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 Reprw' id from Education, November , 1898. 
 
 OUR EDUCATIONAL EXHIBIT AT 1 HE INTERNA¬ 
 TIONAL EXPOSITION IN PARIS IN iqoo. * 
 
 W. T. HARRIS, LL.D..U. S. COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION, WASHINGTON, D. C- 
 
 N view of the approaching World’s Fair soon to be held in 
 
 Paris, commencing April 15, 1900, and closing November 
 15, of the same year, I have ventured to bring before the National 
 
 Educational Association the suggestion of the appointment of a 
 
 general committee whose duty it should be to promote in all suit¬ 
 
 able ways the preparation of an exhibit of the educational condi¬ 
 
 tion and progress within the United States. Such a committee 
 ought to be a large one and formed in such a manner as to repre¬ 
 sent all educational interests, and divide easily into sub-commit¬ 
 tees for special work. Such a committee for example should be 
 composed of ten state superintendents, ten city superintendents, 
 ten presidents of colleges or universities, ten representatives of 
 private or denominational schools, five librarians of public libra¬ 
 ries and five representatives of states and other institutions for 
 the education of special classes including asylums for orphans, 
 deaf and dumb, blind, state reform schools and the like. 
 
 This would make up a committee of fifty or more persons who 
 should be appointed by the Board of Directors of the Association 
 and be called together in November next to organize and begin 
 their work. 
 
 This committee would be of great service to the commissioners 
 or other officers appointed by the president to take charge of the 
 exhibit of the United States. If would stimulate action in all 
 parts of the country, and assist all who seek light as to the best 
 modes of showing educational material. 
 
 One of the most important functions of the committee would 
 be to appoint a commission to report on the French and other 
 educational exhibits as found in place at Paris and to study their 
 relation to the social and political ideals fostered by the several 
 states that prepared these exhibits. 
 
 Perhaps the most noteworthy movement in the history of the 
 past twenty-five years is the rise of German productive industry 
 
 * Address delivered before the National Educational Association meeting, at Wash¬ 
 ington, D. C., July 8, 1808. 
 
2 
 
 under the direct influence of the German imperial government. 
 It would seem that the annual wealth production of that nation 
 has increased within that period of a quarter of a century 
 extending from the epoch of the Franco-Prussian War by some¬ 
 thing near forty per cent, and that it will soon be fifty per cent, 
 greater than it was before the victory at Sedan. Is the French 
 nation fully aware of this tremendous movement to enhance Ger¬ 
 man power, not directly by military preparation but by produc¬ 
 tive industry ? If so what are its methods of national defence ? 
 And what are the English and the Russians and the Southern 
 European powers doing in the meanwhile ? Germany is the lead¬ 
 ing country since the time of Frederick the Great in using the 
 school as a great instrument of political progress. Prussia was 
 before all nations in directing its national housekeeping by the 
 systematic results of intelligence. Under the influence of Prus¬ 
 sian statesmen it is found, for instance, that the German people 
 do not consume as much sugar as England and France and yet 
 having a northern climate it should have the benefit of the more 
 carbon which sugar furnishes. Looking further it notes the world 
 is depending on the inhabitants of tropical and sub-tropical 
 countries for the supply of this useful article. Why should not a 
 method be found by which the people of Saxony and Prussia and 
 Bavaria, can produce their own sugar ? 
 
 The Commission not only asks this question but it sets a series 
 of experiments in operation under the charge of agricultural 
 chemists and scientific farmers. The most available plant for the 
 purpose seems to be the best, and bounties are offered by the 
 government to encourage beet-raising and sugar-manufacture, 
 adding a round sum to the price of all that is exported. To the 
 astonishment of the world in a few years the beet root sugar of 
 the world has come to exceed the cane sugar in the ratio of nine 
 to seven. There were 4,500,000 tons of beet-root sugar to 3,500,- 
 000 tons of cane sugar. 
 
