers 
 prefer apprentices who take prof essio7ial courses in 
 cottnection with trade worky because they are 
 swifter. "Trade graduates have had too little 
 practical work." The Council of Makers of In- 
 struments of Precision sum up the problem in 
 saying that if graduates of trade schools are will- 
 ing to begin at the bottom and put themselves 
 au courant with the trade, they become better 
 workers than those who have not had school 
 training ; but that often they are not wilHng to 
 do this and are then too theoretical. 
 
 In short, there is a gap between the French 
 trade school and business conditions which the 
 trade graduate must bridge for himself ; and the 
 spirit of the school often unfits pupils for bridg- 
 ing it. In spite of the studied symmetry of the 
 course ; in spite of the cultural and intellectual 
 value of the three or four years spent in the 
 classroom ; in spite of the general trade intelli- 
 gence the pupil has gained ; — in spite of all 
 these undeniable assets, he enters industry 
 
 124 
 
FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 
 
 handicapped. He is unaccustomed to conditions 
 of work in a shop where competition forces 
 economy of time and material. He is exquisitely 
 careful in the execution of his tasks, but is 
 neither speedy nor dexterous, and these latter 
 failings account for the dissatisfaction of so 
 many an employer with trade school pupils. 
 
 One solution of this difficulty is offered by the 
 school for girls in Fondary Street, which teaches 
 the distinctly feminine occupations of sewing, 
 tailoring, millinery, and laundry work. The aca- 
 demic side of this and similar institutions is 
 neither so varied nor so thorough as in the boys' 
 schools, because girls are not expected to make 
 such serious use of it and do not often engage in 
 professions demanding high-grade intelligence. 
 But an especial effort is here made to keep in 
 touch with actual trade conditions by having the 
 senior pupils fill orders for the clients of their 
 several departments. This insures variety in work 
 and gives interest in saving time and material 
 and in the quality of the output. The difference 
 between the courses which follow a clientele and 
 those in which the children work on models and 
 with sham materials is striking. Nowhere in the 
 former is that slackness and waste of material 
 evident which marked each course of the latter 
 
 125 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 type visited. The school in Fondary Street has 
 the aspect of a select shop. As in all Parisian 
 schools which sell their products, prices are 
 everywhere a little higher than those on the 
 regular market, since they are fixed to cover 
 the increased cost of production in a schoolroom 
 where work is slow and the factory foremen are 
 replaced by high-priced teachers. 
 
 The League for the Encouragement of Ap- 
 prentices proposes another remedy for the all 
 too evident cleavage between schooling and prac- 
 tice : i. e., part-time day schools compulsory for 
 apprentices in industry and in charge of men 
 with extensive trade experience. In other words, 
 this League, which has studied more thoroughly 
 than any other agency the business and educa- 
 tional aspects of the French situation, looks to 
 Germany for the solution of its problems. 
 
 //. Berlin 
 
 While trade schools in France have been the 
 slow response to a crying need, the German sys- 
 tem of education is more truly the result of fore- 
 sight. To understand any German institution, 
 we must remember that for what many another 
 nation owes to haphazard growth through the 
 ages, the Teutonic empire must thank the sys- 
 
 126 
 
FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 
 
 tematic plans of her rulers, who^ within a cen- 
 tury and by a concerted scheme of action, have 
 developed Germany from a group of negligible 
 petty kingdoms to one of the foremost virorld 
 powers. In this development, the industrial and 
 commercial policy of the government has had, if 
 not the title role, at least that of principal sup- 
 port. Political integrity was not enough. Ger- 
 many must be both industrially self-sufficient 
 and necessary to the consuming world at large. 
 As every young German is trained to defend his 
 country in time of war, so is he also trained to 
 defend her in the markets of the world in times 
 of peace. That this program has been success- 
 ful is attested by the rapid commercial advance 
 of this newest of nations. Not only does Ger- 
 many produce an amazing proportion of what 
 it uses, but German goods have captured the 
 French market and are invading even England 
 and the United States. We buy hundreds of 
 articles whose label, " Made in Germany," may 
 be a lie about the place of manufacture, but is 
 no uncertain hint as to where they should have 
 been made to secure first quality. In the words 
 of a French student, — and the French, oddly 
 enough, are Germany's most appreciative critics, 
 — " Germans lack initiative and inventiveness, 
 
 127 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 but these things are trained little by little into 
 the people by a system of education ever on the 
 alert to inculcate good methods of work. The 
 results which Germany has obtained she owes 
 largely to scientific methods." 
 
 Of course a deal of cheap nonsense is talked 
 about the prosperity of the Fatherland. Ger- 
 many is not yet the modern Eden, or else the 
 tide of immigration — that most delicate indus- 
 trial barometer — would set away from the 
 United States and toward our martial cousins. 
 Though she manages to tuck them effectually 
 out of sight, Germany still has her poor and sin- 
 ning. But the traveler must be impressed by 
 the solid aspect of German towns, by their inner 
 strength and self-sufficient Germanness, and by 
 the absence of that pitiful catering to tourists 
 which marks the decadence of Paris. Even the 
 tiniest stores have tasteful show windows ar- 
 ranged with remarkable sense of color and pro- 
 portion. Far more extraordinary than the lovely 
 flower displays, which brighten many a grim side 
 street with the sunshine of daffodils and mari- 
 golds, is the beauty of dairies and butcher shops, 
 recalling, by their profusion of herbs, jellies, sau- 
 sages, fruit and game, some splendid still life by 
 Fyt. 
 
 128 
 
FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 
 
 One involuntarily asks oneself where that 
 dumpy little fellow in the linen apron, who has 
 come out to eye his wares critically from the 
 curbing, ever caught the knack. He would be 
 prompt enough in his answer if the question 
 were put to him : " In the continuation school 
 for butchers." 
 
 The French system of trade schools may be 
 termed optional supplanting of apprenticeship. 
 The German is a compulsory supplementing of 
 it, and to the continuation schools of Berlin must 
 go every boy between the ages of fourteen and 
 seventeen, who is at work in commerce or trade.^ 
 The six hours a week devoted to schooling are 
 usually taken from the working day and the em- 
 ployer is made responsible for his apprentice's 
 school attendance. Some courses are given on 
 Sunday, others at night, but there is a strong 
 movement on foot to bring all classes into the 
 daytime and, where possible, into the morning 
 schedule. 
 
 Since the age qualification is the only require- 
 ment (completion of the grammar grades being 
 entirely beside the question), the continuation 
 schools receive pupils at widely different stages 
 of advancement. The boys in each year are there- 
 
 1 It is hoped soon to extend this compulsion to girls as well. 
 
 129 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 fore grouped, according to their preparation, in 
 three sections, work for which follows the same 
 general plan, with special adaptations as the 
 needs suggest, makes up for past deficiencies, 
 and carries the pupils forward as far as is com- 
 patible with thoroughness in every inch of ground 
 covered. A typical continuation school in the 
 Moabit district offers six hour per week courses 
 for machinists, locksmiths, merchants, crafts- 
 men, and unskilled workers such as errand boys. 
 Instruction in the five departments is entirely 
 separate. There is no practical work in the 
 school ; manual skill and knowledge of trade pro- 
 cesses the child must pick up under his em- 
 ployer. The school continues the work of the 
 grammar grades with special application to the 
 trade at which the pupil works ; gives general 
 historical and technical information about this 
 trade ; and familiarizes the pupil with the laws 
 governing it and with his own relation to the 
 city, state, and nation. To impart general infor- 
 mation in such a way that the child will apply it 
 to his work and his social relations is, in short, 
 the ideal. 
 
 The instruction comprises German, civics, 
 technology, mathematics, bookkeeping, and draw- 
 ing. The drawing differs with the department. 
 
 130 
 
FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 
 
 Machinists begin with the principles of mechani- 
 cal drawing and pass to copying separate parts 
 from machines used in their respective trades. 
 These models are chosen for their typical value 
 in machine construction as well as for training 
 in drawing. Finally entire machines are copied, 
 and the apprentice who, in industry, is engaged in 
 the manufacture of some infinitesimal part of an 
 object, learns the connection of that part with 
 the whole. The pupils thus understand without 
 explanation specification drawings given them 
 in the shop or factory ; and as ability to sketch 
 a desired machine is essential in a foreman or 
 upper grade practical machinist, this course in 
 drawing is the initial step in advancement for 
 the cleverer pupils. 
 
 The work connects directly with the course in 
 technology, which is really the nucleus of the 
 entire curriculum. Here are studied trade ma- 
 terials, their origin and uses ; the main operations 
 of the trade ; the principles governing them; the 
 finished products and their uses; marketing and 
 prices. A painter must learn all his implements 
 and the special uses of the different kinds of 
 brushes and colors. He must understand the 
 manufacture and the blending of oils. He can 
 tell from what flax-seed oil is made ; can describe 
 
 131 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 the plant and its culture ; knows where it grows 
 and the color of its blossom, for he has seen it 
 in the school collection, and drawn it for his de- 
 signing class ; and can tell other uses of the flax 
 plant. He learns the relative cost and value of 
 different oils and can explain these facts intelli- 
 gibly. In short, everything which enters into a 
 trade must be thoroughly understood not only 
 in that specific connection, but in all other con- 
 nections. As one readily sees, this gives oppor- 
 tunity for imparting varied information of a 
 popular and scientific kind, and instruction in 
 industrial history and geography is here intro- 
 duced. The teacher keeps in mind the fact that 
 he is not only training labor but educating men, 
 and while the trade is the pivot of the course, 
 the importance of mental drill and culture is not 
 forgotten. 
 
 Mathematics follows upon the class in tech- 
 nology and is directly dependent upon it for sub- 
 ject-matter. After the class has studied a given 
 material, all possible problems which might arise 
 any day in connection with it are solved. The 
 text-book is thoroughly practical, having been 
 prepared by educators and business men in col- 
 laboration, and its success is attested by the 
 keen interest of even the dullest pupils. Each 
 
 132 
 
FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 
 
 boy is required to keep an account-book for a 
 firm doing business in his line. 
 
 German is presented in the form of business 
 correspondence, but all the courses are, in a man- 
 ner, training in the proper use of language, as no 
 pupil is allowed to respond in less than a com- 
 plete, correct sentence. 
 
 The continuation school trains the man at the 
 machine. For the ambitious worker who wishes 
 to rise in the industrial ranks, there is the higher 
 trade school represented by the Berliner Tischler 
 Schuley whose purpose is to give cabinetmakers, 
 who have already for several years engaged in 
 the practice of their trade, an opportunity to 
 round out by exercises in joinery their one-sided 
 training due to present-day specialization. It is a 
 day school with a two year course (open to per- 
 sons who have completed a two year apprentice- 
 ship), including recitation and practice in artistic 
 joinery and in the use of machines, study of 
 materials, industrial chemistry, commercial law, 
 trade mathematics, and industrial design. All 
 the pupils have attended the continuation school 
 during their apprenticeship, but wish to supple- 
 ment the exclusively theoretical training there 
 given by an all-round practice which they cannot 
 get in a shop or factory where each employee 
 
 133 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 has a specialty which he follows year after year, 
 and where, in all probability, the factory itself 
 deals with only one branch of the trade. There 
 is absolutely no specialization in the school ; each 
 pupil has exercises in all the different kinds of 
 joinery, and each pupil makes a whole object, 
 thus practicing all the trades taught separately in 
 the Ecole Boiille. Coming, as the training does, 
 at the end of apprenticeship, it makes for thor- 
 oughness and breadth, and exerts an unquestion- 
 able influence toward mobility of labor and 
 lessened unemployment. 
 
 A similar institute is the Hohere Weber 
 Schule, open to women as well as men, and pre- 
 senting courses in all trades for the manufacture 
 and use of textiles. The normal length of the 
 course is three years, but many pupils attend 
 merely a trimester to learn some new machine or 
 process. The author expressed surprise at seeing 
 men and women advanced in years working side 
 by side with younger pupils, and was told that 
 women thrown on their own resources often come 
 here to learn a trade ; and that men, out of em- 
 ployment in their own specialty and too old to 
 be taken as apprentices in industry, acquire in 
 the Weber Schule a new speciality and so con- 
 tinue self-supporting. 
 
