Education as the acquiring of information is one thing: it is quite another thing to develop the human forces by a thoughtfully-planned course of training, mentally, physically, and morally fitting one for “complete living.” Educational methods in every age have been the outgrowth of the social conditions of the time, and are, as a rule, found to be in accordance with the beliefs and principles by which nations are controlled. A new definition of culture is being constructed, one which shall embrace the industries and the mechanical arts. Industrial processes and occupations are claiming recognition in school and college courses, both for the sake of the encouragement and assistance they may render to the industrial classes, and because the familiarity with them is felt to be required by the wants and demands of the age. It is not a rebellion against the old methods as bad in themselves. It does not necessarily interfere with or involve any loss to the traditional studies of the school-room. It is not an attempt to substitute the labors of the workshop for the legitimate intellectual training of the school, inasmuch as the shop-practice, if properly arranged, would be in the nature of change and rest, and even of recreation to the pupil, bringing him back fresher and brighter to his studies. The alternation is stimulating. Change of occupation is proverbially almost as refreshing as rest. The pupils pass from the shop to the class-room, and conversely, with a new zeal and zest for their tasks in either department. It means the addition of practice to theory, experiment to knowledge, the correct eye and skilful hand to the developed brain; that the youth sent forth from school shall be fitted not only for professions and clerkships, but for the heat and task of active life, and for the skilled labor which is so sorely needed. There exist much general misapprehension and no little grave misrepresentation as to industrial schools and manual training, and an attempt in some quarters to confound them with the stupefying effect of long-continued toil. It is not contemplated to swing too far the pendulum of school reform, or to present a panacea. It is proposed to supplement the older scholastic culture with that which will make it take a firmer hold upon men’s minds, and will bring the school into closer harmony with the time-spirit. Let there be no interference, much less any extinction of the classical system. We have come to regard that as a sacred thing and unassailable. Let it remain impregnable to all the attacks of iconoclasts and reformers. The Latin and Greek languages and the science of mathematics come recommended to us by all experience, signed and countersigned, as it were, by the testimony of ages as the basis of every system of liberal culture. They furnish a grateful vicissitude of genial and severe studies; while the one awakens the sensibilities, refines the taste, enlarges the conception, enriches the memory, and invigorates the power of moral judgment; the other, by a course of mental gymnastics as rigid as it is perfect, develops to the utmost the great faculties of attention, analysis, and generalization. No scholar can doubt that they must always form an indispensable element in any scheme of liberal instruction, by which all the powers and emotions of our moral and intellectual nature may be so touched, quickened, directed, exercised, and informed, as to attain their largest measure of capacity. But, side by side with the higher institutions of learning, there should be established schools where the sciences in their relations to the arts and industries shall be specific branches of instruction and training; the addition of a sufficient amount of work in the handling of tools and the manipulation of materials to a good sound education in languages, mathematics, history, and science. Young people should be prepared to take a broad and intelligent part in the life of an age which is eminently scientific and practical; an age which has to do with a world of fierce competition, in which trade is not despised, while science of every kind is a means of making a livelihood; an age which demands an education that seeks to arm a man as well as to adorn him, armer and orner. There is no warrant for applying the term educational to any sort of knowledge which does not increase the power of its possessor, and so make him the more able to satisfy his needs and desires without disorder and waste. The measure of this ability is the measure of a country’s economic progress. Industrial training has an economical and moral as well as an educational value. As Professor Huxley puts it, we cannot continue in this age “of full modern artillery to turn out our boys to do battle in it, equipped only with the sword and shield of an ancient gladiator.”
