into a rough picture of society before the discovery of the steam engine and of electricity, will hardly serve to delineate sufficiently the changes in the very fundamentals of society that these and similar discoveries have brought about. The one possibly most significant from the point of view of education is the incredible increase in the number of facts that must be part of the mental furniture of any one who meets even the ordinary situations of life successfully. They are so many that any attempt to teach them all from text-books in school hours would be simply ridiculous. But the schools instead of facing this frankly and then changing their curriculum so that they could teach pupils how to learn from the world itself, have gone on bravely teaching as many facts as possible. The changes made have been in the way of inventing schemes that would increase the consumption of facts. But the change that is demanded by science is a more radical one; and as far as it has been worked out at present it follows the general lines that have been suggested in this book. This includes, as the curricula of these different schools have shown, not alone teaching of the scientific laws that have brought about the changes in society since their discovery, but the substitution of real work which itself teaches the facts of life for the study and memorization of facts after they have been classified in books.
If schools are to recognize the needs of all classes of pupils, and give pupils a training that will insure their becoming successful and valuable citizens, they must give work that will not only make the pupils strong physically and morally and give them the right attitude towards the state and their neighbors, but that will as well give them enough control over their material environment to enable them to be economically independent. Preparation for the professions has always been taken care of; it is, as we have seen, the future of the worker in industry which has been neglected. The complications of modern industry due to scientific discoveries make it necessary for the worker who aspires to real success to have a good foundation of general education on which to build his technical skill, and the complications of human nature make it equally necessary that the beginner shall find his way into work that is suited to his tastes and abilities. A discussion of general educational principles is concerned only with industrial or vocational education which supplies these two needs. The questions of specific trade and professional training fall wholly outside the scope of this book. However, certain facts connected with the movement to push industrial training in its narrower sense have a direct bearing on the larger question. For there is great danger just at present that, as the work spreads, the really educative type of work that is being done in Gary and Chicago may be overlooked in favor of trade training.
The attention of influential citizens is more easily focused on the need of skilled workers than on that of a general educational readjustment. The former is brought home to them by their own experience, perhaps by their self-interest. They are readily impressed with the extent to which Germany has made technical trade training a national asset in pushing the commercial rivalries of that empire. Nothing seems so direct and practical as to establish a system of continuation schools to improve workers between the ages of fourteen and eighteen who have left school at the earliest age, and to set up separate schools which shall prepare directly for various lines of shop work, leaving the existing schools practically unchanged to prepare pupils for higher schools and for the walks of life where there is less manual work.
Continuation schools are valuable and important, but only as palliatives and makeshifts; they deal with conditions which ought not to exist. Children should not leave school at fourteen, but should stay in school until they are sixteen or eighteen, and be helped to an intelligent use of their energies and to the proper choice of work. It is a commonplace among teachers and workers who come in contact with any number of pupils who leave school at fourteen to go to work, that the reason is not so much financial pressure as it is lack of conviction that school is doing them any good. Of course there are cases where the child enjoys school but is forced to leave at the first opportunity in order to earn money. But even in these rare instances it would usually be wiser to continue the family arrangements that were in vogue up to the child’s fourteenth birthday, even if they include charity. The wages of the child of fourteen and fifteen are so low that they make a material difference only to the family who is already living on an inadequate scale.
The hopelessness of the situation is increased by the fact that these children increase their earning capacity much more slowly and reach as their maximum a much lower level than the child who is kept in school, so that in the long run the loss both to the child and his family more than offsets the precarious temporary gain. But the commonest reason advanced by pupils for leaving school is that they did not like it, and were anxious to get some real work to do. Not that they were prepared to go to work, or had finished any course of training, but simply that school seemed so futile and satisfied so few of their interests that they seized the first opportunity to make a change to something that seemed more real, something where there was a visible result.
What is needed then is a reorganization of the ordinary school work to meet the needs of this class of pupils, so that they will wish to stay in school for the value of what they are learning. The present system is bungling and short-sighted; continuation schools patch up some of its defects; they do not overcome them, nor do they enable the pupils to achieve a belated intellectual growth, where the maladjustment of the elementary school has served to check it. The ideal is not to use the schools as tools of existing industrial systems, but to use industry for the reorganization of the schools.
There is danger that the concentrated interests of business men and their influential activity in public matters will segregate training for industry to the damage of both democracy and education. Educators must insist upon the primacy of educational values, not in their own behalf, but because these represent the more fundamental interests of society, especially of a society organized on a democratic basis. The place of industry in education is not to hurry the preparation of the individual pupil for his individual trade. It should be used (as in the Gary, Indianapolis, and other schools) to give practical value to the theoretical knowledge that every pupil should have, and to give him an understanding of the conditions and institutions of his environment. When this is done the pupil will have the necessary knowledge and intelligence to make the right choice of work and to direct his own efforts towards getting the necessary technical skill. His choice will not be limited by the fact that he already knows how to do one thing and only one; it will be dictated only by his own ability and natural aptitude.
The trade and continuation schools take their pupils before they are old enough or have knowledge enough of their own power to be able to make a wise choice, and then they drill them in one narrow groove, both in their theoretical work and in their manual skill, so that the pupil finds himself marked for one occupation only. If it proves not to be the right one for him it is still the only one he is trained for. Such a system does not give an opportunity for the best development of the individual’s abilities, and it tends to keep people fixed in classes.
The very industries that seem to benefit most by receiving skilled workers for the first steps of the trade will lose by it in the more difficult processes, for the workers will not have the background of general knowledge and wider experience that the graduate of a technical high school or vocational school should have acquired. But the introduction of the material of occupations into the schools for the sake of the control of the environment brought by their use will do much to give us the proportion of independent, intelligent citizens that are needed in a democracy.
It is fatal for a democracy to permit the formation of fixed classes. Differences of wealth, the existence of large masses of unskilled laborers, contempt for work with the hands, inability to secure the training which enables one to forge ahead in life, all operate to produce classes, and to widen the gulf between them. Statesmen and legislation can do something to combat these evil forces. Wise philanthropy can do something. But the only fundamental agency for good is the public school system. Every American is proud of what has been accomplished in the past in fostering among very diverse elements of population a spirit of unity and of brotherhood so that the sense of common interests and aims has prevailed over the strong forces working to divide our people into classes. The increasing complexity of our life, with the great accumulation of wealth at one social extreme