 134 
 
FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 
 
 The flexibility of the German, as compared 
 with the French system of industrial education, 
 is here apparent. There is no rigid term of work 
 and no general plan of instruction applied to 
 each department and making of the entire school 
 a symmetrical organization. On the contrary, the 
 theoretical instruction is separate for each branch. 
 The division of time between practice and theory 
 and the length of the courses vary with the re- 
 spective trades. The emphasis everywhere put 
 upon drawing, and the cooperation between de- 
 partments which carry out and finish each other's 
 work, remind one of the French program. But 
 the methods and spirit of the art departments 
 are diverse. Whether their contrasting atmos- 
 phere is due to a corresponding difference in na- 
 tional temper is hard to determine. The German 
 course is likely to stress at every point trade util- 
 ity ; while, in France, one begins in the realm 
 of pure art and takes the application to the par- 
 ticular industry as an outgrowth of this. 
 
 In comparison with the continuation school 
 previously discussed, the pendulum here swings 
 almost as far toward practice as it swung there 
 toward theory. General branches are taught as 
 a running accompaniment to bench work and an 
 effort is made to gain speed and dexterity. This 
 
 135 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 is the inevitable result of the presence in the 
 classroom of workers experienced in shop 
 methods. 
 
 One of the most interesting Berlin experiments 
 in industrial education is the so-called practice 
 workshop for artistic wrought iron, machine con- 
 struction, and manufacture of instruments of pre- 
 cision, which admits, during unemployment or 
 between jobs, workers who have had several 
 years' experience, and teaches them greater skill 
 in their specialty, or perhaps more of the trades 
 in general from a theoretical or executive stand- 
 point than they can learn in a factory. The course 
 lasts ten weeks, but workers who wish to become 
 foremen or journeymen ambitious for a master- 
 ship may remain longer. These latter come again 
 and again to the school and ultimately make 
 their " masterpiece" to submit to the committee 
 chosen by their trade organization to pass upon 
 the work of would-be masters. 
 
 Trade education for girls is not so well organ- 
 ized in Berlin as that for boys. The situation is 
 similar to that in America : woman's position 
 in industry is far from settled ; the "housewife 
 ideal" still dominates in many of the schools and, 
 in others, exerts a disturbing influence on the 
 regular trade courses. Every grade of institution, 
 
 136 
 
FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 
 
 from the domestic science section of the Pesta- 
 lozzi-Froebel Training School to the simplest com- 
 mercial course, is represented, including many 
 which are neither one thing nor the other, but 
 attempt a little of both. Germany has not yet 
 taken a stand on the woman problem, and edu- 
 cation is temporizing with women in the schools. 
 
 ///. Munich 
 
 The journey from the sandy plains of Branden- 
 burg to the brilliant and invigorating upper airs 
 of the Bavarian plateau is a physical change which 
 prepares one for the greater crispness and verve 
 of the Munich school method. Here the German 
 system of industrial education is seen at its 
 highest point- There are the same types of schools 
 as in Berlin — a flexible series that drills the man 
 at the machine and still gives outlet for ability 
 into the upper ranks of industry. But the age 
 limit for compulsory attendance is higher, the 
 hours per week of required schooling, which 
 come in the daytime, are never less than eight, 
 and the training given is more balanced and 
 complete. 
 
 It may be questioned why the admittedly 
 faulty systems of Paris and Berlin have been 
 described at the expense of a satisfactory pro- 
 
 137 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 gram which is thus relegated to a few concluding 
 paragraphs. The reason for this is twofold. Paris 
 and Berlin represent the kinds of school most 
 common in America, — the former finding its 
 feeble counterpart in the Manhattan Trade 
 School for Girls, the Boston Trade School, and 
 the new Wisconsin system ; and the latter being 
 reduplicated, in its essential features, by the 
 recent experiment in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. 
 Furthermore, the best is always thrown into 
 sharper relief by comparison with the next best, 
 for the failures of the one illuminate the suc- 
 cesses of the other. 
 
 The Munich continuation school actively em- 
 bodies in every dot and iota of the course of 
 study Superintendent Kerschensteiner's phrase 
 "maker of useful men," or better still, "usable 
 men" ; and in the clear light of this purpose, the 
 Berlin program seems negative and wavering, 
 a weak compromise between academic and trade 
 ideals. With a useful man in view, the Bavarian 
 school tries to round out the scrappy shop train- 
 ing of the apprentice with such studies as will 
 give him a grasp on his whole trade. The trade 
 can then use him as the exigency of the moment 
 dictates. This grasp, to be complete, must be both 
 theoretical and practical, and it is here that the 
 
FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 
 
 Munich educator takes issue with the Berlin 
 method. Berhn maintains that dexterity in tech- 
 nical processes can be acquired only in the factory, 
 and so eliminates practice from the curriculum 
 as a waste of valuable time better spent in gen- 
 eral academic drill. Munich avers that unless 
 the child is introduced in school to all the pro- 
 cesses of his trade, the greater part of them will 
 always remain a sealed book to him, and he will 
 be, not at all "a usable man," but a narrow 
 specialist, a miscroscopic part of a man, useful in 
 a very limited field. Skill he can learn in busi- 
 ness as need arises, but preliminary understand- 
 ing of trade operations he must get in school 
 in order to embrace opportunities for acquiring 
 skill as they present themselves. 
 
 The famous Prank Schule gives eight to thir- 
 teen hour continuation courses for eleven sepa- 
 rate trades, one of the most interesting of which 
 is that for locksmiths. The technology, German, 
 and physics recall the Berlin schedule, while 
 physiology, hygiene, and Bible history explain 
 themselves. Composition deals with all sorts of 
 documents which might be written in the course 
 of the trade. The German gift for exhausting a 
 subject without killing originality is manifested 
 in a detailed treatment of theme work seldom 
 
 139 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 found in American schools. For instance, a class, 
 representing a master locksmith, has written, at 
 its last session, an order for a grindstone. This 
 stone has supposedly been delivered in bad shape, 
 a crack being plainly visible at its center. The 
 manufacturing firm must now be apprised of the 
 receipt of the stone, of its condition on arrival, of 
 the supposed reasons for this condition, and as 
 to whether it can be accepted or not. All these 
 points having been brought out by class discus- 
 sion, they are put upon the blackboard. Several 
 pupils compose orally sentences conveying point 
 one, which are criticized with an eye to grammar 
 and style ; and when each point has been thus 
 handled, a few oral versions for the whole letter 
 are given. At a final signal, the boys write for 
 themselves the proposed letter, which is subse- 
 quently corrected and copied into a notebook for 
 reference when the pupil is in business. The pace 
 for such work is obviously set by the average, 
 not by the best or even better pupils ; but as a 
 result of this insistent thoroughness, the average 
 rises with each successive year. 
 
 First and second year mathematics is con- 
 cerned with reckoning prices and materials. Here 
 a remarkable amount of elementary economics 
 enters incidentally. In determining the price to 
 
 140 
 
FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 
 
 be charged for certain locks, boys of fourteen 
 handle competition, rent, prime costs, profit, cost 
 of living, and other bugbears of the college stu- 
 dent with astounding familiarity and intelligence. 
 In the third year, bookkeeping for a firm of lock- 
 smiths is taken up. 
 
 Much that is done in drawing-class is used in 
 the workshops. The course aims at precision, 
 and at understanding the specification drawing, 
 the tool, the product, and the principles of its 
 construction. 
 
 The idea of the shopwork is to cover the most 
 important operations of the trade and the mani- 
 pulation of all its tools. Under this system few 
 whole objects can be made, but there is talk of 
 having the pupils make one complete thing in- 
 stead of so many typical parts. The point at is- 
 sue is whether what they lose in practice will be 
 made up by what they gain in sense of unity and 
 in the fineness of workmanship which comes from 
 pride in the finished product. In this day of min- 
 utely subdivided toil and of complete separation 
 of the worker from the finished product, those 
 two points have educational value which cannot 
 be overstated. 
 
 In the trade school for locksmiths having three 
 or four years' experience, the work of the con- 
 
 141 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 tinuation school is carried forward with more 
 freedom for the individual to develop his own 
 ideas, and with far greater emphasis on artistic 
 production. Mathematics becomes algebra and 
 geometry; drawing and modeling from nature 
 are supplemented by lectures on the history of 
 styles. The Museum of Industrial Art in Munich 
 offers an unparalleled collection of artistic smith- 
 work from various epochs, and study of this col- 
 lection bears fruit in the practice classes, where 
 many a lock, hinge, or clasp shows the inspiration 
 of older models fashioned with a feeling for their 
 architectural context which is lacking in much 
 modern wrought iron. 
 
 Every school in Munich tells the same story of 
 correlation which makes the excellence of French 
 trade education. But here the additional correla- 
 tion with actual business practice is established. 
 Apprentices and journeymen are studying under 
 teachers formerly or even now foremen or super- 
 intendents in industry. Moreover, they are not, 
 as in Berlin, left to the mercy of industrial spec- 
 ialization for their practice and are not studying 
 in the abstract a trade with which their real ex- 
 perience must be fragmentary. Every step in 
 theoretical instruction is illustrated by the labor- 
 atory method. The Munich teacher knows that 
 
 142 
 
FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 
 
 an apprentice seldom performs the operations 
 even of that branch of his trade at which his 
 master is employed. The apprentice in the shop 
 looks on, hands his fellow workman tools, helps a 
 little here and there. But the pupil in the school 
 has a chance to do at some time in his course 
 almost everything common in trade practice. 
 
 The range of subject-matter taught in Munich 
 trade schools seems restricted in comparison with 
 the Paris program. But it matters little what one 
 has studied if one has acquired that asset more 
 precious than encyclopedias of information — the 
 ability to think. There is reason to believe that 
 in doing one thing completely, the pupil develops 
 a more thoughtful habit of mind ; and that, hav- 
 ing learned by thoroughness in a smaller field 
 how to think a thing out to the ultimate detail, 
 he will be a more apt and creative workman and 
 a more intelligent citizen. At least he will be in- 
 dustrially resourceful, conversant with his whole 
 trade, a useful, usable master of the iron hand. 
 
 IV. Switzerland 
 
 Before leaving the subject of foreign experi- 
 ments at trade education, a word must be said 
 about the mountain republic which has out- 
 stripped the rest of the world in the matter of 
 
 143 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 compulsory education. How often does it occur 
 to the casual tourist that his clever Swiss land- 
 lord and his apt Swiss servants owe much of their 
 efficiency to training in a school for hotel keepers ? 
 As he travels through the bowels of the earth or 
 creeps around mountain shoulders behind the 
 sturdy crouching engines of the Swiss railroad, 
 does he reflect that in spite of Switzerland's 
 meagre natural endowment, the tremendous ef- 
 forts it has put forth to develop capable citizens 
 have resulted in unparalleled engineering achieve- 
 ments: in funiculars ; in model sanitoria and ho- 
 tels ; in light and power industries, — indeed, in 
 everything that can utilize the water power which 
 is nature's chief gift ; in a perfection of watch- 
 making absolutely unrivaled ; and in a profusion 
 of efficient small producers who can maintain 
 themselves independently against stupendous 
 odds ? For a nation to live and prosper on Swiss 
 soil seems flying in the face of Providence, and 
 Switzerland has done it because she is, above all 
 others, the land of public education for public 
 usefulness. 
 
 Swiss curricula present little that is new after 
 a survey of French and German systems of vo- 
 cational education. It is the fitting together link 
 by link of a complete chain of industrial training, 
 
 144 
 
FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 
 
 the strengthening of this chain by closely related 
 labor and education laws, and the moral and finan- 
 cial support of it by labor, capital, and the general 
 public — it is this total program which renders 
 Switzerland worthy of special study. 
 
 A unique enactment passed in 1906 controls 
 completely the conditions of apprenticeship in 
 Switzerland, and since apprenticeship is so 
 broadly interpreted as to cover any attempt by a 
 minor at a gainful occupation, this law may be said 
 to regulate child labor. No child under fifteen may 
 enter any workshop or factory, and seldom may 
 a minor work for more than ten hours per day. 
 The proper care and instruction of apprentices 
 by their employers is secured by elaborate regu- 
 lations and a system of penalization under which 
 an employer may forfeit his right to receive ap- 
 prentices. In addition to this trade instruction 
 given in the master's shop, the learner must be 
 allowed certain time during his working day to 
 attend the industrial, continuation, or general 
 school in his district. Moreover, at the end of 
 his apprenticeship, he is required by law and by 
 trade union regulation to undergo a test of 
 working ability; and many pupils who have 
 passed the legal school age remain in various 
 courses to prepare for this examination. 
 