 German political economy knows that the people that produces 
 the raw material is not the richest people. To be the richest 
 people it must become a great manufacturing people and also a 
 great commercial people. What are the higher commercial 
 schools of Germany teaching their pupils ; what are the schools 
 of chemistry teaching the youth that are to direct German manu¬ 
 factures ? It is not at all likely that we know by direct inspec- 
 
 
3 
 
 tion. We can, however, see the importance of those schools by 
 their results. Could not a well-appointed commission learn much 
 by studying the Paris Exposition in 1900 ? It would scarcely gain 
 entrance into the government schools where new processes are 
 developing, but it could learn by outside inquiry separate items 
 which can be pieced together and made very suggestive. 
 
 The secret methods used in industrial processes in Germany, 
 France or England, can be learned by other nations and in fact 
 soon become well-known devices. The conceited nations who are 
 not anxious to adopt new inventions nor to educate their people 
 in directive power soon find themselves lagging behind in power 
 of national defence. There never was an educative lesson taken 
 more to heart than that of Koniggrats except the similar and 
 greater one of Sedan. 
 
 The great advantage of studying education at an international 
 exposition is found chiefly in its bringing together the educational 
 side by side with the industrial exhibit. 
 
 The most advanced civilization of our day has entered what 
 may be designated as a third epoch of industrial history. The 
 first epoch is one wherein little or no division of labor exists, and 
 wherein most of the combination is in the interest of the protec¬ 
 tion of life and means of subsistence from the foes of the state. 
 In the imperfect political forms existing, the citizen cannot devote 
 his best energies to productive industry — the best talent must be 
 devoted to the state in its military aspect, and the consequence 
 is that slaves and women are compelled to attend to the indus¬ 
 tries and to provide food, clothing and shelter for the necessities 
 of life. Under such circumstances division of labor and combina¬ 
 tion is not possible |to its full extent. When the state becomes 
 settled and its limits have extended so as to include under one 
 government the many smaller tribes and principalities that were 
 never able to live in peace when independent, but were forever 
 entering as factors into a process of mutual hostility —then set¬ 
 tled peace comes, and division of labor is possible where produc¬ 
 tive industry becomes recognized as a function of free men. The 
 second epoch of industry is this one of division of labor as the 
 supreme principle. “Divide and conquer” is its motto. It limits 
 the training of the laborer to a single simple function or activity 
 so as to secure thereby the greatest possible skill and rapidity of 
 production. Such concentration of individual energy upon the 
 
4 
 
 parts of a process is possible only where combination can be easily 
 effected between the different kinds of workmen and thus the 
 finished product turned out by the association working as a single 
 individual. This second phase of industry is not accompanied 
 with the corresponding enlightenment of the individual laborer. 
 It aims at infinite specialization; at concentrating the entire 
 energy of the laborer upon the simple movement of the body, and 
 thus reduces the human being to a machine and tends to narrow 
 his intellect correspondingly. 
 
 But out of the second class of industry, by a sort of dialectic 
 necessity, proceeds the third. The ultimate tendency of the divi¬ 
 sion of labor is to sub-divide each process for the sake of acquir¬ 
 ing skill, until a maximum of simplicity is reached. It is here 
 that the aid of machinery comes in. The simpler the movement 
 the easier it is to find a mechanical process that can be substituted 
 for that of*the human hand. When a number of simple mechan¬ 
 ical processes are discovered, the directing mind of labor begins 
 to invent combinations of machinery, and with this enters the 
 third epoch of industry. Machinery continually grows more com¬ 
 plex in this epoch, and tends continually to invade the province 
 of the mere hand-laborer, and to render [him useless by providing 
 cheaper and more certain means of accomplishing his work. 
 