With many education is looked upon merely as a mental training whose sole object is to place the mind in a state fit to receive future impressions. This may be all very well for those who are never to feel the keen struggle for existence; but for a vast and constantly-increasing majority who are doomed to a bread-winning life, the main purpose of education should be to make the youthful mind “a supple, effective, strong, and available instrument for whatever purpose it may be applied to.” Less than three per cent. of the boys of this country can hope to make a living by the practice of the professions. Less than twenty per cent. of the boys enter high schools, and less than half of those who enter complete the course. The first duty of man is to work, and the first object of education should be to fit him for that work; to make him not the slave but the master of what it has imparted, the manipulator and not the mere receptacle of its power. Every year adds to the necessity of supplementing the muscular power of the laborer and artisan with that mental energy which only comes of education. Men in the busy corners of the globe are multiplying day by day, and multiplying more rapidly than the means of supporting life. Unskilled labor, or, as technically defined, the “labor of quantity,” is being ousted by the iron sinews and fiery pulse of the steam-engine and the machine. Man, as the mere owner of muscle, is being edged out by these most powerful competitors. Merely as an agent of physical force, as the possessor of the power of labor, the steam-engine is a competitor which drives him easily out of the market, and more and more unskilled labor is passing away by the development of the forces which mechanical science has discovered. As the world goes on, we must expect mechanical force to be more varied, more powerful, and cheaper, and the competition of the human limbs to become more helpless. But there is one region where the machine can never follow the human being, and that is in the exercise of thought. In skill, in the cultivation of the mind, in the power of applying the powers of thought to the laws of nature, in all that we call skilled labor of the highest kind, in that man must always have a monopoly and need fear no encroachment. Science teaching, as applied to that instruction which familiarizes the student with the universe in which he lives, and makes him in the presence of the great laws and forces of nature not a stranger, but a child at home, must be recognized as one of the great moulding influences of the time; it is at the foundation of material progress; it is the basis on which much of the manufacturing industry and commerce rests; many of the deep social ameliorations of the day are due to its influence; and popular education must be brought into closer relations with it. The industrial world has been made by scientific discovery, and its prosperity must largely depend on the spirit of scientific knowledge among the masses of its workers. It is only by the practical application of such knowledge to industrial processes that a country can hope to hold its own in the struggle of national competition. The genius of invention has succeeded in producing by machinery cheap and serviceable imitations of almost every necessary of life, hitherto the exclusive product of skilled labor. The artisan is daily becoming more and more the servant of automatic tools. Every industry is tending to centralization in a few hands, and from human to mechanical hands. If the workshop is to compete successfully with the factory, it must do so by superior taste and finish in that higher sphere of methodical, technical, rational labor whither the finest inventions cannot follow in the domain of thought. It is here, and only here, the laborer can hope to hold his own against the great power he has himself brought forth. It is here the means of increased subsistence must be found. One of the most anxious subjects of public care is to discover methods by which the masses of the people shall be able to maintain themselves in a prosperous, decent, and comfortable condition. In bare, unskilled labor the satisfaction for this want is not to be found. The Swiss have foreseen that the industrial victory must be won on the intellectual field, the association of manual work with technical training and scientific research; and the necessity for that delicacy of touch and accuracy of eye, that have made their mechanics in many departments the best in the world, to be further educated and prepared for supremacy in a field of wider range and more varied scope. In this way art may regain an influence over manufacture, which, though not lost, is certainly jeopardized by the introduction of machinery. The whole tendency of modern trade has been in the direction of wholesale transactions, which, while favoring the hundred and the gross, have neglected the piece or the example. We miss in the manufactures which we turn out the individual touch of the workman, and we have gained a dead level of uninteresting achievement at the expense of intelligence, originality, and variety. The demand for old designs in furniture, or silver or iron work, pushed to undue excess, perhaps, by the caprice of fashion, is after all a healthy protest against the monotonous and mindless excellence of the machine-made article. There is a difference between learning a trade and learning the principles of a trade. The object is not always to teach the “technic” of an industry, because that can be done only in the workshop, but it may be to teach the science and art upon which all technics are really based. Manual training is of course training to manual labor, which has been called the “study of the