 145 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 In some Swiss cantons, school attendance is 
 practically compulsory between the ages of six 
 and nineteen, as pupils remain from six to four- 
 teen in the primary grades, from fourteen to 
 seventeen in the complementary or vocational 
 school, and then follow courses preparatory for 
 the obligatory examination for recruits. In the 
 canton of Geneva, the child goes at three to the 
 Ecole Enfantine, and at seven passes into the 
 Ecole Primairey where mstruction in modern 
 languages and manual training is begun. At thir- 
 teen, he enters upon a two years* course in one 
 of the following institutions : (i) Secondary rural 
 schools ; (2) the Ecole Comple'mentairCf a part- 
 time school, which " completes and develops pri- 
 mary education from the point of view of trade 
 practice adapted to the needs of the special lo- 
 cality " ; or (3) the Ecole Professionjtelle, which 
 is not a course for apprentices, but is comparable 
 to our own manual training high schools. It pre- 
 pares for any higher special school and aims to 
 develop general capacity and intelligence. After 
 fifteen, school attendance is nolonger compulsory, 
 but " employers favor workers who follow higher 
 courses,"^ and often subsidize those which their 
 employees attend. 
 
 1 Astier et Cuminal, Z' Enseignement Technique. 
 146 
 
FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 
 
 Among higher courses, designed to train aver- 
 age workmen, may be mentioned various night 
 schools and several special schools giving trade 
 preparation equivalent to apprenticeship, such as 
 the Ecole des Metiers (for building-trades), the 
 Ecole Mecamque and the Ecole d' Horologie, 
 These schools emphasize practical instruction and 
 give only such academic branches as bear directly 
 upon the trades in hand. Even trade theory is not 
 extensively developed in the curricula. The Tech- 
 niciim may also be entered from the Ecole Pro- 
 fessio7inelle, but is a more advanced school intended 
 for the training of foremen in construction, civil, 
 mechanical, and electrical engineering. While 
 practice plays a large part in the instruction, it is 
 not stressed so much as general trade theory, the 
 Technicum being in this respect a contrast to the 
 trade schools just described. From the secondary 
 rural schools, country children may enter similarly 
 graded courses in agricultural branches. Poly tech- 
 nical and horticultural universities complete a 
 system recalling the German plan, but even more 
 comprehensive and far-reaching. 
 
 The Swiss ideal is represented by the sequence 
 of primary, professional, and technical schools 
 embracing the more liberal features of both 
 French and German systems. But the existence 
 
 147 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 of the Ecole CompUmentaire (the part-time school 
 in which early trade specialization appears) shows 
 that in Switzerland, as in Germany, France, and 
 America, economic pressure is too great to allow 
 the mass of children to continue a general edu- 
 cation beyond the grammar grades. The Lehr- 
 werkstdtten^in Berne offer an interesting solution 
 of this difficulty. In this school pupils are regu- 
 larly apprenticed and at the expiration of the term 
 are paid a wage for the time they have spent in 
 the shops. The articles they produce are turned 
 over to the trade union council for sale and thus 
 friction with labor organizations because of school 
 competition is avoided. Here, as throughout the 
 entire field of Swiss vocational training, we see a 
 harmonious cooperation of labor, capital, legisla- 
 tive bodies, and educational authorities for the 
 upbuilding of efficient citizenship and national 
 prosperity. 
 
 ^ Public training-shops. 
 
X 
 
 AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS 
 
 " Double, double, 
 Toil and trouble! 
 Fire burn 
 And cauldron bubble." 
 
 In that cauldron where the American trade school 
 is brewing, bubbles a quantity of heterogeneous ex- 
 periment — most of which has already been tried 
 and found wanting abroad. "Experience keeps 
 a dear school," but America will learn in no other. 
 In our eagerness to meet the educational need of 
 our time, we have not planned deliberately or 
 studied our industrial situation in detail. Snatch- 
 ing at a multitude of foreign programs without 
 examining into their previous success, we try them 
 at home ; and have not, so far, kept close enough 
 account of their results to judge whether they 
 have proved satisfactory here. 
 
 These experiments group themselves as pre- 
 paratory trade schools,^ i. e., schools which give 
 
 1 This classification is borrowed from a leaflet published by 
 the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education. 
 
 149 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 a broad, general foundation in manual and aca- 
 demic branches and fit the pupil to enter industry 
 as a learner; trade schools for the average work- 
 man, whose aim is to supplant apprenticeship; 
 technical high schools designed to prepare for the 
 upper ranks in industry ; and part-time and even- 
 ing classes for persons already engaged in indus- 
 try or commerce. 
 
 It is evident that most of them are reduplica- 
 tions of French and German types already dis- 
 cussed. The outline on page 151 will show their 
 foreign parentage at a glance. 
 
 What has been said in the preceding chapter 
 of the French and German schools may be here 
 reiterated in more emphatic American terms; 
 more emphatic because our industrial situation is 
 more complex and fluid than that in any other 
 country, and a rigid school method will therefore 
 fall more quickly behind the times. Such scien- 
 tific investigation of American methods as has 
 been made points to the same conclusions as those 
 already reached by European experts. 
 
 The preparatory school, which gives a broad 
 basis in manual training and academic branches, 
 does not specialize along definite trade lines, but 
 trains its students in general use of machinery 
 and material so that when they enter any indus- 
 
 150 
 
AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS 
 
 Munich Con- 
 tinuation 
 School 
 
 Certain 
 Private 
 Corporation 
 Schools for 
 employees 
 
 German Trade 
 High School 
 
 Technical 
 High School 
 to prepare for 
 upper ranks of 
 industry. 
 Note, however, 
 important dif- 
 ference : 
 The German 
 student has al- 
 ready complet- 
 ed an appren- 
 ticeship be- 
 fore entering 
 the School 
 
 Berlin 
 Continua- 
 tion 
 School 
 
 Part Time 
 and Evening 
 Schools 
 giving the 
 theory with- 
 out practice 
 
 H 
 
 G O 
 
 Trade School 
 for average 
 workman, de- 
 signed to 
 supplant 
 apprentice- 
 ship 
 
 Swiss 
 
 " Professional " 
 
 School 
 
 General 
 Preparatory 
 Trade 
 School 
 
 Foreign 
 Type 
 
 American 
 Type 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 try they are defter with their hands and more apt 
 in learning new processes than the raw recruit 
 without previous training. This school may, from 
 one point of view, be classed with manual train- 
 ing high schools, in that a diploma does not cer- 
 tify bread-winning ability and that an apprentice- 
 ship is still necessary after graduation. From the 
 developmental point of view, the aims of the types 
 are the same. But the preparatory trade school 
 differs from the so-called manual training school 
 in having a distinctly industrial bias. By empha- 
 sizing the value of general education as a prepa- 
 ration for industry, it catches many pupils who 
 would otherwise leave school early to work in 
 poorly paid and uneducative juvenile occupations. 
 Such an institution is the Lawrence Industrial 
 School at Lawrence, Massachusetts, ** devoted to 
 opening up avenues to the industries and trades." 
 As Lawrence is a textile center, the school work 
 naturally enough borrows its subject-matter from 
 textile industries. The three years' course com- 
 prises business English, mill mathematics, book- 
 keeping, industrial history, chemistry, mechanics 
 and electricity, raw material, carding and spinning^ 
 weaving and warp preparation, fabric analysis, de- 
 signing, dyeing and finishing. Special dexterity in 
 any one of the many processes involved in factory 
 
 152 
 
AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS 
 
 work along these lines is not the aim. The course 
 serves merely as a general introduction to the in- 
 dustry and the industrial viewpoint. Pupils enter 
 at fourteen ; graduate at seventeen. 
 
 Such a course raises the question whether the 
 graduate loses or gains industrially by spending 
 in the schoolroom three years which might be 
 devoted to acquiring that special manual skill by 
 which he must ultimately earn his living. The 
 advocate of this plan would be quick in his re- 
 sponse that, at fourteen, no child has access to 
 opportunities for acquiring skill, and that, if he 
 goes to work, it will be in some position which 
 leaves him farther behind than the preparatory 
 school. But as Mr. Merritt, of the Yale-Towne 
 Manufacturing Company, justly declares, " In 
 considering the question of industrial education, 
 one of the most important factors is the desire 
 of children to earn something so that they will 
 be independent, and also the desire of their par- 
 ents to have them earn something to help to- 
 ward the family support. ... In many cases 
 where such trade schools have been started, it 
 has been found difficult to get sufficient pupils 
 to fill the schools because they prefer to get into 
 some gainful occupation." An inquiry as to rea- 
 sons for leaving school, made by the author 
 
 153 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 among trade union locals in Kansas City, sub- 
 stantiates this observation. A frequent answer, 
 tinged with regret, was, ''Most of us stayed in 
 school as long as we could afford it." 
 
 Until recently, trade schools which design to 
 supplant apprenticeship have been almost the sole 
 exponents of the industrial ideal in this country. 
 The industrial field, for which one department of 
 a well-known school of this kind prepares, has been 
 exhaustively investigated by the Russell Sage 
 Foundation Committee on Women's Work, and 
 application of their findings to this type of insti- 
 tution seems warranted. The committee selected 
 for special study that part of millinery known as 
 "trimming," but as trade terms are very loosely 
 employed in the business, their work had a much 
 wider range. Two hundred women workers in the 
 industry in New York City were interviewed at 
 their homes by the committee's agents, who ques- 
 tioned them as to the number of positions they 
 had held, the salaries received, the periods of em- 
 ployment, and the opportunities given for learn- 
 ing the trade, and as to whether they had ever at- 
 tended a trade school. If so, the workers were 
 asked how the school training had helped them 
 in their work. The shop was then visited and 
 the employer's opinion of the trade school grad- 
 
 154 
 
AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS 
 
 uate and the need for industrial training obtained. 
 The school attended was finally inspected and 
 the classroom work examined in the light of the 
 knowledge of trade needs previously gained. 
 The results of this unique and systematic study 
 recall the statements of the Parisian League 
 for the Encouragement of Apprenticeship and 
 are even more startlingly conclusive. The com- 
 mittee's conclusions may be summarized briefly 
 as follows: (i) Academic training given in con- 
 nection with trade work is insufficient. (2) The 
 courses are not long enough to give thoroughness 
 and skill. " The experience of millinery workers 
 would seem to suggest that in modern times, 
 perhaps even more than in the days when indus- 
 trial conditions were less complex, apprenticeship 
 must include learning the trade, as well as one 
 process in it, if the workers are to be efficient. 
 . . . Ability to adapt is of primary importance. 
 . . . Yet pyschology and practical experience 
 make it clear that such ability cannot be given in 
 a six months* course." (3) There is not enough 
 practice on single processes, and not enough va- 
 riety in work. (4) Few of the courses use exclu- 
 sively real trade material. (5) Many of the teach- 
 ers are not experienced practical milliners. (6) 
 The pupils do not, therefore, learn the trade as 
 
 155 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 it actually is ; they are not ready to take hold and 
 do something at once when they enter a shop. 
 (7) The school takes girls too young, and there- 
 fore graduates them too young to place them- 
 selves advantageously in the trade. (8) The 
 school augments the oversupply of workers, 
 which is a principal reason for the pitifully low 
 wages and the slack seasons prevalent in the 
 industry. 
 
 It appears here, as in Paris, that the school 
 divorces itself from actual trade practice in spite 
 of an earnest effort to meet the industrial needs 
 of the day. " Our trade schools are no good. It's 
 altogether different outside," said one millinery 
 girl. How to make such courses automatically 
 self-testing, and thus prevent lapses from current 
 methods, is a difficult problem. The particular 
 trade school under discussion has kept no system- 
 atic track of its graduates and hence cannot 
 judge of the results of its work ; and the temp- 
 tation is great for the busy teacher to lose touch 
 with the almost vertiginous progress of an indus- 
 try which, at the beginning of her pedagogic 
 career, she probably knew from A to Z. The 
 industrial torrent rushes rapidly on, but the 
 pupil is caught for the length of the training 
 course in an eddy beside the stream. The more 
 
 156 
 
AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS 
 
 complicated the trade, and the longer the course, 
 the more urgent becomes this objection. 
 