 To the narrow, simple mind of the mere hand-laborer, the 
 avatar of machinery appears as a direful portent,— all-destructive 
 of his meansfof subsistence #nd of his very raison d'etre. But the 
 Divine Providence uses machinery as the instrument of individ¬ 
 ual freedom. The appliance is two-fold : — 
 
 1. The first effect of machinery is to increase very largely the 
 productivity of the individual, and to cheapen the products of 
 industry. Thus, when things are re-adjusted, the former hand- 
 laborer finds himself producing more, and able to purchase his 
 private supply with less money. The social whole gets better 
 fed, sheltered and clothed, with less labor than formerly, and has 
 therefore surplus time to produce ornament and to educate itself. 
 
 2. The second effect of machinery is to elevate the laborer by 
 demanding of him a higher quality of labor. Mere hand-labor 
 required the minimum of brain effort. But when man is set to 
 directing machinery, he becomes less a hand-laborer and more a 
 brain-laborer. He must understand the combination of move¬ 
 ments in his machine, and must exercise watchfulness and fore- 
 
5 
 
 The epoch of machinery continually tends toward the 
 production of more and more complex machines, combining many 
 formerly separate trades in one machine, and as a consequence, 
 requiring of the director of the machine greater power of combi¬ 
 nation. Each laborer now comes to stand where the overseer or 
 supervisor stood before. The tendency of machinery is therefore 
 to remove the laborer as far as possible from mere hand-work, and 
 to demand of him alertness of mind, and versatility — exactly 
 opposite traits of mind from those produced by mere division of 
 labor. Mere brute force being in abeyance, it is noticeable that 
 woman becomes more equal to man in the third epoch of industry, 
 and a sharer with him in all forms of labor. 
 
 Whereas the principle of mere division of labor tended toward 
 the complete reduction of him to a hand or foot — a brute force 
 — and demanded of him the minimum of brains, and therefore 
 did not stimulate or encourage school education, the new princi¬ 
 ple of labor-saving machinery makes a direct demand for directive 
 intellect, and therefore encourages education as a means to secure 
 it. The type of this‘highest phase of human industry may be 
 studied in the Springfield arsenal, in the Waltham watch manu¬ 
 factory, in the latest machines for printing newspapers, manufac¬ 
 turing pins, weaving ribbons and carpets, etc. This form of 
 industry requires general intelligence in the workman as an in¬ 
 dispensable basis, and the school education which is thus rendered 
 necessary re-acts again upon the industry, making new and subtler 
 combinations of machinery, and continually emancipating the 
 laborer from drudgery. 
 
 If, in the state of barbarism, only one in a thousand can be 
 spared for the work of ornament, in the stage of the division of 
 labor at least one in a hundred can be reserved for the production 
 of the beautiful, and in the epoch of machinery the number 
 devoted to art and culture increases one in ten, and, prospectively, 
 beyond that. 
 
 From these considerations it is obvious how pertinent will be 
 the studies of our teachers upon the products of machinery in the 
 world exposition as directly related to the progress of school edu¬ 
 cation. 
 
 Wherever there is evidence of versatility of skill in the indi¬ 
 vidual workman, or evidence of high directive power, there is 
 evidence of school education or its equivalent. 
 
6 
 
 This correlation of productive industry with education hasb^^( 
 recognized in World’s Fairs. In the Paris Exposition of 1855, 
 therewas a sub-division devoted to primary education, and again 
 in that of London of 1862, the class “education” appeared in the 
 schedule. The primary schools of France made a show in the 
 exhibition at Paris in 1867. At Vienna, in 1873, we all became 
 interested in the educational department, and prepared to do a 
 much greater work in our own International Fair, the then 
 approaching centennial anniversary of the birth of our nation. 
 
 In the Paris Exposition of 1889, education in France received a 
 wonderful illumination. Its thoroughness and its penetration to 
 all classes of society was demonstrated. The fact that the United 
 States had only a small rudimentary exhibit there was a source of 
 regret then and since, not only on the part of Americans, but 
 also on the part of France and other nations, as was shown by 
 their oft-repeated comments. In the Columbian Exposition, so 
 fresh in our memory, education occupied a much larger space 
 than in any of the Fairs that had preceded it, and the grand 
 impression it made is still fresh in our minds. 
 