external world.” While in all technical education the sciences and arts must be illustrated by practical examples, the main object is to so instruct masters and workmen that they can pursue their craft with dignity and intelligence, without professing to teach the craft itself. The need for technical instruction arises from the fact that ordinary educational systems are not fitted to promote the rapid development of trade, manufactures, and commerce. The education of the industrial classes should bear on their occupations in life. The life of a laborer is spent in dealing with things which he has to convert into utilities. In this conversion he must take the properties inherent to each kind of matter and convert them into utilities by an intelligent application of forces, which he may guide but cannot alter. No man can create new properties in matter or subject it to the action of new forces. When working-men get a higher life, a life of intelligence and knowledge, they then can develop improvements in their industries by an economical application of force, and a wise use of properties in material. Not mere handicraft skill, with ten fingers disassociated from the head and the heart, can sustain mechanical industry. Machinery, when rightly understood and applied, will prove the greatest means of intellectual elevation, for its very purpose is to substitute the thought of the brain for the toil of the hand and the sweat of the brow. How excellent the old Greek poet is when natural forces are made substitutes for human labor: “Woman!” he exclaims, “you have hitherto had to grind corn, let your arms rest for the future! It is no longer for you that the birds announce by their songs the dawn of the morning. Ceres has ordered the water nymphs to move the mill-stones and perform your labor.” Technical education is to train the pupils to handiness; to supplement mental activity with physical dexterity. The object of teaching girls to sew is not necessarily to train professional dress-makers, but to make them careful and tidy in their homes. Workshop instruction is not to make boys carpenters and cabinet-makers, but to enable them to learn any trade more easily and make them generally handy. It is no small part of the value of such training that the workman may be fitted to render his home more commodious, to arrange a shelf or cupboard, to repair a broken piece of furniture, or possibly to decorate his humble home. But whether or not, in after years, the student sees proper to become or by necessity is driven to a professional use of his technical knowledge, this is not involved in the idea and system of its pursuit. Its purpose is that, when he leaves school, he shall carry with him an education serviceable for any occupation of life; to develop a dexterity of hand which will prove valuable under any circumstances, and at the same time furnish him with a means of healthy enjoyment. It is a simple recognition of the fact that a large number of the children must be destined to make their living by industrial labor. There is certainly something in the operation of learning a trade that is akin to capitalizing. The youth works in the training-school, and he defers to the future the final results of the process. He lays up wealth, as it were, by doing that which avails only to give him a larger income hereafter. It is much as if he put money into the banks. It has always appeared as though a purely scholastic education makes children averse to manual labor; that it results too much in every boy and girl leaving school desirous of engaging in work which is neither manual nor, what is mistermed, menial. It brings too often to expectant parents the disappointment experienced by Sir Francis Pedant, in Fielding’s comedy; that gentleman, it will be remembered, was very angry when he found that, instead of instilling into his boy at Oxford, as per contract, “a tolerable knowledge of stock jobbery,” his tutor had fraudulently crammed him with the works of all the logicians and metaphysicians from “the great Aristotle down to the learned modern Burgersdicius.” “Have I been at all this expense,” exclaimed Sir Avarice, piteously, “to breed a philosopher?”
As a fundamental rule, it may be accepted that the knowledge which is best for use is also best for discipline, since any other supposition, as Herbert Spencer has shown, would “be utterly contrary to the beautiful economy of nature, if one kind of culture were needed for the gaining of information, and another kind were needed as a mental gymnastic.” The best end of any education is to equip boys and girls to earn their own living when they grow up, and to perform efficiently the duties to which they may be called when they reach the estate of manhood and womanhood; giving them that most valuable of all gifts on earth—personal independence—the capacity to stand on their own feet and look the world in the face, to take care of themselves, and those who belong to them. The question of technical and industrial education has received much intelligent consideration and very extensive application in Switzerland. Since 1884 the Confederation, to encourage the existing technical schools as well as the establishment of new ones, has been granting annual subsidies, which are becoming more and more liberal. The Polytechnic at Zurich, to which reference has been made in the previous chapter, is now well known as a model school of practical life, with mechanics, physics, and arts under a thoroughly scientific curriculum. Trade and industrial schools, as distinguished from polytechnical,—genuine establishments for teaching homely trades,—have been made a prominent as well as a compulsory feature in many of the Swiss educational