 The same indecision between training for the 
 home and training for the trade which charac- 
 terizes the Berlin continuation school for girls is 
 felt in our trade schools for girls as well. The 
 short course barely gives time for one line, and 
 a combination of two ideals precludes thorough- 
 ness in either. Admitting to trade schools girls 
 who do not intend to earn their living by what 
 they learn, also lowers the standard of school 
 work. There is not that atmosphere of earnest 
 steadiness and painstaking care which must char- 
 acterize the successful worker in industry. 
 
 Technical high schools, of secondary grade, 
 indeed, but still attempting to raise the manual 
 worker in the ranks of industry and fit him for 
 responsible positions, are open to the same criti- 
 cisms. The Technical High School in Cleveland, 
 Ohio, belongs to this group. The ideal of the 
 school is at once apparent in its course of study: 
 the shopwork for the first year being turning and 
 cabinet-making ; for the second, pattern-making, 
 founding and forging; for the third, m.achine 
 shop practice ; and being, for the last of the third 
 and all of the fourth, concentrated on some spe- 
 cial branch. Depth and thoroughness are not so 
 
 157 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 much the aim as breadth and general capacity. 
 To prepare the way for business adaptabiUty, and 
 executive advancement is the object. 
 
 Evening schools for persons already in indus- 
 try are the most common and the oldest method 
 for helping working people educationally. Cul- 
 tural branches have, as a rule, formed the back- 
 bone of such courses. Of late, actual trade in- 
 struction has encroached upon the academic 
 preserves of the night school, and we find two 
 distinctly industrial types of courses : one offer- 
 ing general technical instruction, and the other 
 giving special practice work intended to supple- 
 ment the highly specialized shop training of the 
 modern worker. Excellent examples of all three 
 of these classes abound. The evening school has 
 stormed the most conservative educational cita- 
 dels. Those who oppose trade education in gen- 
 eral as class education, and an undemocratic 
 converging of the lines of opportunity upon one 
 focus, welcome enthusiastically any effort to lift 
 the laborer from the industrial pit into which he 
 falls without it. The utility of the night school 
 as a solution for the industrial training problem 
 is, however, to be gravely questioned. For the 
 young worker it is most unfortunate. The strain 
 of a long day's labor in a factory or shop is 
 
 158 
 
AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS 
 
 enough, if not too much, for the growing child. 
 And even if there were no danger from over- 
 strain, a child's mind is not in trim to profit by 
 evening teaching after a day of toil. Neither do 
 the short evening hours give opportunity for 
 thorough and comprehensive instruction. It is 
 also doubtful wisdom to give young and irre- 
 sponsible boys and girls an excuse for staying 
 out night after night alone. If the evening 
 school has a legitimate function, it is certainly 
 for adults. Yet even here the question obtrudes 
 itself, " Is not the evening school a makeshift 
 way of compensating for previous deficiencies in 
 training } " When the public does for its young 
 people all it should in the way of preliminary 
 education, the night school will die. It is, figura- 
 tively speaking, the educational vanguard, a com- 
 promise which the public makes with the mi- 
 nority who have begun to demand, but have not 
 yet attained, their full rights. However far for- 
 ward we may push the night school, it must still 
 be regarded as a temporizing measure, useful 
 only in helping adults to combat unfair condi- 
 tions of early training or present employment. 
 
 There remains to be considered the part-time 
 school for those engaged in commerce or indus- 
 try. This has, in America, assumed two forms : 
 
 159 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 the private apprenticeship school conducted by 
 certain large corporations, and a few scattered 
 experiments like Lewis Institute in Chicago 
 and the Fitchburg, Massachusetts, High School, 
 The latter reproduces in its essential features 
 the Berlin system of continuation schools. The 
 chief difference is the time divisions between 
 school and work ; in place of the six hours spent 
 in school by the Berlin child, the Fitchburg plan 
 provides alternate weeks of school and shop- 
 work. The school instruction is purely academic 
 and theoretical ; practical skill must be gained 
 in the factories of the business concerns coop- 
 erating with the school board. This plan not 
 only presents all the drawbacks of the Berlin 
 program in leaving the child's practice work to 
 the hit-or-miss tactics of industrial specializa- 
 tion, but raises a serious problem by the duplica- 
 tion of the apprentice force involved. In a small 
 scale experiment, this danger might not become 
 apparent, but if universally applied, would it not 
 lead directly to the equipping of twice the num- 
 ber of workmen needed in industry .? Lewis In- 
 stitute offers certain improvements upon the 
 Fitchburg plan in the way of shop practice, ten 
 hours of the school week being devoted to found- 
 ing, pattern-making, machine construction and 
 
 1 60 
 
AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS 
 
 forging, but the duplication of the apprentice 
 force remains. 
 
 The Munich program, which has proved most 
 efficient among foreign schools, is carried out in 
 the United States only in a modified form and 
 by certain wealthy corporations. The apprentice- 
 ship schools of the General Electric Company, 
 the Westinghouse Company, the New York Cen- 
 tral Railroad, and a dozen other well-known and 
 prosperous concerns attest the success and econ- 
 omy of this method of training workmen. In 
 drafting a final program for public trade edu- 
 cation, study of these institutions must play a 
 prominent part. The instruction there given may 
 be narrow from an academic and cultural point 
 of view, but it comprises the necessary industrial 
 elements. It teaches what business needs ; the 
 public schools would add what society and hu- 
 manity need. The General Electric Company's 
 school devotes seven and one half hours per 
 week to theory and fifty-five hours to shop prac- 
 tice in training-rooms equipped for this special 
 purpose. This plan secures both the advantages 
 of the French school, where the work is done 
 under the eye of an instructor, and identification 
 with actual conditions of manufacture — an ideal 
 opportunity which none but the most powerful 
 
 i6i 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 of corporations can supply, and which is most 
 nearly approximated in the educational world by 
 the part-time continuation school, including gen- 
 eral practice in the curriculum. 
 
 The Yale-Towne Manufacturing Company has, 
 for several years past, had in operation such an 
 apprenticeship system which is in effect a practi- 
 cal trade school, producing men for its own work, 
 but also men who could readily adapt themselves 
 to any mechanical operations. Apprentices are 
 paid increasing wages during a four years' course, 
 at the end of which a certificate of graduation is 
 awarded, together with a cash bonus if service 
 has been satisfactory. All graduates are encour- 
 aged to remain in the employ of the company and 
 are given substantial increase in wages when they 
 enter upon their career as journeymen. The in- 
 struction of these apprentices is carried on in 
 special training-rooms under expert teachers in 
 the different grades of work manufactured and 
 in the handling and repairing of machine tools. 
 Opportunity is given to show inventive ability. 
 Each apprentice is taught individually and is 
 advanced in accordance with his ability. After 
 about two years in the training-rooms, the ap- 
 prentices are usually placed in different depart- 
 ments of the factory, where they work with 
 
 162 
 
AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS 
 
 journeymen and come more closely in touch with 
 the regular factory routine. 
 
 To acquaint them with the science which lies 
 behind the design of the machines and tools, and 
 with the problems they must meet later on as 
 foremen, the apprentices are required to attend 
 educational classes provided by the company. 
 For these sessions, which fall during working- 
 hours, they are paid the same as when at the 
 bench. The course of study comprises arithme- 
 tic, elementary algebra, mensuration, elementary 
 trigonometry, elements of mechanics, power 
 transmission, strength of material, mechanism, 
 mechanical drawing, machine design, and jig and 
 fixture design. In addition, the superintendents 
 and foremen give practical talks relating to the 
 trades. These classes usually occupy six hours 
 per week, twelve weeks constituting a term, and 
 three terms, a year. Advancement is contingent 
 upon passing an examination at the end of each 
 term. 
 
 The results of this school have thus far been 
 beneficial to both the apprentices and the com- 
 pany. In quite a number of cases at the end of 
 the second year, when the apprentices have be- 
 come skillful enough to run an ordinary machine, 
 such as a lathe or a milling-machine, they have 
 
 163 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 been drawn off from their course by the offer of 
 high wages from some outside shop. During the 
 recent rush to make automobiles, for example, 
 the automobile shops offered unreasonably high 
 wages for only fairly skilled hands ; and yet these 
 opportunities to work before completing the 
 course show that the apprentices were receiving 
 in the Yale-Towne shops a training measurable 
 in dollars and cents, and sufficiently flexible to 
 admit of ready industrial re-adjustment. 
 
 In classification of the multiform departures 
 along this newest educational byroad, many nu- 
 merous and valuable experiments have necessarily 
 eluded pigeon-holing ; and the line of demarca- 
 tion between the several classes suggested has 
 been difficult to determine. No two courses are 
 alike; no two have even the same ideal. Each 
 has been shaped by the personal bias and the 
 general observation of some individual or groups 
 of individuals rather than by a systematic study 
 of the industrial conditions they were designed 
 to meet. American treatment of the subject has 
 been deductive rather than inductive — a result 
 probably of the fact that the movement has been 
 under the wing of the educational authorities 
 with strong preconceived ideas and academic in- 
 terests. Within the past few years a different 
 
 164 
 
AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS 
 
 school of enthusiasts has arisen who cry out against 
 present educational methods as sterile and futile, 
 who would eliminate from the course of study all 
 unnecessary and unj^ractical fields of culture, and 
 train our children with a single eye to working 
 and earning capacity. Neither camp has as yet 
 possessed the whole truth about trade education. 
 The man who would over-academize trade educa- 
 tion robs it of its function and virility. The over- 
 practical enthusiast who measures teaching by 
 dollars and cents, and discards everything that has 
 no immediate industrial utility, robs the child of 
 his educational birthright. Man is made for more 
 than wage-earning, but man has a right to wage- 
 earning ability, for *' his further development 
 along cultural and other lines is conditioned by 
 his capacity to support himself." 
 
 No discussion of trade education in America 
 would be complete if it disregarded those indus- 
 trial schools for the negro, which led in a move- 
 ment that has now extended to black, red, and 
 white alike. Even during the pioneer stages of 
 negro education, the faculties of Hampton and 
 Tuskegee Institutes held that broader conception 
 of industrial training which saves the trade school 
 from pure utilitarianism. With them it was never 
 the trade for trade's sake, but always the trade 
 
 165 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 for the man's sake. These two great schools were 
 not organized to train labor, but to uplift and 
 rehabilitate a race. Forty years ago Hampton 
 Institute was a living embodiment of the convic- 
 tion that education is the most fundamental 
 method of social betterment ; and forty years 
 ago, by erecting education on a firm vocational 
 basis, Hampton Institute struck the keynote of 
 true constructive philanthropy. Shortsighted 
 people have both praised and censured industri- 
 al training for the negro on the ground that it 
 will confine him to his proper or improper sphere. 
 Results have set at naught both these narrow 
 inferences. Industrial education has paved the 
 way for negro advancement by giving to every 
 black the one right of every man of any color — 
 the right to be of some use in the world. 
 
XI 
 
 THE TYPE OF TRADE SCHOOL NEEDED IN THE 
 UNITED STATES 
 
 A CLEAR-CUT ideal is the first step toward draft- 
 ing a workable program. What, then, shall be the 
 aim of American industrial education ? What fin- 
 ished or unfinished product shall our trade school 
 strive to graduate ? Certainly neither theorist nor 
 specialist. Highly skilled specialists are, how- 
 ever, what industry undoubtedly needs and lacks. 
 But why does it lack them ? Not because industry 
 could not train specialists ; but because the proper 
 material out of which to make specialists is un- 
 available. Our trouble with present workmen is 
 basic lack of trade intelligence and mental train- 
 ing, which prevents progress from lower to higher 
 forms of work. It is the basis for skilled speciali- 
 zation, for mobility, for executive capacity which 
 the trade school must furnish. General intelli- 
 gence, general trade theory, general trade prac- 
 tice : these are the essentials. We may add to the 
 old-time educational ideal one word, and read as 
 our objective purpose, " the all-around workm2in." 
 