 The French, it is well known, are eminent for their ability to 
 make an exhibit tell its own story. As JEsop taught the animals 
 to speak like rational beings, so the French have taught the art of 
 arranging tilings in such a way as make them talk. Hence it has 
 happened that more useful hints are to’be derived from a French 
 educational exhibit than from any other as regards the illustration 
 by means of object lessons. 
 
 The American method of instruction has not been that of object 
 lessons. It has leaned rather to the side known as the text-book 
 method. But educational methods are gradually undergoing 
 revolution all over the country so far as instruction is concerned, 
 so as to adopt the “ method of investigation ” in place of the old 
 method, which it speaks contemptuously of as the “ cramming 
 text-books method.” The new method is all-worthy of adoption ; 
 but the old is, perhaps, not sufficiently valued. Hence, we have 
 extremes and unnecessary one-sidedness in the newest devotees 
 of the method of investigation. The tendency is, of course, to 
 neglect the printed page and the critical comparison of authori¬ 
 ties, and to confine teaching too much to individual experiment 
 and original investigation. It must never be forgotten that the 
 school has its chief work in initiating the pupil into the accumu- 
 
7 
 
 BIRa wisdom of the race as a preliminary to his original additions 
 to the same. Unless he knows what has been thought, observed, 
 and done, he runs the risk of travelling round in a narrow circle 
 of his own, and wasting his life in repeating discoveries long since 
 made. Hence in early life, there predominates the assimilating 
 stage of education in maturer life, the stage of original acquisi¬ 
 tion . 
 
 And yet, even in this characterization of the difference between 
 the school and practical life, we are apt to underrate the assimi¬ 
 lative stage. For inasmuch as all human life is vicarious and all 
 mankind are made by means of spoken and printed language to 
 live for each individual — so that each individual is able through 
 language to participate spiritually in the experience of the race 
 without being obliged to suffer the terrible throes — the agony 
 and sweat of blood — that that experience has cost in the aggre¬ 
 gate — it follows that the greater part of life is after all the par¬ 
 ticipation in the life of the race and its assimilation rather than 
 exclusively original. The race transcends the individual almost 
 in an infinite potency. What are the senses of one scientific man 
 to the aggregate senses of all scientific men? What is the think¬ 
 ing of one philosopher to the thinking of all philosophers ? The 
 physical labor of one man is insignificant compared with that of 
 his community; still less potent is the unaided might of the indi¬ 
 vidual thinker,— experimenter or literary man. Genius is the 
 ascent of the individual into the vision and will-power of the race 
 — so that he is guided by the universality of mankind, and is fit 
 guide for others. Without this participation in the common mind 
 and experience of the race, the individual cannot achieve anything 
 except erratic and negative endeavors. He conspires against 
 humanity. He mistakes idiosyncrasy for originality, and his life 
 is a profitless attempt to dispense with sunlight and to see the 
 world by the shine of his own eyes. The outcome of such seeing 
 is hallucination and the specter-world. 
 
 For these reasons we must take care not to undervalue the old 
 pedagogic method of critical sifting of the text-book lessons as an 
 initiation of the pupil into the method of availing himself of the 
 experience of mankind. Its compass did not include ail, but, if a 
 choice must be made, it included what should be first chosen. 
 
 The study of a nation’s text-books is for these reasons of im¬ 
 portance and every educational exhibit ought to have such books 
 fully represented. 
 
8 
 
 It has been felt from the beginning that it would be impossii^ 
 to show up the products of education as the products of the farm 
 and work-shop are presented. Education produces cultured 
 human beings, and these cannot be placed on exhibition like 
 grain or cloth. Neither can the methods of education be shown 
 to advantage, except in the school-room. Only the physical 
 appliances can be well shown. These are the buildings, furni¬ 
 ture, apparatus and books. These appliances do not have so 
 direct a relation to their product as the plow and the reaper do 
 to the grain or the spinning-jenny and the loom do to the cloth. 
 But as buildings and furniture have a very serious influence for 
 weal or woe on the health of children, these, at least, are of value 
 as items of exhibit. 
 