systems. In some form these are to be found in every Canton, furnishing instruction in one or more branches of handiwork,—the boys preparing to become skilled workmen and competent foremen; and many a girl, though an indifferent scholar, by being taught cutting, needle-work, cooking, nursing, and methodical habits—accomplishments that bear so closely upon the happiness and the very existence of home—will enable her to be a useful wife and good mother. Trade-schools in Switzerland are of ancient origin, having an intimate connection with the great impulse which the watch industry of French Switzerland received in the latter half of the last century. In the year 1770 a journeyman watchmaker, named Louis Faigare, applied to Professor Saussure for some information connected with his trade, which the then means of ordinary public instruction did not afford to his class. The professor accommodated him, and from this resulted a series of lectures, or rather conversaziones, held in the great scientist’s drawing-room. The audience increasing to such proportions, it was found advisable to secure suitable quarters, and a club was formally organized under the title of Société des Arts de Genève. This club, so modest in its inception, has survived all the mighty political tempests of a troubled age,—the violent annexation of the Genevese republic to France and its restoration to the Helvetic union,—and to-day enjoys a high rank among learned societies, and numbers in its list of members some of the most eminent names of modern science. This is the parent of the celebrated Horological School in Geneva, with its branches at Chaux-de-Fonds, Neuchâtel, Biel, Fleurier, and St. Imier. Pupils are received in these schools when they have passed their fourteenth year, and the course is from three to four and one-half years. For the artistic education, there is a special school devoted entirely to the art of decorating watches, which has become a very important branch of the industry.
There is also in Geneva a school of industrial art, the organization and work of which are substantially the same as the one at Munich, and the two are considered the best in Europe. This school is under the direction and administration of the Council of State of the Canton, which delegates one of its members to act as president of the commission which administers its affairs. Two classes of students are admitted, viz., regular scholars, who attend regularly and continuously either a general course of art study or some particular branch, such as carving, bronze founding, goldsmith’s work, etc.; and special students, apprentices, workmen, and others who arrange to receive instruction at stated hours. The pupils produce work which has a commercial value, and objects made in the school are kept for sale, a part of the money thus received being paid to the student executing the work. The courses of study embrace modelling and carving in plaster, stone, and wood; repoussé work in metals; painting in water-color, in enamel, and on china; casting and chasing of bronze and the precious metals; work in wrought iron and engraving, besides the regular work of drawing-schools in general, such as drawing from the cast, from plants and flowers, and from the living model. The school occupies a very fine and spacious building, erected a few years ago at a cost of about $160,000, and is furnished with very admirable and adequate appliances, not only for study but for the execution of art-work on a considerable scale. The pupils are of both sexes, and there is no distinction of or separation between them in the organization of the classes. The discipline of the school is very strict, the time of each pupil coming in and going out being carefully noted, and the utmost regularity of attendance, during the hours covered by his course, being required of each pupil. All the regular pupils are also required to attend the evening schools of the city. Encouragement and recognition of ability and application are made in the form of prizes, which are awarded by means of competition or concours held at different times, and on such subjects as are announced from time to time. The methods of study and discipline are all sensible and practical.
More humble in their first stages, but scarcely inferior as to practical results, are the Swiss straw-platting schools. These have succeeded, in a few years, in developing a veritable new industry, commanding markets in the utmost corners of the earth. Some of the poorest portions of the sub-Alpine districts have become well-to-do and flourishing, and at least one little hamlet, not to be found in the guide-books a few years ago, is now from this trade a thrifty town of some ten thousand inhabitants. The higher instruction in this particular industry extends to the cultivation and acclimatization of various kinds of foreign grasses, furnishing from the coarsest to the finest qualities of straw. In the mountain districts there are schools for teaching the manufacture of children’s toys, for which the Swiss pine is admirably adapted. Then, in those sections where osiers (a species of willow) can be cultivated, establishments for learning basket-making have been started. In Zurich there is a “Dressmakers’ Institute,” from which annually “graduate” thirty to forty Couturières Parisiennes. At Winterthur there is a shoemakers’ school, with a peripatetic staff of professors who give lessons wherever a class may be formed. This school also issues publications relating to its aims, one of the latest being quite an exhaustive and scientific treatise on the structure of the human foot, and giving the technical side of the new government regulations concerning the manufacture of army boots and shoes.