 167 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 The history of the trade school in our country 
 has been so far this : consciousness of the inad- 
 equacy of academic education ; expensive but too 
 often superficial investigation of foreign schools 
 or schools in other American cities, with an eye 
 to courses of study and ideals rather than results ; 
 vague canvass of the business pubHc to measure 
 the desire for better trained workmen ; drafting in 
 the educational sanctum sanctonim, a program 
 which first meets the light of day and the eye of 
 practical criticism in the shape of a school built 
 and in operation ; hiring instructors who have once 
 been engaged in industry, but who must now 
 teach year after year, often summer and winter, 
 and who thus lose touch with progress in their 
 trades ; admitting any and every pupil, whether 
 actually destined for a self-supporting career or 
 not ; finding places for a few graduates, but in 
 almost no instance keeping systematic track of 
 each pupil with a view to testing and reconstruct- 
 ing classroom work in the light of its failure or 
 success as a preparation for industry. 
 
 Needless to say, this procedure began at the 
 wrong end, soon left solid ground, and has been 
 navigating the upper airs of educational theory 
 ever since. Much really excellent work has been 
 accomphshed by American industrial schools. 
 
 i68 
 
TYPE OF TRADE SCHOOL NEEDED 
 
 But the whole subject is, as yet, nebulous ; we 
 do not know how successful we have been or just 
 where we have failed. Instead of duplicating 
 untested curricula, instead of blindly following 
 the blind and investing in expensive educational 
 plants which experience may prove to be unpro- 
 fitable, let us preface the grounding of vocational 
 schools by a careful survey of our industrial needs 
 and a rigorous testing of the work of already 
 established institutions. 
 
 Fundamental questions to be answered at the 
 start are : what industries the school must feed ; 
 at what age these industries take on helpers ; 
 what sort of work beginners do ; what training 
 they are given in the shop ; and how many new 
 helpers per year these industries require. We 
 must know what per cent of workers are women ; 
 must determine woman's stability as an industrial 
 factor, and see whether it be true that the aver- 
 age woman worker merely passes through indus- 
 try on her way to marriage. We must know the 
 working conditions and wage scales for these in- 
 dustries, and the qualities upon which promotion 
 depends. We must put ourselves thoroughly in 
 touch with the workers themselves as well as 
 with the employers, and a labor union may have 
 as much to teach us as the manufacturer. The 
 
 169 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 trade school should look impartially to the good 
 of the greatest number ; it must not ally itself 
 with any special interest ; must remember that 
 what industry can get out of its workers is no 
 more important than what workers can get 
 out of industry. What the trade needs can be 
 learned from the trade alone ; but for what the 
 man needs that the trade may not victimize him, 
 we must go to his living as well as to his working 
 conditions. Businessmen, foremen, journeymen, 
 trade union members, educators, and philanthro- 
 pists must join in drafting the program. 
 
 Rigorous testing of the work of already estab- 
 lished schools ought to have been done from the 
 very beginning by the schools themselves. Each 
 graduate should be followed for several years and 
 the value of his preparation measured in his own 
 and his employer's eyes. Only thus can the school 
 tell whether it is furnishing industry what in- 
 dustry needs ; only thus, if at all, can a once flaw- 
 less curriculum be kept abreast of the times ; 
 and only thus can we tell what to save and 
 what to discard in grounding new vocational 
 institutions. 
 
 Since no such exhaustive study has yet been 
 made, we are scarcely ready to pronounce upon 
 what kind of trade education will produce the 
 
 170 
 
TYPE OF TRADE SCHOOL NEEDED 
 
 all-round workman demanded by American in- 
 dustry. It is, however, certain that only a very 
 flexible form which will continually readjust itself 
 to changing industrial conditions and be continu- 
 ally and automatically tested by industry, can sat- 
 isfy our needs. We require, furthermore, the sys- 
 tem which will never create an artificial supply 
 of workers and which will be at once most econo- 
 mical of time and of results. Can we best attain 
 these ends by preparing for, by supplanting or 
 by supplementing apprenticeship } Which of these 
 systems has proved most effective in Europe ? 
 The Munich contimiation school, with its obliga- 
 tory supplcmejiting of wage work for apprentices 
 already placed ifi commeixe a7id industry. Which 
 system do our successful business enterprises in 
 America embody in their training schools for 
 apprentices '^. Theoretical instruction and general 
 exercises in practice are given under the eye of 
 a teacher y but the learner is also put into the fac- 
 tory to work side by side with journeymen who 
 are producing for the market. No set instruction 
 can supplant drill at the machine under com- 
 mercial pressure; nothing can give such timely 
 correction to the inevitable classroom inflexibil- 
 ity. General trade knowledge, general trade prac- 
 tice may be acquired in the school ; speed, dex- 
 
 171 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 terity, and the verification of classroom knowl- 
 edge come in the trade; and by a combination 
 of these experiences, time is greatly economized^ 
 the pupil is able to earn while he learns, and 
 emerges from his training more intelligent, re- 
 sourceful, and competent. The school for gener- 
 alizing, the factory for specializing — a continuous 
 and clarifying interaction ! — a flexible self-test- 
 ing system whose courses cannot well lag behind 
 the times, since every pupil is conversant with 
 actual business conditions ! 
 
 To decide that the school shall perfect our pre- 
 sent labor force determines when definite trade 
 instruction should begin. Certainly not before the 
 working age. Premature specialization dwarfs the 
 mind and ties the child down for life to the pos- 
 sibilities of a few simple reflexes. Youth has a 
 right to growing time. There is necessary, too, 
 for intelligent work, a substratum of culture and 
 mental drill, to furnish which a complete gram- 
 mar course uninvaded by bread-and-butter respon- 
 sibilities is none too long. We may begin early in 
 the school life, however, to lay the foundation for 
 trade dexterity, as well as trade intelligence, by 
 introducing manual training into the grades. What 
 psychology calls basic skill (whether mental or 
 motor) is acquired very early, probably before the 
 
 172 
 
TYPE OF TRADE SCHOOL NEEDED 
 
 twelfth year. If broad muscular adaptability is 
 gained in the grammar grades, the child will come 
 to the higher school — trade or academic — self- 
 controlled, effective, and able to lay hold of 
 special processes without fumbling. 
 
 What balance shall be maintained between the 
 academic and vocational, the theoretic and prac- 
 tical elements in the trade school curriculum? 
 We have already seen that theory and practice 
 must go hand in hand to produce an all-round 
 workman and that the school cannot safely leave 
 practice to the shop. The other question is far 
 more difficult to answer. Yet we must remember 
 that by inserting the word " work " in the old edu- 
 cational rubric, we have not changed its import. 
 The test of education has always been utility ; the 
 Latin high school, the academic college course 
 were once vocational. Now that new lines of ac- 
 tivity come into being, new sorts of work need 
 to be done, we change, not the method, but the 
 matter. The oft-drawn contrast between liberal 
 and practical education does not exist. Both 
 mathematics and chemistry develop thought 
 power, similar, except for the sphere in which the 
 thinking is done. The student of language receives 
 what is for him a practical education, and yet 
 language study is commonly denominated a liberal 
 
 173 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 or cultural branch. All good education is both 
 practical and liberal ; and the training which was 
 once practical for preachers and lawyers is no more 
 liberal than that which is to-day practical for en- 
 gineers, machinists, or men of business. 
 
 If there is no inherent difference between pro- 
 fessional and trade education, then whatever in 
 the one is calculated to broaden the vision, 
 strengthen the mind and quicken the sensibilities, 
 is equally proper to the other. Mathematics, 
 science, geography, history, language, literature, 
 music and art — these are subjects of universal 
 applicability, universal utility. But because the 
 young industrial worker has no further apparent 
 use for the half-developed material of his gram- 
 mar course, he forgets it. Mary Woolman ^ points 
 out that the majority of girls enter the trade 
 school with a very meager general education in 
 which they are not interested because it seems to 
 them useless, but that when they see its bearing 
 on their daily tasks, they desire to study further. 
 The practical instruction is thus their first glimpse 
 into the world of culture. Indeed, " those whose 
 environment is work, find more culture in a trade 
 than in a purely academic school." It opens their 
 eyes to the real vitality of what has before seemed 
 
 1 Formerly head of Manhattan Trade School for Girls. 
 
TYPE OF TRADE SCHOOL NEEDED 
 
 dead knowledge, but without which, mere manual 
 dexterity is profitless. 
 
 Certain narrowly utilitarian advocates of indus- 
 trial training, who are not less one-sided in their 
 view than the devotees of so-called higher edu- 
 cation, would reproduce in the trade school that 
 very unfavorable industrial situation which it is 
 designed to combat. Yet the vocational idea has 
 not come thus to pare down the man to fit his in- 
 dustrial niche and to strike cultural subjects from 
 school curricula, but to preempt and till new fields 
 for culture. Man is a composite ; toil is not his 
 only aspect. Education must develop not merely 
 efficient producers, but efficient consumers ; and 
 it must provide resource from work as well as 
 preparation for work. Rhythm is the law of life ; 
 but there is no rhythm in the existence of one who 
 has never learned the secret of recreation. This 
 secret is not in alternating work and idleness, for 
 nature abhors a vacuum and idleness is not pos- 
 sible for the human mind. The old chord of work 
 will go on vibrating even during enforced physi- 
 cal quiet if some other chord is not touched. A 
 wide range of interests is therefore necessary for 
 sane and wholesome living ; and anything which 
 will develop broader sympathies and open up new 
 modes of recreation — all those features of modern 
 
 175 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 schooling which are too frequently stigmatized as 
 decorative frills — are in the highest human sense 
 utilitarian. 
 
 The object of vocational education is civic as 
 well as human and industrial ; is, as our preface 
 stated, to hold pupils in school until they are pre- 
 pared for citizenship. Therefore, history and civics 
 belong here even more emphatically than in the 
 academic school, since to the trade school will 
 come eighty per cent of our voting public. 
 
 In short, we conclude that the trade school 
 must not only train dextrous workers, but give, 
 in terms of the working pupil's life, the mental 
 drill he misses by not attending an orthodox high 
 school. 
 
 The character of work to be done in the voca- 
 tional school determines the qualities desirable 
 in teachers and superintendents. In the reaction 
 against academic ideals and methods, instruction 
 in trade schools, and even their management, is 
 often confided to persons with wide trade knowl- 
 edge and experience, but without pedagogic 
 training. Most of the instructors in the Worces- 
 ter, Massachusetts, trade high school, for in- 
 stance, had been foremen in local shops before 
 taking their present positions. One of the masters 
 voluntarily remarked to the author, "I am not a 
 
 176 
 
TYPE OF TRADE SCHOOL NEEDED 
 
 trained teacher and when I came into the school, 
 I knew almost nothing about how to present a 
 subject to my pupils. I knew how things ought 
 to be done, but to show the boys and make them 
 understand was another matter, To show thirty 
 boys at once was quite different from showing 
 one greenhorn in the factory." Here was a man 
 who knew industry well, who had just the infor- 
 mation of which his pupils stood in need, but 
 who was handicapped by lack of transmitting 
 power. Before he could teach, he must learn how 
 by lengthy practice on the youths who came to 
 him for instruction. On the other hand, there 
 was, in one of the academic branches, a profes- 
 sional high school teacher quite unacquainted 
 with the trade needs of the boys under her jur- 
 isdiction. She was teaching in accordance with 
 the old academic ideals and completely vitiating 
 any vocational atmosphere which her subject 
 might have had. In this one school were pre- 
 sented both horns of the dilemma which con- 
 fronts us in an attempt to secure for the trade 
 school an efficient faculty. The workman cannot 
 teach and the teacher cannot work. For this new 
 field we need a new educational birth molded of 
 trade and scholastic ideals. The successful trade 
 school teacher must be broadly educated, peda- 
 
 177 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 gogically trained, and industrially practiced if he 
 is to develop at all points the capacities of his pu- 
 pils. The mere mechanic whose vision is limited 
 by factory walls will perhaps (after he has learned 
 to instruct them) make adroit workers of his pu- 
 pils. But he will not be able to widen their outlook 
 upon life or even upon industry beyond the nar- 
 row view which they might obtain by serving an 
 apprenticeship in the factory which shaped the 
 master. 
 
 Awake to the fact that vocational training is 
 not merely a trade but an educational problem, 
 some European countries have special normal 
 courses preparatory for trade school positions 
 and require, in addition to this theoretical train- 
 ing, not only that the teacher must have been em- 
 ployed in industry before his pedagogic career be- 
 gins, but that while he is engaged in teaching, he 
 must still spend part of his time in a factory of 
 the type for which he prepares his pupils. Thus 
 it is hoped to obtain as instructors both good me- 
 chanics and broad-minded, well-balanced men of 
 practical culture. 
 