 In the first attempts to exhibit the results of education in a 
 World’s Fair, the teacher naturally resorted to the use of exami¬ 
 nation papers and the work of classes and grades on prepared 
 questions was bound into volumes, but without exciting that 
 degree of interest and inquiry that had been expected. It required 
 too much time to examine them. 
 
 It is almost incompatible with the idea of an Exposition, to 
 present its material in the form of books, and to require a minute 
 and careful examination in order to form a comparative estimate 
 of its value. It is true that a special commission sent to report 
 on education, might, in the course of the summer, go through, 
 with some degree of attention, the thousands of volumes of pupils’ 
 work presented at such an Exposition, and report the relative 
 merits. The most profitable investigation would still remain to 
 the commission ; it should proceed to visit the localities that sent 
 the best work, and study the methods of instruction there prac¬ 
 ticed. For it is not the knowledge of the fact that this or that 
 place excels in its work, which is of value, but the knowledge of 
 the method of its accomplishment. 
 
 It has happened, therefore, that the exhibit of education has 
 drifted more and more towards what can be presented in a graphic 
 form. 
 
 Instruction in penmanship, drawing and map-making can be 
 best shown. 
 
 The photograph has come more and more into requisition. It 
 may show the school architecture at a glance and also the per- 
 sonelle of teachers and pupils. Photographs of interiors may 
 
show the furniture and apparatus. An exhibition of photographs 
 showing every school building in the State with its pupils and 
 teachers in front of the building would, be the most unique attrac¬ 
 tion ever presented at an International Exposition. For it would 
 show the countenance, stature, costume of pupils and teachers, 
 the degree of importance which the community placed upon the 
 school by its costliness and its improvements. 
 
 After the photograph comes the large chart showing items of 
 comparative population, school attendance, number of teachers, 
 length of annual session, finances as regards state aid and local 
 taxes. 
 
 We all remember the remarkable series of charts showing the 
 statistics of Harvard Gollege and its history, at the Columbian 
 Exposition. They are reproduced in General Eaton’s Report of 
 that Exposition printed by the Bureau of Education in the Annual 
 Report for 1892-’93. What a valuable exhibit of higher educa¬ 
 tion could be made with similar charts of each college and uni¬ 
 versity in the United States. 
 
 When we consider the object of school education in the school 
 we are not surprised at the amount of room given to new and 
 often slight departures from the current traditions of education. 
 A new system of map drawing, or a new object lesson will receive 
 more attention than a large display of solid work in the regular 
 lines. 
 
 And yet this is not so strange when we compare this with the 
 history of school methods. For a fact that strikes us as a great 
 paradox when we look over the history of education is that nearly 
 all of the reforms in pedagogy have come from radical, negative 
 men — men who were idiosyncratic, and who departed from the 
 beaten paths of society to such a degree as to amount to a deform¬ 
 ity. Such were Pestalozzi, Basedow, Jacotot, and a host of 
 reformers that emanated from the school of Rousseau. Although 
 the work of the teacher would seem to be that of initiating the 
 pupil into the conventionalities of civilized life, the school of 
 Rousseau theoretically taught that the end of education is to restore 
 the child to nature. The grain of truth in this spirit of protest 
 against the forms and prescriptions of society lies in this . Edu¬ 
 cation is to make man conscious of the necessity of the conven¬ 
 tionalities and usages which he is to wear about him — the clothes 
 as it were of his inner spiritual self — through life/ And all 
 
consciousness begins with negation. Analysis is a process of 
 tearing to pieces, and the fabric of society is thus torn to shreds 
 as preliminary to seeing its necessity by synthesis. 
 
