I have tried to follow up the evolution of our present industrial society on several parallel lines: how industry itself has developed, how immigration affects the labor problem as regards the woman worker, and the relation of women to the vocations in the modern world. Let us now glance at our educational systems and see how they fit in to the needs of the workers, especially of the working-women. For our present purpose I will not touch on education as we find it in our most backward states, but rather as it is in the most advanced, since it is from improvement in these that we may expect to produce the best results for the whole nation.
Free and compulsory public education was established to supply literary and cultural training at a time when children still enjoyed opportunities of learning in the home, and later in small shops something of the trades they were to practice when grown-up. I know of a master plumber, who twenty years ago, as a child of eleven, made friends with the blacksmith and the tinsmith in the little village where he lived, and taught himself the elements of his trade at the blacksmith's anvil and with the tinsmith's tools. At fourteen that boy knew practically a great deal about the properties of metals, could handle simple tools deftly, and was well prepared to learn his trade readily when the time came.
As the most intelligent city parents cannot as individuals furnish their children with similar chances today, we must look to the public schools, which all citizens alike support, to take up the matter, and supply methodically and deliberately, that training of the eye and hand, and later that instruction in wage-earning occupations which in former days, as in the case quoted, the child obtained incidentally, as it were, in the mere course of growing up.
On the literary side, it is true, schools are improving all the time. History is now taught by lantern slides, showing the people's lives, instead of by a list of dates in a catechism. Geography is illustrated in the garden plot of the school playground. But in responding to the new claims which a new age and a changed world are making upon them, schools and teachers are only beginning to wake up. The manual training gradually being introduced is a hopeful beginning, but nothing more. The most valuable and important work of this kind is reserved for the upper grades of the grammar schools and for certain high schools, and the children who are able to make use of it are for the most part the offspring of comfortably off parents, enjoying all sorts of educational privileges already. Education, publicly provided, free and compulsory, therefore presumably universal, was established primarily for the benefit of the workers' children, yet of all children it is they who are at this moment receiving the least benefit from it. Many circumstances combine to produce this unfortunate result. The chief direct cause is poverty in the home. So many families have to live on such poor wages—five and six hundred dollars a year—that the children have neither the health to profit by the schooling nor the books nor the chance to read books at home when the home is one or perhaps two rooms. The curse of homework in cities ties the children down to willowing feathers or picking nuts or sewing on buttons, or carrying parcels to and from the shop that gives out the work, deprives them of both sleep and play, makes their attendance at school irregular, and dulls their brains during the hours they are with the teacher. In the country the frequently short period of school attendance during the year and the daily out-of-school work forced from young children by poverty-harassed parents has similar disastrous results.
Even in those states which have compulsory attendance up to fourteen, many children who are quite normal are yet very backward at that age. The child of a foreign-speaking parent, for instance, who never hears English spoken at home, needs a longer time to reach the eighth grade than the child of English-speaking parents.
Chicago is fairly typical of a large industrial city, and there the City Club found after investigation that forty-three per cent. of the pupils who enter the first grade do not reach the eighth grade; forty-nine per cent. do not go through the eighth grade; eleven per cent. do not reach the sixth grade, and sixteen per cent. more do not go through the sixth grade.
A child who goes through the eighth grade has some sort of an equipment (on the literary side at least) with which to set out in life. He has learned how to read a book or a newspaper intelligently, and how to express himself in writing. If he is an average child he has acquired a good deal of useful information. He will remember much of what he has learned, and can turn what knowledge he has to some account. But the child who leaves school in the fifth or sixth grade, or, perhaps, even earlier, is apt to have no hold on what he has been taught, and it all too soon passes from his memory, especially if he has in his home surroundings no stimulus to mental activity. Poor little thing! What a mockery to call this education, so little as it has fitted him to understand life and its problems! What he has learned out of school, meanwhile, as often as not, is harmful rather than beneficial.
The school door closes and the factory gate stands open wide. The children get their working papers, and slip out of the one, and through the other. At once, as we arrange matters, begins the fatal effect of handing over children, body and soul, into the control of industry. After a few days or weeks of wrapping candy, or carrying bundles or drawing out bastings, the work, whatever it is, becomes but a mere mechanical repetition. A few of the muscles only, and none of the higher faculties of observation, inquiry and judgment come into play at all, until, at the end of two years the brightest school-children have perceptibly lost ground in all these directions.
Two of the most precious years of life are gone. The little workers are not promoted from performing one process to another more difficult. They are as far as ever from any prospect of learning a trade in any intelligent fashion. The slack season comes on. The little fingers, the quick feet are not required any longer. Once more there is a scurrying round to look for a job, less cheerfully this time, the same haphazard applying at another factory for some other job, that like the first needs no training, like the first, leads nowhere, but also like the first, brings in three or four dollars a week, perhaps less. A teacher at a public-school social center inquired of a group of fifty girls, cracker-packers, garment-workers and bindery girls, how long each had been in her present situation. Only one had held hers eighteen months. No other had reached a year in the same place. The average appeared to be about three or four months.
Worse still is another class of blind-alley occupation. These are the street trades. The newsboy, the messenger and the telegraph boy often make good money to begin with. Girls, too, are being employed by some of the messenger companies. These are all trades, that apart from the many dangers inseparable from their pursuit, spell dismissal after two or three years at most, or as soon as the boy reaches the awkward age. The experience gained is of no use in any other employment, and the unusual freedom makes the messenger who has outgrown his calling averse to the discipline of more regular occupations.