Other handicrafts have followed the example set by the shoemakers. The joiners, cabinet-makers, silk-weavers, jewellers, and even to umbrellas and parasols, each have their cheap and, in many cases, free-training schools. The knit goods of Switzerland, so largely imported to the United States, do not owe their introduction to cheap Swiss labor, but simply to their superior quality, the result of the excellent training all girls obtain at school; knitting being regarded as an indispensable acquirement. Drawing, industrial as distinguished from artistic, is taught in all Swiss schools; not as an accomplishment, but as of paramount utility. It is considered that “drawing” lies at the bottom of all industrial training, enabling one to delineate with precision that which he wishes to express better than he can do it with the language of the pen. In his “Proposed Hints for an Academy,” Benjamin Franklin classed “drawing” with the three “R’s” as subjects necessary for all. It ranks with them because it is the language of form in every branch of industry from the most simple to the complex. It makes the workman more exact, more efficient, and more careful; it is always convenient and often very useful. A trade which, either by law or immemorial usage, is assumed to require a more exacting apprenticeship is wood-carving; a Swiss product that enjoys world-wide reputation, and has long been a source of considerable revenue to the country. The schools for wood-carving have a fully organized faculty, and the word faculty is used advisedly, for the classes have an almost amusing resemblance to an academic course. There are lectures with manipulatory demonstrations in the use of the plane, saw, lathe, and all needed tools, and also on the distinctive characteristics of various woods. A school for ornamental work and design in wood-carving at Brienz is supported by the Canton; and at Interlaken the wood-workers enjoy, free of charge, the services of a “Master Modeller,” furnished by the Canton. There are separate schools for the study of wood-engraving, sculpture, and art cabinet-making. The agricultural and forestry departments of the Polytechnic, in its “technology,” as signifying science applied to industrial arts, has advanced these interests to positions that otherwise could never have been attained. Switzerland in physical respects is not a bountiful motherland, neither the climate nor soil is good for agriculture, yet it is surprising what good results are obtained through the general diffusion among the agricultural class of much technical information, susceptible of easy apprehension and ready application. Swiss agriculture, to make any return, cannot be a mechanical routine, but must be intelligent if not scientific.
What is known as practical farming would not return the seed and labor involved. As an intelligently and scientifically-directed industry, it has assumed a prosperous and profitable condition. The agricultural course in the Polytechnic is thorough and comprehensive. It covers the mechanical and chemical composition of the soil; the scientific basis as to the rotation of crops; the periods of growth at which plants take their nitrogen; how draining improves land; and many other similar matters varied in their application, but ruled by fixed laws, and which must be learned outside the daily experience and observation of farm-life. In the single crop of grass, which is of such great value in its relation to the extensive Swiss dairy interest, in its cultivation, grazing, and harvesting, the suggestions and counsel emanating from the agricultural department of the Polytechnic have been of incalculable value. The amount of this crop, from a cold and barren soil, and the uses to which it is turned would seem incredible to the American farmer. The Swiss farmer, to accomplish so much, must know something of the chemical analysis of the grass, both in the natural and dried state; the feeding value of like weight in the different varieties, in an equally moist or dry condition; the final stage of growth which they ought to be allowed to attain; suitability for permanent or other pastures; the adaptability of grasses for certain soil; their duration, ability to resist drouth, and strength to over-power weeds. Then come questions of hay-making, ensilage, the management of old and new grass-lands; on these and many others the peasant is enlightened and constantly advised, not only by the Polytechnic but from cantonal agricultural schools at Rütte (Bern), Strickhof (Zurich), Sursee (Luzern), and at Brugg (Aargau). There is an institution for experimental vine growing at Lausanne; a school of gardening at Geneva; and dairy schools at Sornthal (St. Gallen), and Trayveaux (Freiburg). From time to time lectures and short courses of instruction are given in different parts of the country on horticulture and vineculture, fodder-growing, cattle-breeding, by