 But what will supplementary courses do for 
 the unfortunate young people who have, as yet, 
 no job worthy of the name of trade ? What of the 
 thousands of children in the so-called juvenile oc- 
 
 17S 
 
TYPE OF TRADE SCHOOL NEEDED 
 
 cupations where " the best is like the worst " ? 
 What of messenger boys ? Office boys ? Errand 
 boys? What of the entirely unoccupied child ?^ 
 The Manufacturers' Association in its 1908 con- 
 vention disapproved of founding schools for youths 
 already employed in legitimate commerce and in- 
 dustry until those outside had been provided for, 
 justly arguing that they stood most in need of 
 assistance. To help the man who already has a 
 job and desert the poor devil who can't, through 
 lack of training, procure one, seems an over-cruel 
 application of the parable, " to him that hath 
 shall be given." Here appears the true function 
 of what we have called the preparatory trade 
 school. There is no future in his own calling for 
 which we can perfect the messenger boy, but we 
 may perhaps open up avenues to better employ- 
 ment in other lines by giving general manual, 
 mechanic, and business training which can be 
 turned to good use in any trade. Perhaps, too, 
 when continuation schools are once established, 
 it will not be so hard for young workers to gain 
 entrance to desirable occupations. Employers 
 may be willing to take on apprentices when they 
 know that the whole burden of training will not 
 
 1 " Probably child idleness is a more serious matter in the 
 United States to-day than child labor." Richard T. Ely. 
 
 179 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 fall on commerce and industry ; when they know 
 that juvenile helpers will no longer be a static, 
 unskilled element in their labor force. 
 
 In a report of the National Society for the 
 Promotion of Industrial Education, we read that 
 the industrial improvement course has assumed 
 and will probably continue to assume the form of 
 an evening school. So long as vocational self-im- 
 provement remains optional, this will undoubt- 
 edly be the case save where an exceptionally pro- 
 gressive employer cooperates with the educational 
 authorities, as in Ludlow, Fitchburg, Cincinnatti, 
 and Chicago. But should continuation courses be 
 made obligatory, time for them can be taken (as 
 it must be if the best results are to be accom- 
 plished) from the working day and such shifts 
 arranged as will not necessitate reduplication of 
 the apprentice force. Indeed, claiming this 
 educational birthright of general intelligence, 
 trade theory and practice cannot be left to un- 
 guided whim, which may barter it for a little 
 more ready money, for early independence, for 
 any will-o'-the-wisp of youthful short-sightedness 
 or parental self-seeking. Vocational training must 
 be made obligatory. 
 
XII 
 
 CHOOSING A VOCATION 
 
 In discussing the difficulty with which youths en- 
 ter desirable occupations, we have stressed chiefly 
 their lack of training for skilled work. But the 
 difficulty is also traceable to an ignorance of the 
 desirability or undesirability of various occupa- 
 tions, which leads to a short-sighted initial choice 
 and a permanent check in advancement. Ignor- 
 ant of their mental or bodily unfitness for a trade, 
 thousands of our most promising young people 
 get into uncongenial, spirit-breaking toil, or prac- 
 tically commit suicide by taking up tasks for 
 which their physique is inadequate. Lured by a 
 comparatively high beginning wage, children 
 wander into industrial cul-de-sacs^ and students 
 estimate that the largest per cent of unemploy- 
 ment is among persons who have been pushed 
 out by the younger generation from trades 
 offering neither prospect of advancement nor 
 training for other lines of activity. English poor- 
 houses are filling with men and women unfitted 
 for any but a pauper's life by their ill-starred at- 
 
 i8i 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 tempts at early self-support. The same waste of 
 human resources is apparent in our own country. 
 The Massachusetts Commission on Industrial 
 Education found twenty-five thousand children 
 between the ages of fourteen and sixteen who 
 were engaged in the lowest unskilled forms of 
 industry ; and Dr. Kingsbury's investigation in- 
 to the conditions of their employment showed 
 what a bleak industrial future they could antici- 
 pate. 
 
 Trade schools of the type suggested in the pre- 
 ceding chapter will only partially obviate the 
 dangers of mischosen occupation. For the child 
 already engaged in a trade where progress is 
 possible, they will open the door to promotion. 
 For the child caught in some mesh of toil with 
 no outlook for the future, they will open the door 
 of escape. But they cannot save children from 
 getting into the wrong job, and conserve the 
 time, ability, and potential accomplishment 
 wasted by our hit-or-miss method of choosing a 
 vocation. No amount of industrial education can 
 fit a child well for something to which he is un- 
 adapted, and, until we make sure that our young 
 men and women go into the work to which they 
 are best suited and which will give them the best 
 chance of rising in the industrial scale, elaborate 
 
 182 
 
CHOOSING A VOCATION 
 
 systems of trade education will not repay the in- 
 vestment which they represent. Trade schools 
 need a supplementary measure to utilize most 
 effectually their possibilities ; and this supple- 
 mentary measure is systematic guidance of youth 
 in selecting an occupation. The boy or girl 
 emerging from the shelter of school life into the 
 hurly-burly of business, needs to be told the facts 
 about openings which present themselves. They 
 cannot judge for themselves because trade has 
 shut itself up in factories with No Admittance 
 signs across the workroom doors. If the child 
 consults an employee as to the nature of a busi- 
 ness, he hears of single processes performed day 
 after day without variation — and, considered 
 singly, the processes of one trade are about the 
 same and about as unattractive as those of any 
 other. The child must be made to understand 
 that no employer of high-grade help wants a 
 worker who has spent the formative years of his 
 life as a messenger or errand boy, drifting from 
 job to job and forming irregular, shiftless habits 
 inimical to business efficiency. He needs to be 
 shown the wisdom of starting in a skilled trade 
 at a low wage rather than in an unskilled, blind- 
 alley trade at a temptingly high one. He should 
 also be cautioned against unsanitary occupations. 
 
 183 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 The immigrant child ought surely to be warned 
 of industrial pitfalls in the trades at which aliens 
 snatch so helplessly while struggling for a foot- 
 hold on American soil. Such systematic voca- 
 tional guidance, nation-wide in range of vision, 
 could distribute more rationally our foreign in- 
 flux, since it is timidity and ignorance of other 
 opportunities which bind immigrants to huddled 
 quarters in seacoast towns. The finer qualities 
 of our immigrant population, those spiritual and 
 intellectual traits which should brighten and 
 vary the pattern of American life, we stifle by 
 thrusting the new arrival into a treadmill of 
 drabbest American toil out of which he comes 
 shorn of most that is foreign and stimulating in 
 mind and manners. The evils introduced into 
 our country by immigration are bruited abroad 
 at the expense of the good, the racial freshness, 
 the poetry, and the peculiar talents which an 
 enlightened policy would cultivate till, under 
 more favorable environment, they blossomed like 
 rare exotics in American gardens. To guide im- 
 migrant children into occupations adapted to 
 preserve and develop their valuable racial assets 
 would, perhaps, prove the sanest way of Ameri- 
 canizing our new citizens. 
 
 The child not only lacks knowledge of the 
 
 184 
 
CHOOSING A VOCATION 
 
 different trades, but he needs to be stimulated 
 to think of his own qualifications as a worker. 
 "Know thyself," said the old philosopher, and 
 surely, in the choice of a vocation, self-knowledge 
 is the beginning of wisdom. Yet it would seem 
 that self-knowledge is a lost art of the romantic 
 age. People are interested more and more in 
 outward, objective things, forgetting that things 
 are important only for their value and that value 
 is an expression of personality. An inspiring 
 fact about charitable and corrective work is that 
 it gives us better methods of handling normal 
 individuals. Maud Miner ^ recently said of way- 
 ward girls, " All these fallen women have ambi- 
 tions, ideals, and talents just as have the rest ot 
 us. It is the task of the probation officer to get 
 hold of these, quicken them and sustain them 
 till they carry the girl out of her life of shame 
 into one of honorable activity." Just as have the 
 rest of us ! There is the kernel of significant 
 truth. Who knows what funds of usefulness are 
 yearly squandered in people who come to noth- 
 ing — good or bad — because their real abilities 
 have never been given proper outlet in activity ? 
 And who can hesitate to prophesy that the 
 
 ^ Secretary of the Probation Association and formerly pro- 
 bation officer in the New York Night Court. 
 
 i8s 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 national happiness and prosperity would be a 
 hundred fold augmented if every human being 
 could industrially find himself and do just that 
 thing he came into the world to do ? 
 
 Not only what trade the child shall follow, but 
 what further studies, if any, he shall pursue, is 
 usually decided at the end of the grammar school 
 course. Here is the crucial moment when children 
 looking aimlessly for a job can be economically 
 and permanently helped. To the oft-repeated 
 question, "What can the grammar schools do for 
 industrial education ? " we therefore answer, not 
 only, " prepare for trade instruction by basic man- 
 ual training," but " emphasize the fact that school 
 looks toward life rather than toward learning, by 
 directing graduates into a congenial vocation or 
 an institution preparing therefor." Thus should 
 we better the old educational economy, which 
 saved at the spigot and wasted at the bunghole 
 in compelling school attendance and then al- 
 lowing enormous leakage between school and 
 work. 
 
 To guide children in the choice of a career 
 necessitates a detailed, inclusive knowledge of in- 
 dustrial, commercial, professional, and agricul- 
 tural conditions, which can scarcely be expected 
 of a teacher. Here is the function of the voca- 
 
 i86 
 
CHOOSING A VOCATION 
 
 tional expert. In school activity, as in all funda- 
 mental social endeavor, a reliable body of compre- 
 hensive statistics as to our industrial situation is 
 thus seen to be imperative. To ground a system 
 of vocational education ; to draft a course of study 
 for a trade school ; to give the grammar school 
 graduate adequate counsel when he vacillates be- 
 tween idleness, further schooling, or immediate 
 work of a dozen types — to do any one of these 
 things, we must know the facts as to our business 
 world. In every community a thorough investiga- 
 tion of living and working conditions, kept up to 
 date by periodic tallying, would be a paying in- 
 vestment. To its records would go the agitator 
 for factory regulation, the student of woman and 
 child labor, the advocate of a minimum wage, the 
 unionist eager to fix a standard living wage, the 
 Consumers' League preparing a list of fair houses 
 or granting the label to manufactured goods, the 
 housing expert, and the reformer combating the 
 social evil or fighting for more generous recrea- 
 tion facilities. From such a survey, all movements 
 for social betterment would draw the facts where- 
 by to shape their programs. It would keep a steady 
 finger on the pulse of life, and experience in such 
 an investigation would be invaluable training for 
 the various forms of constructive effort, as it 
 
 1Z7 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 would give balance of mind and insight into the 
 underlying sources of social disorder. 
 
 The work of such clearing-houses of informa- 
 tion as the Boston Vocation Bureau is described 
 by Meyer Bloomfield in The Vocatiotial Guidance 
 of Youthy yet even this Boston bureau feels that 
 the surest way to bring the results of its investi- 
 gation home to those who need them is through 
 cooperation with the school organization. The 
 central bureau becomes the repository of informa- 
 tion ; the school authorities are the link which 
 draws together the child and the advisory expert. 
 
 The results of a successful system of vocational 
 guidance will be manifold. Better adjustment of 
 labor to demand, greater satisfaction, efficiency 
 and advancement on the part of the worker, les- 
 sened unemployment and labor wreckage, — all 
 begin to attest the value of existing experiments 
 to those directly touched by guidance work. But 
 the most important results come, not from special 
 advice given to individuals, but from bringing the 
 public to consider the relative desirability of di- 
 verse occupations. Unprejudiced guidance must 
 mean a partial boycott of undesirable trades, for 
 only inferior workers will seek employment where 
 conditions are dangerous or unsanitary, hours 
 long, wages low, and work tedious. Dissemination 
 
 i88 
 
CHOOSING A VOCATION 
 
 of these facts, now but vaguely apprehended, will 
 enforce, more surely than ill-supported legislation, 
 the installation of safety and sanitary devices and 
 the general improvement of labor conditions. The 
 manufacturer is made or unmade by patronage, 
 and progressive employers, now forced by com- 
 petition into countenancing labor conditions which 
 they deplore, would welcome enlightened public 
 opinion on these questions, since it would be the 
 final weapon in driving from the field unprincipled 
 competitors. Vocational guidance wisely con- 
 ducted would prove both an effective means of 
 social conservation, and a potent force in recon- 
 structing industrial standards. 
 
