and uses, then the aim of instruction must be to cover the whole ground. Any failure to do so will mark a defect in learning. But not so if what we, as educators, are concerned with is that pupils shall realize the connection of what they learn about number, or about the earth’s surface, with vital social activities. The question ceases to be a matter simply of quantity and becomes one of motive and purpose. The problem is not the impossible one of acquainting the pupil with all the social uses to which knowledge of number is put, but of teaching him in such a way that each step which he takes in advance in his knowledge of number shall be connected with some situation of human need and activity, so that he shall see the bearing and application of what is learnt. Any child who enters upon the study of number already has experiences which involve number. Let his instruction in arithmetic link itself to these everyday social activities in which he already shares, and, as far as it goes, the problem of socializing instruction is solved.
The industrial phase of the situation comes in, of course, in the fact that these social experiences have their industrial aspect. This does not mean that his number work shall be crassly utilitarian, or that all the problems shall be in terms of money and pecuniary gain or loss. On the contrary, it means that the pecuniary side shall be relegated to its proportionate place, and emphasis put upon the place occupied by knowledge of weight, form, size, measure, numerical quantity, as well as money, in the carrying on of the activities of life. The purpose of the readjustment of education to existing social conditions is not to substitute the acquiring of money or of bread and butter for the acquiring of information as an educational aim. It is to supply men and women who as they go forth, from school shall be intelligent in the pursuit of the activities in which they engage. That a part of that intelligence will, however, have to do with the place which bread and butter actually occupy in the lives of people to-day, is a necessity. Those who fail to recognize this fact are still imbued, consciously or unconsciously, with the intellectual prejudices of an aristocratic state. But the primary and fundamental problem is not to prepare individuals to work at particular callings, but to be vitally and sincerely interested in the calling upon which they must enter if they are not to be social parasites, and to be informed as to the social and scientific bearings of that calling. The aim is not to prepare bread-winners. But since men and women are normally engaged in bread-winning vocations, they need to be intelligent in the conduct of households, the care of children, the management of farms and shops, and in the political conduct of a democracy where industry is the prime factor.
The problem of educational readjustment thus has to steer between the extremes of an inherited bookish education and a narrow, so-called practical, education. It is comparatively easy to clamor for a retention of traditional materials and methods on the ground that they alone are liberal and cultural. It is comparatively easy to urge the addition of narrow vocational training for those who, so it is assumed, are to be the drawers of water and the hewers of wood in the existing economic régime, leaving intact the present bookish type of education for those fortunate enough not to have to engage in manual labor in the home, shop, or farm. But since the real question is one of reorganization of all education to meet the changed conditions of life—scientific, social, political—accompanying the revolution in industry, the experiments which have been made with this wider end in view are especially deserving of sympathetic recognition and intelligent examination.
Chapter X
Education Through Industry
The experiments of some of our cities in giving their children training which shall make them intelligent in all the activities of their life, including the important one of earning a living, furnish excellent examples of the best that is being done in industrial education. The cities chosen for description are Gary, Chicago, and Cincinnati. This book is not concerned with schools or courses which are designed simply to give the pupils control of one specialized field of knowledge; that is, which train people for the processes of one particular industry or profession. It is true that most of the experiments in industrial education tried so far in this country have taken the material offered by the largest skilled industries of the neighborhood for their basis, and as a result have trained pupils for one or more definite trades. But wherever the experiment has been prompted by a sincere interest in education and in the welfare of the community this has not been the object of the work. The interest of the teachers is not centered on the welfare of any one industry, but on the welfare of the young people of the community. If the material prosperity of a community is due almost entirely to one or two industries, obviously the welfare of the individuals of the community is very closely connected with those industries. Then the educational purpose of training the children to the most intelligent use of their own capabilities and of their environment, is most easily served by using these industries as the material for the strictly utilitarian part of this training. The problem of general public-school education is not to train workers for a trade, but to make use of the whole environment of the child in order to supply motive and meaning to the work.
In Gary this has been done more completely than in any other single place. Superintendent Wirt believes firmly in the value of muscular and sense training for children; and instead of arranging artificial exercises for the purpose, he gives children the same sort of things to do that occupy their parents and call for muscular skill and fine coördination in the business of everyday life. Every child in Gary, boy and girl, has before his eyes in school finely equipped workshops, where he may, as soon as he is old enough, do his share of the actual work of running and keeping in order the school buildings. All of the schools except one small one where there are no high school pupils, have a lunch room where the girls learn to cook, and a sewing room where they learn to make their own clothes; a printing shop, and carpenter, electrical, machine, pattern, forging, and molding shops, where boys, and girls if they wish, can learn how most of the things that they see about them every day are made. There are painting departments, and a metal working room, and also bookkeeping and stenography classes. The science laboratories help give the child some understanding of the principles and processes at work in the world in which he lives.
The money and space required to equip and run these shops are saved from an ordinary sized school budget by the “two school system” that has been described above, and by the fact that all the expense usually charged by a school to repairs and paid out to contractors, is spent on these shops and for the salaries of the skilled workmen who teach in them. The buildings are kept in better repair than where all the work is done during the summer vacation, because as soon as anything needs to be fixed the pupils who are working in the shop that does that kind of work get at the repairs under the direction of the teacher. These shops can not be considered in any way an unnecessary luxury because they are used also by the high school pupils who are specializing for one kind of work and by the night and summer school for their vocational classes. The school management says in regard to the success of this plan, “When you have provided a plant where the children may live a complete life eight hours a day in work, study, and play, it is the simplest thing imaginable to permit the children in the workshops, under the direction and with the help of well-trained men and women, to assume the responsibility for the equipment and maintenance of the school plant. An industrial and commercial school for every child is thus provided without extra cost to the taxpayers.”
Learning moulding, and manufacturing school equipment. (Gary, Ind.)
The first three grades spend one hour a day in manual training and drawing, which take the form of simple hand-work and are not done in the shops, but in an especially equipped room with a trained teacher. The pupils draw, do painting and clay modeling, sewing and simple carpentry work. The five higher grades spend twice as much time on manual training and drawing. The little children go into the shops as helpers and watchers, much as they go into the science laboratories, and they pick up almost as much theory and understanding of processes as the older children possess.