 Hence education, more than any other art, lives by new depar¬ 
 tures. Its growth resembles a vegetable organism rather than an 
 animal organism. It grows by the sprouting out of new life 
 upon the old, and the old becomes in this way the soil and sup¬ 
 port of the new. Each new branch or twig or leaf is a new indi¬ 
 vidual, rooting in the old as its soil. The animal’s limbs are not 
 separate individuals, but in each one he is at home and at one 
 with himself. The animal is one organism in all his members, 
 and has the psychological faculty of feeling, while the plant is a 
 bundle of individualities, and cannot feel, but only live. 
 
 Education develops in the child a new thought or trains him to 
 do a new act. Then by endless repetition it reduces the new 
 activity to habit. Repetition is essentially deadening—the reduc¬ 
 tion to habit is the reduction from a stage of conscious spontaneity 
 to a state of unconscious, involuntary activity. And yet all 
 spiritual life depends upon this conversion of spontaneity into 
 use and want. But the process of converting a free activity, a 
 new thought, into an unconscious habit is, after all, the process of 
 freeing the will and the intellect from its concentration on a lower 
 activity, in order that it may energize anew upon a larger syn¬ 
 thesis. Without habit it can make no progress. 
 
 O’er its dead self it steps onward and upward to higher things, 
 says a poet. 
 
 But the work of the teacher is in perpetual danger from this 
 source. It treads always upon the brink of the abyss of dull 
 routine and mechanical, soulless, unconscious repetition. Hence 
 the necessity for, and the actual occurrence of, negative and one¬ 
 sided reforms for the sake of relief from the soul-killing monot¬ 
 ony. The circle of pedagogical change and reform ever revolves. 
 Its general movements are : — 
 
 (a) From teaching the entire complexity of a thing to teach¬ 
 ing its simplest elements, i. e., from exhaustive treatment to that 
 of smattering. 
 
 (b) From beginning with the elements of a thing to begin¬ 
 ning with its final results. 
 
 (c) From concentration on the intellectual technics to con¬ 
 centrating upon the practical. 
 
11 
 
 (d) From emphasizing the humanities and hastening the initia¬ 
 tion of the child into all human combinations and into conscious 
 communion with the spiritual life of mankind, to emphasize the 
 natural sciences and mathematics and hastening the initiation into 
 mechanic art and the means of combination of material objects. 
 
 (e) From a striving to give a clear consciousness of every 
 step taught, at once, to a blind obedience to prescription, — learn¬ 
 ing formulas with only a practical end in view. 
 
 But let us return from these considerations of the detail of an 
 educational exhibit and take up once more our chief reason for 
 making elaborate preparation for this Paris Exposition. 
 
 Our interest in the Exposition in Paris and in all subsequent 
 World Expositions in Europe is not the same interest that it was 
 in 1889. Since then we have risen out of our isolation and the 
 Monroe doctrine, and have taken our first step to become one of 
 the number of great powers that assume to direct the course of 
 civilization and decide for the rest of the world its destiny. We 
 shall probably count our seventy-five millions of people by 1900 
 the time of the Paris Exposition. Considering our wealth-pro¬ 
 ducing power and the enrollment in our schools we may easily 
 claim to be the most powerful nation in the world. That is to 
 say we may claim to have the strength on the whole though we 
 are not using it to form great armies or navies. We are using it 
 chiefly in productive industry. Our claims will be recognized by 
 the united powers of Europe and we shall be allowed our place in 
 their councils. But we never can avail ourselves of the advant¬ 
 age unless we as a nation become familiar with the political aims 
 and aspirations of the several nations constituent in that great 
 unity. We must know thoroughly their history and their present 
 purposes — not only the conscious purposes of their governments 
 but especially the more or less unconscious purposes in the popu¬ 
 lar instinct. For we must learn to interpret the words of rulers 
 through their actions and their actions through their convictions. 
 
 To learn to understand the wishes of other nations and the 
 means by which they make them valid is the first lesson of diplo¬ 
 macy. And we as a nation are now fairly launched upon the 
 era in which diplomacy will become more and more necessary to 
 our success in obtaining the consideration that is due us. 
 
 World Expositions are the grand object lessons in which our 
 people may best begin this study of our great contemporaries the 
 nations of Europe. 
 

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