XIII 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 The term "vocational training" is as broad as life 
 itself, and at the conclusion of this brief volume, 
 we have barely broached the question. Trades 
 are multitudinous ; those trades only could be 
 our theme which press upon us most urgently as 
 an educational problem. But the principles 
 evolved for industrial, agricultural, and domestic 
 courses are equally applicable to commercial, 
 mercantile, technical, and professional training. 
 Even within the trades chosen for discussion, 
 there has been a further limitation in treatment. 
 We have dealt principally with the ordinary man ; 
 technical schools, whether of high school or col- 
 lege grade, aim definitely to prepare for manager- 
 ial positions. Yet these higher schools are one in 
 spirit with institutions giving elementary trade 
 instruction ; all fit for productive, self-supporting 
 life; all look toward the practical social use 
 rather than the individual acquisition of culture 
 and knowledge. The articulation of the elemen- 
 tary vocational school with a complete system of 
 
 190 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
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THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 vocational education, and the place in this plan 
 for purely academic training is shown by the ac- 
 companying tentative outline. Such a schedule is 
 but the world in abstract, a plat of that arterial 
 system through which inspiration and intelli- 
 gence circulate to every social organ. 
 
 The function of this present book, however, is 
 suggestive rather than exhaustive, and its object 
 will have been fully accomplished if, amid the 
 windings of its theme, one dominant idea rises 
 continually to view : the idea of social welfare. 
 This is the touchstone by which the trade school 
 will be tested. Not because agriculture, industry, 
 and homemaking need competent workers ; not 
 because vocational training will quicken the art- 
 istic sensibilities of our people ; not because pre- 
 sent schools do not interest our children ; not 
 because man has a right to self-support ; not be- 
 cause criminals will find in the trade school their 
 salvation ; not because women receive from it 
 marital and industrial freedom ; not because the 
 unionist sees therein an advantage for his order 
 and the socialist believes it a step nearer the 
 millennium : — but because, from the deeply 
 underlying harmony of these several interests, 
 we infer one mighty common interest for all 
 mankind. The vocational school preserves nor- 
 
 192 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 mality and efficiency ; it strikes to the bottom, 
 and has, in the broad program for social better- 
 ment, a central place. Education and legislation : 
 education the creator, legislation the conserver ; 
 education the fluidizing, legislation the crystal- 
 lizing element — these are the only sure instru- 
 ments of progress. And the real motive power 
 and vital spark lie in education. 
 
 Democratic and practical schools forplain men, 
 more than other educational propaganda, contain 
 this potent force for uplift. More than anti-tuber- 
 culosis societies, more than scientific charity and 
 correction, more than juvenile improvement clubs, 
 Boys' Scout movements, or any brave enterprise 
 pushing forward alone to the frontiers of regen- 
 eration ! For in vocational schools. Knowledge 
 comes forward saying, as in the old play, — 
 
 " Every man, I will go with thee to be thy guide, 
 In thy most need to go by thy side." 
 
 They will widen the scope of education to em- 
 brace all classes of society, to include those very 
 classes which charitable agencies strive ineffect- 
 ually, because fragmentarily, to enlighten. 
 
 The problem of vocational training is also more 
 profound than preparing men and women to work. 
 It is to educate the public mind, to embody a 
 
 193 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 working ideal that will gradually transform in- 
 dustrial practice, until labor, no longer cramping 
 and brutalizing, is a beautiful realization of the 
 noblest human possibilities ; until the old words 
 of the Benedictine Rule take on their fullest 
 meaning, and to work is verily to pray. 
 
XIV 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ON ELEMENTARY VOCA- 
 TIONAL EDUCATION 
 
 In selecting a bibliography on vocational train- 
 ing, one is hampered by the great bulk of ma- 
 terial dealing with the topic, and by the endless 
 repetition of subject-matter which this literature 
 displays. Discussion has so far been largely con- 
 fined to criticism of current educational methods, 
 arguments for the establishment of vocational 
 schools, and general statistics concerning foreign 
 systems of vocational education. The first two 
 classes of articles are as a rule vaguely theoreti- 
 cal, and the last class often fails to give a good 
 working idea, either of a foreign system as a 
 whole, or of just what is done in any particular 
 trade school. Even the detailed descriptions, 
 published in English, of foreign vocational 
 schools are usually unsatisfactory because they 
 give ideals and abstracts of curricula rather 
 than actual classroom methods and their re- 
 sults as a training for subsequent employment. 
 Reliable and complete studies of trade school 
 
 195 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 results as seen in the subsequent experiences of 
 graduates is lacking for both American and for- 
 eign institutions. 
 
 The object in compiling this bibliography has 
 been to make it at once [as brief and as represent- 
 ative as possible, and the following books, articles 
 and reports are chosen, not because they alone 
 are worthy of perusal, but because each presents 
 the subject from a different and important point 
 of view. 
 
 For a fuller account of general material on 
 American phases of the question, see the Se- 
 lected Bibliography published by the National 
 Society for the Promotion of Industrial Educa- 
 tion. 
 
 I 
 
 France 
 
 Laws Governing Vocational Training. 
 
 Cent Arts de Lutte SociaU : La Legislation de V Eftfance, Parts 
 II and III. Jacques Bonzon. (Gillaumin et Cie, Paris, 1899.) 
 Historical and Social Review of Need for Trade Education. 
 VApprentissage : Hier — A ujourd'h ui — Demain. Pierre 
 
 Brizon. (" Pages Libres," Paris, 1909.) 
 La Crise de L" Appreiitissage et La Reforme de V Enseigne- 
 ment Professionnel and VAge d^ Admission des En/ants au 
 Travail et Travail de Demi- Temps. Martin Saint-Leon, 
 (Chronique Sociale de France, Lyon, 1908.) 
 De La Prostitution des En/ants, Part III, chapter ii, Eugene 
 Prevost. (Plon, Nourrit et Cie, Paris, 1909.) 
 196 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 V Enseignement Menager. Comptesse Diesbach. (Tegui, 
 
 Paris, 1904.) 
 Description of French System of Trade Education. 
 
 U Enseignement Technique. Astier et Cuminal. (Roustan, 
 
 Paris, 1909.) 
 U Enseignement Professionnel en France. Rene Leblanc 
 
 (Comely, Paris, 1905.) 
 Les Ecoles et Les CEuvres Municipals d^ Enseignement h. Paris. 
 
 M. Lavergne, (Mouillot, Paris, 1900.) 
 
 II 
 
 Germany 
 
 Practical Efficiency of Trade Schools. 
 
 The Cause and Extent of the Recent Indttstrial Progress of 
 
 Germany^ p. 147. Earl Dean Howard (Houghton Mifflin 
 
 Co., Boston, 1907.) 
 Description of German System of Trade Education. 
 
 Handbuch des deutschen Fortbildungsschulwesens . Vols. I-VI. 
 
 Oscar Pache. (Wittenberg, 1896-1902.) 
 V Enseignement Technique. Astier et Cuminal. (Roustan, 
 
 Paris, 1909.) 
 Industrial Education in Germany. (Report of U. S. Dept. 
 
 of Commerce and Labor. Vol. xxxiii, p. 147.) 
 Industrial Schools in Germany. (Report of Mass. Com- 
 mission on Industrial Education, p. 258, 1906.) 
 Trade Schools in Certain Localities. 
 
 The Prussian System of Vocational Schools. (Report of U. S. 
 
 Bureau of Education, 1910, chap, vii.) 
 The Technical Continuation Schools of Munich. Paul Hanus. 
 
 {School Review, vol, 13, p. 678.) 
 Ubersicht iiber das Fortbildungsschulwesen und die gewerbli- 
 
 chen Unterrichtsanstalten der Stadt Berlin. (Report of the 
 
 Berliner Schulrat for 1909-10.) 
 197 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 III 
 
 Switzerland 
 
 Reviews of Swiss S)'stem of Trade Education. 
 
 V Enseignement Technique. Astier et Cuminal. (Roustan, 
 Paris, 1909.) 
 
 Industrial Schools of Switzerland. (Report of Mass. Com- 
 mission on Industrial Education, p. 215, 1906.) 
 
 IV 
 
 England 
 
 Need for Trade Education. 
 
 Majority and Minority Reports, Royal Commission on the 
 Poor-Laws and.the Relief of Distress. (Wyman & Son, Lon- 
 don, 1909.) 
 
 The Present Industrial Importance of Technical Education. 
 Sir Phillip Magnus. {Engineering Magazine, vol. 24, p. 169.) 
 
 Fabianism and the Empire. George Bernard Shaw. (Rich- 
 ards, London, 1900.) 
 
 The Nation, the Apprentice, and the Polytechnic. S. G. Raw- 
 son. {Contemporary Review, vol. 80, p. 584.) 
 Description of English Experiments in Trade Education. 
 
 Continuation Schools in England and Elsewhere : Their Place 
 in the Educational System of an Industrial and Commer- 
 cial State. Michael Sadler. (Manchester University Press, 
 1907.) 
 
 Technical Education in Evening Schools. Clarence H. 
 Creasey. (Sonnenschein, London, 1905.) 
 
 Industrial Efficiency. Arthur Shadwell. (Longmans, Green & 
 Co., New York, 1906.) 
 Discussion of Type of School needed in Great Britain. 
 
 Foundations of Trade and Industry. Fabian Ware. (Ap- 
 pleton, New York, 1901.) 
 
 198 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Report^ Consultative Committee on Attendance, Compulsory 
 or Otherwise, at Continuation Schools. (Wyman & Son, 
 London, 1909.) 
 
 United States 
 
 Apprenticeship in the United States. 
 
 The Apprenticeship System and Its Relation to Industrial 
 
 Education. Carroll D. Wright. (U. S. Bureau of Ed., 
 
 1908, Bulletin 6.) 
 The Apprenticeship System. Charles Pidgin. (Mass. Bureau 
 
 of Statistics of Labor, 1906.) 
 Education of Workers in the Shoe Industry. Arthur Dean. 
 
 (Nat. Soc. for Pro. of Ind. Ed., Bulletin 8.) 
 Education for Efficiency in Railroad Service. J. Shirley 
 
 Eaton. (U. S. Bureau of Ed., 1909, Bulletin 10.) 
 Industrial Education. Charles Thurber. {^School Review^ 
 
 vol. 15, p. 375.) 
 Industrial Education of Working Girls. Charles Pidgin 
 
 (Mass. Bureau of Statistics of Labor, 1905, Part i. 
 How Girls Learn the Millinery Trade. Alice Barrows. ( The 
 
 Survey^ April 18, 1910.) 
 The Training of Millinery Workers. Alice Barrows. (Pro- 
 ceedings of the Academy of Political Science, vol. i, no. i. 
 Conditions of Entrance to the Principal Trades. (U. S. 
 
 Bureau of Labor, 1906, Bulletin 67.) 
 What is Ahead for the Untrai?ied Child in Industry. Suzan 
 
 Myra Kingsbury. {Charities and the Commons, Oct. 5, 
 
 1907.) 
 Decay of Apprenticeship and Corporation Schools. Ralph 
 
 Albertson. {Charities and the Commons, Oct. 5, 1907.) 
 Apprenticeship and Corporation Schools. (Nat. Soc. for Pra 
 
 of Ind. Ed., Bulletin 13.) 
 
 199 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 Trade Schools in the United States. 
 
 A Descriptive List of Trade and Industrial Schools in the 
 United States. Charles R. Richards. (Nat. See. for Pro. 
 of Ind. Ed., Bulletin ii.) 
 Legislation upon Industrial Education in the United States. 
 (Nat. Soc. for Pro. of Ind. Ed., Bulletin 12.) 
 Results of Trade Schooling as a Preparation for Work. 
 
 See Report of Russell Sage Foundation Committee on 
 Women's Work. About to be published. 
 Attitude of Trade Unions toward Industrial Education. 
 
 Industrial Education. (Bulletin of American Federation of 
 Labor, Washington, 1910.) 
 Industrial and Agricultural Education for the Negro. 
 
 Up from Slavery. Booker T. Washington. (Doubleday, 
 
 Page & Co., New York, 1903.) 
 The Education of the Negro. Booker T. Washington, 
 (Lyon, Chicago, 1904) 
 Elementary Agricultural Education in the United States. 
 