which some knowledge of the theory and technical details of agricultural science is given, with the view of awakening a spirit of enterprise in the more remote districts of the country. Forest culture and forest preservation may be considered a necessity in Switzerland, for its influence in checking the sudden and disastrous floods so common in the mountain streams, and in the protection and maintenance of the steep hill-sides which constitute so large a portion of the agricultural area of the country. While riparian trees are gross water-users, and usually deciduous, such as the sycamores, alders, willows, cottonwoods, etc., upon the mountains the trees are of a different class, and their effect is without known exception beneficial to irrigators and water-users in the valleys below. The denudation of mountain districts is followed by increased torrent or flood action and diminished regular flow in springs and streams, often by the entire desiccation of these. There is a department in the Polytechnic devoted to forestry, from which is supplied a large body of thoroughly educated foresters, who find ready employment under the federal and cantonal forest departments.[75] The course of study is of the most advanced character, and requires three years for its completion. There are, besides, many local and primary forest schools, having spring and autumn terms of three to four weeks each, and they are assisted by federal subsidy. By a federal law of 1885, there was added to the forest department of the Polytechnic, a school for forest experiment connected with meteorological stations, thereby supplementing this already excellent school with the means of accurate, scientific, and regular meteorological observations, in their close and important alliance with matters of forest culture.
It is under the supervision of these educated foresters and trained wood-rangers that, on the mountain-side, apparently but a forbidding rock, by constant, careful, and scientific attention, are found oak-, beech-, birch-, and pine-trees in large quantities and of good dimensions. Each tree is carefully looked after and preserved, and trained so that they shall not interfere with each other; each has its fair share of space and light. In this work nature and man’s labor and thought give to the forest an abundance of moisture, and between the frequent storms and showers, abundant floods of sunlight and warmth. It is this intelligent care and attention that enables a tree to take root and grow to its normal size on what is apparently little more than towering and weird piles of sheer rocks. The vast treeless West and the reckless wasteful deforesting of American woodlands will soon render forest culture and protection a necessity in the United States. Never was a country so lavishly supplied with forest flora of all the qualities in all gradations. No country ever used its wood materials so lavishly; squandering a wealth of timbers before its true value was known. It is time to husband the remnant with more intelligence and to stop its wasteful destruction. Why should sylviculture not present an inviting field for business enterprise, or be quite as fascinating to watch the development of a collection of trees as that of a herd or flock? Our landholders, who are accustomed to garner crops in a hundred days from planting, have a natural shrinking from a seed which may not mature a crop in a hundred years. But it can be shown that growing wood on waste-lands enhances the value of the remainder of the farm by more than the planting and care have cost; and that the first instalment of a forest-crop is not so remote as is generally believed. The best varieties of wood can be grown as easily as the poorest, and the demand for certain forest products is rapidly becoming more urgent. The tree-growth enriches rather than impoverishes the ground. Forestry not only beautifies the farm, but between woodland and plough-land is established that balance which must be preserved to insure the most equitable distribution of moisture and climatic conditions most favorable to the productiveness of the soil and the better health of the people. Almost every Commune in Switzerland has its realschule, where children from the primary school have the opportunity of a higher education, specially adapted to fit them for commercial and industrial life. These schools take the place of the old and now practically extinct system of apprenticeship. The handiwork and technical schools embrace instruction in drawing, modelling, practical reckoning, elements of geometry (especially surface and body measurements), book-keeping in French and German, physics, chemistry, and technological branches, ceramics, and aquarelle. The schools for girls include singing, drawing, fancy or handiwork, letter-writing, book-keeping, casting accounts, sewing by hand and machine, dress-making (pressing, cutting, and