BREADTH OF PREPARATION FOR VOCATIONAL LIFE
The duty of the regular elementary and high schools is not to cultivate special vocational skills; not to turn out trained farmers, or mechanics, and so on. But the work of these schools should be such that their graduates will be better farmers, or mechanics, or lawyers, or doctors, or engineers, or teachers, than they would be without it. First of all these schools should produce workers who are physically fit for the work they enter. They should educate the hand and the eye along with the brain. They should cultivate habits of working together, give instruction regarding the significance of all work in community and national life, and by every means possible prepare the pupil to make a wise choice of vocation. Moreover, the schools should provide a breadth of education that will "transmute days of dreary work into happier lives."
MAKING LIFE EDUCATIONAL
Mr. Herbert Quick in his story of "The Brown Mouse," which is a plea for better rural schools, says:
Let us cease thinking so much of agricultural education, and devote ourselves to educational agriculture. So will the nation be made strong.
The life we live, even on the farm, is full of science and history, civics and economics, arithmetic and geography, poetry and art. The modern school helps the pupil to find these things in his daily life and, having found them, to apply them to living for his profit and enjoyment. For this reason it works largely through the "home project," boys' and girls' clubs, gardening, and many other activities.
A recent writer has said,
What is the true end of American education? Is it life or a living? … Education finds itself face to face with a bigger thing than life or the getting of a living. It is face to face with a big enough thing to die for in France, a big enough thing to go to school for in America … Neither life nor the getting of a living, but LIVING TOGETHER, this must be the single PUBLIC end of a common public education hereafter. [Footnote: D. R. Sharp, "Patrons of Democracy," in ATLANTIC MONTHLY, November, 1919, p. 650.]
EDUCATION FOR LIVING TOGETHER
The more nearly the conditions of living in the school community correspond to the conditions of living in the community outside of school, the better the training afforded for living together. In many schools the spirit and methods of community life prevail, even to the extent of school government in which the pupils participate.