 Agricultural Education, includittg Nature Study and School 
 Gardens. James Ralph Jewell. (U. S. Bureau of Ed., 
 
 1907, Bulletin 2.) 
 
 On the Training of Persotis to Teach Agriculture in Public 
 Schools. Liberty Hyde Bailey. (U. S. Bureau of Ed., 
 
 1908, Bulletin i.) 
 
 Agricultural Education. (Report of U. S. Bureau of Ed., 
 
 1910, chap. IV.) 
 The American System of Agricultural Education. A. C. True 
 
 and Dick J. Crosby. (U. S. Dept. of Agriculture, Office of 
 
 Experiment Stations, Circular 106.) 
 Cyclopedia of American Agriculture. L. H. Bailey. (Mac- 
 
 millan Co., New York.) 
 See also bibliography in Professor Bailey's bulletin named 
 
 above. 
 The Type of Trade School needed in the United States. 
 
 Education for the Trades ; From the Standpoint of the Manu- 
 
 200 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 facturer, Milton P. Higgins. (Proceedings of Nat. Ed. 
 
 Assoc, 1903, p. 597.) 
 Industrial Education for Women. Mrs. Raymond Robbins. 
 
 (Proceedings of Nat. Soc. for Pro. of Ind. Ed., Bulletin 
 10.) 
 The True Ideal of a Public School System that Aims to Bene- 
 fit All. Discussion by Jane Addams. (Proceedings of Nat. 
 
 Soc. for Pro. of Ind. Ed., Bulletin 6, Part 11.) 
 Democracy and Social Ethics, chapter vi. Jane Addams. 
 
 (Macmillan Co., New York, 1905.) 
 What can the Grade School do for Industrial Education ? 
 
 Anna Garlan Spencer. (Proceedings of Nat. Soc. for Pro. 
 
 of Ind. Ed., Bulletin 10.) 
 Evening Schools; Their Purpose and Limitations. John 
 
 Shearer. (Proceedings of Nat. Soc. for Pro. of Ind. Ed., 
 
 Bulletin 10.) 
 The Intermediate Industrial School. Charles R. Allen and 
 
 William H. Elson. (Proceedings of Nat. Soc. for Pro. of 
 
 Ind. Ed., Bulletin 10.) 
 Vocational Guidance. 
 
 The Vocational Guidance of Youth. Meyer Bloomfield. 
 
 (Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston, 191 1.) 
 Choosing a Vocation. Frank Parsons. (Houghton Mifflin Co., 
 
 Boston, 1909.) 
 The Labor Exchange in Relation to Boy and Girl Labor. 
 
 Frederick Keeling. (P. S. King & Son, London.) 
 Report, Apprenticeship and Skilled Employment Association. 
 
 (Denison House, London, 1909.) 
 Pamphlets descriptive of opportunities for boys and girls in 
 agriculture, commerce, industry and the professions have 
 been published by — 
 Boston Vocation Bureau ; 
 
 Students' Aid Committee of Brooklyn High School, Teach- 
 ers' Association ; 
 Poughkeepsie Board of Education ; 
 
 201 
 
THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOL 
 
 English Apprenticeship and Skilled Employment Commit- 
 tees ; 
 Albert Otto Paul and C. Bange of Leipzig; 
 The Woman's Municipal League and the Woman's Educa- 
 tional and Industrial Union of Boston, etc. 
 General Discussion of Vocational Training and Allied Topics. 
 
 The Place of Industries in Elementary Education. Kather- 
 ine Dopp. (University of Chicago Press, 1906.) 
 
 The Movement for Industrial Education. (Collection of arti' 
 cles in Charities and the Commons for Oct. 5, 1907.) 
 
 Educational Aims and Educational Values and Beginnings 
 in Industrial Education, Paul Hanus. (Houghton Mifflin 
 Co., Boston, 1908.) 
 
 The Worker and the State. Arthur Dean. (Century Co., 
 New York, 1910.) 
 
 The Problem of Vocational Education. David Snedden. 
 (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 191 1.) 
 
 Education for Efficiency. E. Davenport. (Heath & Co., 
 Boston, 1909.) 
 
 Education for Efficiency. Charles W. Eliot. (Houghton 
 Mifflin Co., Boston, 1909.) 
 
 The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. Jane Addams. 
 (Macmillan Co., New York, 1910.) 
 
 Unemployment. W. H. Beveridge. (Longmans, Green & 
 Co., New York, 1909.) 
 
 Itidustrial Democracy. Sidney and Beatrice Webb. (Long- 
 mans Green & Co., New York, 1897.) 
 
 The Town Child. Reginald Bray. (T. Fisher Unwin, Lon- 
 don, 1909.) 
 
 Education for Citizenship. George Kerschensteiner. (Rand, 
 McNally & Co., Chicago, 191 1.) 
 
OUTLINE 
 
 I. FOREWORD 
 
 1. Small number of children in high school ... i 
 
 2. Meaning to nation i 
 
 3. Combating ignorance the true constructive phil- 
 
 anthropy 2 
 
 4. Object of present discussion 4 
 
 II. THE HAND OF IRON 
 
 1. The true pedagogue essentially a man of the world 6 
 
 2. This is an age of highly specialized industry . . 6 
 
 3. Decay of apprenticeship 10 
 
 4. Effect on production of the subservience of the 
 
 man and his mind to the machine 13 
 
 5. Scarcity of skilled workers 20 
 
 6. Unemployment and vagrancy 21 
 
 7. Overcrowding in non-industrial lines 22 
 
 III. THE PUBLIC SCHOOL 
 
 1. Origin of present system of popular education . 24 
 
 2. Embodies at once a democratic view of men and 
 
 an undemocratic view of society 26 
 
 3. The high school course from the standpoint of 
 
 the manual worker 27 
 
 4. Small enrollment explained 27 
 
 5. High schools direct graduates into professions 
 
 and commerce 27 
 
 203 
 
OUTLINE 
 
 6. Strictly developmental function of so-called man- 
 
 ual-training courses 30 
 
 7. Reasons for dropping out during high school 
 
 course 32 
 
 8. Devitalized teaching 35 
 
 9. " The course of study for its own sake "... 37 
 
 IV. A SCHOOL FOR THE PLAIN MAN 
 
 1. Industry needs a scientific spirit in every worker 38 
 
 2. Salutary effect on academic education of alliance 
 
 with trade training 39 
 
 3. Reasons for expecting larger school enrollment 
 
 when vocational schools are established . . 42 
 
 4. Bearing of trade education on international com- 
 
 petition 46 
 
 5. Vocational training a ground plank in the so- 
 
 cial betterment program 48 
 
 6. Child labor and the trade school 51 
 
 7. Social advantages of trade training and its influ- 
 
 ence on unimaginative toil 52 
 
 V. TRADE EDUCATION AND THE WOMAN 
 
 1. The economic dependence of woman .... 57 
 
 2. An unorganized strike against the unprogressive 
 
 and injurious labor conditions in the home- 
 making trade 61 
 
 3. Modifications of the family institution necessary 
 
 to give women human freedom 61 
 
 4. How to persuade women that housekeeping is 
 
 interesting 62 
 
 5. Training for child rearing 63 
 
 204 
 
OUTLINE 
 
 6. Business and industrial training for women . . 66 
 
 7. Problem of late marriages 70 
 
 8. Vocational training as a partial remedy for pros- 
 
 titution 71 
 
 VI. IN THE COUNTRY 
 
 1. Urban character of our civilization 74 
 
 2. Neglect of rural resources ; human, social, and 
 
 economic 75 
 
 3. Beginnings of agricultural education for upper 
 
 classes ^^ 
 
 4. Comparative neglect of plain farmer . . . , 77 
 
 5. Soil as a natural resource 78 
 
 6. Necessity of training for successful farming. . 78 
 
 7. Form agricultural education should take in rural 
 
 grammar and high schools 80 
 
 8. What is already being done at home and abroad 84 
 
 9. Human rather than economic aspect of problem 89 
 
 VII. TRADE EDUCATION AND ORGANIZED 
 
 LABOR 
 
 1. Views of American Federation of Labor on in- 
 
 dustrial education 91 
 
 2. Attitude of trade unions toward apprenticeship. 92 
 
 3. Labor problems which arise in grounding trade 
 
 schools 94 
 
 4. Effect on unionism of public trade education ; 
 
 the sale of school-made goods, rise in wages, 
 security from immigrant competition, greater 
 effectiveness in trade-union action .... 97 
 
 205 
 
OUTLINE 
 
 VIII. TRADE EDUCATION AND SOCIALISM 
 
 1. What socialism is and is not 102 
 
 2. Point at which trade education touches socialism 104 
 
 3. Increasingly socialistic form of society . . . 104 
 
 4. Greater intelligence and civic spirit which this 
 
 demands from voters 105 
 
 5. Intelligence needed not only to realize the social- 
 
 istic ideal without injustice, but to conduct 
 
 efficiently a socialistic state 106 
 
 IX. FOREIGN TRADE SCHOOLS 
 
 1. Advantages of study of foreign vocational 
 
 schools 109 
 
 2. Three types of trade schools no 
 
 3. Origin of trade schools in France in 
 
 4. Characteristics of French course of study . . 113 
 
 5. Detailed description of two Parisian trade 
 
 schools 114 
 
 6. Advantages and disadvantages of this system as 
 
 seen in actual results 123 
 
 7. Two solutions offered 126 
 
 8. German ideal in industrial education .... 126 
 
 9. Berlin law governing trade education .... 129 
 
 10. A typical continuation school for apprentices . 130 
 
 11. Two higher trade schools for experienced work- 
 
 ers 133 
 
 12. The practice shops 136 
 
 13. Vocational training for girls 136 
 
 14. Contrast between the Munich and the Berlin 
 
 ideals for industrial education 137 
 
 206 
 
OUTLINE 
 
 15. Superiority of Munich plan 138 
 
 16. The Pranck continuation school 139 
 
 17. Higher schools for locksmiths 141 
 
 18. Estimate of Munich system 142 
 
 19. The Swiss system as a model of harmonious co- 
 
 operation between labor, capital, legislative 
 bodies, and educational authorities .... 143 
 
 X. AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS 
 
 X. General outline of trade schools in the United 
 
 States 149 
 
 2. Description and criticism of work in preparatory 
 
 trade schools 150 
 
 3. In trade schools designed to supplant appren- 
 
 ticeship 154 
 
 4. In technical high schools 157 
 
 5. In evening schools and part time schools (public 
 
 and private) 158 
 
 6. General summary of value of these experiments 164 
 
 XI. THE TYPE OF TRADE SCHOOL NEEDED 
 IN THE UNITED STATES 
 
 1. An ideal for American^education 167 
 
 2. Mistakes made in grounding trade schools . . 168 
 
 3. Investigation which should precede grounding 
 
 such schools 169 
 
 4. Tentative statement of type needed .... 171 
 
 5. When trade instruction should begin .... 172 
 
 6. Balance between academic and trade instruction 173 
 
 7. Teachers for trade schools 1 76 
 
 8. True function of preparatory trade schools . . 178 
 
 9. Shall vocational training be obligatory? , . . iSo 
 
 207 
 
OUTLINE 
 
 XII. CHOOSING A VOCATION 
 
 1. Human and industrial loss from present chaotic 
 
 methods of choosing a vocation i8i 
 
 2. Reasons for unwise choice 182 
 
 3. Inadequacy of mere vocational education . . . 182 
 
 4. The need for vocational guidance 182 
 
 5. Function of the vocational expert 186 
 
 6. Wider outcome of vocational guidance . . . 188 
 
 XIII. CONCLUSION 
 
 1. Limitations inevitable in treating subject . . . 190 
 
 2. Tentative plan for a complete system of voca- 
 
 tional training 191 
 
 3. Social welfare the real argument for the trade 
 
 school 192 
 
 4. The trade school's contribution to social progress 
 
 through the individual 193 
 
 5. Reaction on industrial methods 194 
 
 XIV. BIBLIOGRAPHY ON ELEMENTARY VOCA- 
 TIONAL EDUCATION 
 
 1. Scope of the bibliography 195 
 
 2. France 196 
 
 3. Germany 197 
 
 4. Switzerland 198 
 
 5. England 198 
 
 6. United States 199 
 
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