trimming), besides a knowledge of different kinds of wares, how to tend plants and flowers, and even the art of treating the sick and wounded. From these schools all have access to the Polytechnic, where each professor is an acknowledged authority in the branch of service with which he deals. In all the higher schools and universities every encouragement is given to students to qualify themselves for technical pursuits. The secret of Switzerland’s material success lies in the liberality of its conception of public education. Its primary schools are graded with good secondary schools for scientific education, and these lead to remarkable technical institutions with great completeness of organization. If any country appears by nature unfit for manufactures it is surely Switzerland. Cut off from the rest of Europe by frowning mountains, having no sea-coast and removed therefore from all the fruits of maritime enterprise, having no coal or other sources of mineral wealth, Switzerland might have degenerated into a brave semi-civilized nation like Montenegro. Instead of this it proudly competes with all Europe and America in industries for which it has to purchase from them the raw materials and even the coal, the source of power necessary to convert them into utilities. Other countries have become sensible of the superiority which skilled education can confer, and they have not been slow to take advantage of it. The United States are justly proud of their common-school systems as they exist in the several States. They have done a great deal for public education, and are progressing by their own force and by the general sympathy of the community. Mr. Edward Atkinson, in summing up the elements that have contributed to the vast gain in the conditions of material welfare in the United States, names seven, and assigns the third position in importance to the “systems of common schools which are now extending throughout the land.” The tendency to be guarded against is that in education as applied to the whole mass of the people, what is desirable and charming and decorative be not put before what is absolutely useful; not to take the garnish first and leave the solid meat to take care of itself. When it comes to deal with the large masses of the community who must work, and to whom it is, so to speak, a matter of life and death, the question to be considered is whether they shall work well prepared with the utmost assistance which the accumulated knowledge and skill of the community can give them, or whether each man shall be left to fight his own way and learn his own industry for himself. The country wants more handicraftsmen, the school produces too many scriveners. The country is crying out for skilled laborers, and the school sends it clerks or would-be gentlemen of leisure. The farmers and working men want wives who can make a home neat and happy, and who understand the wise economy of limited resources, and the school sends them women fit only to be governesses. The system of education in the United States sends too many boys into trading, teaching, the professions, or “living by their wits.” They imbibe a spirit that shuns what are termed the “humble callings,” and crowd, at starvation wages, the occupations of the counter and desk. They grow up to feel and believe that the bread which has been gained by the sweat of the brow is less honorably earned than that which is the product of mechanical quill-driving. Therefore the United States have a plethora of men who, as described by President Garfield, are “learned so-called, who know the whole gamut of classical learning, who have sounded the depths of mathematical and speculative philosophy, and yet who could not harness a horse or make out a bill of sale, if their lives depended upon it.” There is need of a public education that, while it gives to the mind fleet and safe modes of reasoning, shall at the same time, in a corresponding degree, develop a clear sight, a firm arm, and a training suitable for the various trades and occupations which are essential elements of a prosperous national life. The utility of such acquirements is not their chief virtue; it is their permanence in the mental armory, for eyes and hands not only respond to cultivation as readily as brains, but the trained eye and skilled hand do not slough off their acquirements like the weary brain. All through the United States scientifically and technically trained foreigners, fresh from their “realschulen,” are pushing out classically-educated young men from their desks and stools and taking the places of profit which belong to them by national inheritance. American spirit, capacity, and energy are unrivalled, and require only an equal training and opportunity to insure an earnest of unbounded success in establishing and maintaining the future eminence of the country in the world’s great field of human art and human industry.
The question of manual and industrial instruction is not confined in its interest only to those connected with the organization of schools and systems of education, as bearing entirely on the development and activity of the whole circle of intellectual faculties, but it relates to a deep and far-reaching political problem that thoughtful statesmen contemplate with serious concern. Might not the spirit of cheerful domestic industry, which the extension of educated handiwork is calculated to promote, do much to correct the evils of intemperance, violence, and social discontent which are assuming such alarming symptoms? The moral influence it exerts might produce a revolution for the better and a well-ordered commonwealth of labor. The habits of order, exactness, and perseverance fostered by manual training have an incalculable moral value. The ranks of the unemployed and misery and crime are largely recruited from the ranks of youth who are without any adequate training to earn an honest livelihood. With a more general dissemination of the rudiments of useful trades and employments there would be secured a larger share to productive labor,—for it would put brains into it and make it alike more honorable and profitable. It would tend to remove whatever disadvantage has heretofore attached to industrial occupations on grounds of dignity and the niceties of the social scale. When young America is trained for mechanical pursuits under the same roof and amid the same surroundings as he is trained for preaching and pleading, when he is made to feel at school that the same distinction is to be earned by skilful doing as by skilful dosing, the necessity for all the more or less sincere, but very wordy, extolling of the dignity of labor, which employs so much of our energy at present, will be removed. And when the mechanic has acquired industrial skill, not at the expense of his mental training, but along with it and as a necessary part of it, the crafts themselves will assume the old dignity and importance which once they had, but which they have lost in these days of false and foolish artificial standards by which men measure each other. The units or grains of society are continually moving to and fro between the scum and the dregs, from capital to labor and labor to capital, from wealth to poverty and poverty to wealth. But rich and poor, professional and artisan alike, have a common interest in strengthening the bulwarks against the dangers that menace honest society,—against nihilism, socialism, communism, and all kinds of vagabondage. Educated industry is the talisman. The strength of the republican pyramid is in its base, and it is in the lower social layer that the true character of a country’s need in common-school education must be looked for. A Nihilist lecturer recently stated that there are four hundred schools in Europe whose sole work is to teach the use of explosives. If the Old World is thus diligently sowing the seeds of discontent and rebellion, scattering some of them on our own too prolific soil, teaching that to brute-force alone can humanity look for the redress of its wrongs, how much more necessary it becomes to show the world that not in killing each other, but in helping each other to live, is the only possible solution of social difficulties. Unless the school can teach respect for labor, it will never be learned, and unless it is learned, and learned practically, the upheavals which of late years have disturbed society will grow in frequency and violence. Pericles, the great Athenian, describing the glory of the community of which he was so illustrious a member, said, “We, of Athens, are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes; we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness.” But Athenian society rested on slavery, and the drudgery was performed by those who had no share in the good things which the citizens could enjoy. Our object should be to bring Periclean ideas of beauty, simplicity, and cultivation of mind within reach of those who do the hard work of the world. It can be done, and should be done, in a way to advance the skill and develop to the highest form of practical energy the skill of our handicraftsman and the manliness of his life; giving him an education that will enlarge his mind, improve his morals, instruct his industry, and thereby advance the power, the prosperity, and the peace of the State. The future will, practically speaking, belong to the technically educated, for no amount of natural “smartness” can compete with education in particularities. Raw material, forming a capital advantage, has been gradually equalized in price and made available to all by improvements in locomotion; and henceforth industry must be sustained, not by a competition of local and popularly designated “natural advantages,” but by the inexorable competition of intellect in all of its manifold and overpowering evolution. If a country would not be left behind in the race, if it desires to find any satisfactory solution for the deepest and most inscrutable problem of the time, if it wishes a complex and high civilization, to be maintained secure from all the dangers which the presence of unprosperous and unfed millions must bring upon a country, it should do its utmost to give a healthy and wide development to the industrial education of the masses; such systematic instruction as shall enable them to carry to the factory, to the laboratory, to the quarry, to the mine, to the farm, that scientific knowledge which is required to deduce practice from theory, to give dignity as well as efficiency to labor, and to connect abstract principles with the industrial pursuits of life; in a word, to provide an education which will develop for each man and woman the faculties that nature has given in such a manner that they may be as active and profitable and prosperous members of the community as possible; an education beautiful by its adaptment, subservient by its use, and salutary by its application; an education that teaches in what way to utilize those sources of happiness which nature supplies, and how to use all the faculties to the greatest advantage of ourselves and others; an education that heeds the advice of Professor James Blake: “Let us head-train the hand-worker and hand-train the head-worker. For manual and head-training together form the only education. Apart from the practical advantages, it has an ethical value in enabling men and women to use all their faculties, for no man can distort himself by exclusive attention to one order of faculties, and especially by neglecting to keep good balance between the two fundamental co-ordinates of his being, body and mind, without finding the distortion repeating itself in moral obtuseness and disorder.”