So ingrained in the public mind has this contempt for the artisan and laborer become in the course of ages, that notwithstanding the fact of the admitted kingship of iron among metals, and notwithstanding the fact that without iron the world would almost sink into a state of barbarism, still the opposition to the introduction of tool practice into the public schools is violent, and most violent among those classes who would be most benefited by it. Pending consideration of a bill by the Massachusetts Assembly in 1883, providing for the admission of manual training to the public-school curriculum, an opponent of the measure said: “The introduction of the use of tools is only another attempt to deprive the poorer classes of a good education. It is simply an attempt to overload the course of studies in the schools so that children shall not learn anything; so that the poor may be made poorer, while the children of the rich having a good time in the public schools may have their thought and health preserved for higher or special education.”
This is a repetition of the old answer of the Inquisition to Galileo upon the announcement and defence of his great discovery. He was summoned to Rome, and “accused of having taught that the earth moves, that the sun is stationary, and of having attempted to reconcile these doctrines with the Scriptures.” Bruno had been driven to and fro over the face of the civilized world, and finally burned in the year 1600 for teaching the system of Copernicus. Having the fear of Bruno’s fate before his eyes, Galileo recanted, and promised neither to publish nor defend his theories. But his love of science overcame his fear of oppression, and in 1632 he published his “System of the World.” Again he was summoned before the Inquisition, which was destined forever after to torment and persecute him. He was driven to his knees before the cardinals, consigned to prison, and tortured to blindness. After his death in a prison of the Inquisition at the age of seventy-seven years, his right to make a will was disputed, his body was denied burial in consecrated ground, and his friends were prohibited the privilege of raising a monument to his memory in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence.
Eighteen hundred years ago a Roman emperor refused to sanction the use of improved machinery in the prosecution of a great public work, on the ground that it would deprive the poor of employment.
In 1663 a Dutchman erected a saw-mill in England, but the hostility of the workmen compelled its abandonment. More than a hundred years elapsed before the second saw-mill was put in operation in England, and that was destroyed by hand-sawyers.
The Flemish weavers who introduced improved weaving machinery into England in the seventeenth century were met by protests. One of these protests, addressed to Parliament, represented that the Flemish weavers had “made so bould as to devise engines for working of tape, lace, ribbin, and such like, wherein one man doth more among them than seven Englishe men can doe, so as their cheap sale of commodities beggereth all our Englishe artificers of that trade and enricheth them.”
A little more than a hundred years ago, in England, when the Sankey Canal, six miles long, was authorized, it was upon the express condition that the boats plying upon it should be drawn by men only.
Illustrations of the vis inertiæ of ignorance might be multiplied indefinitely. Ignorance reverences the past. Ignorance never doubts. Ignorance is content; perfectly satisfied with its own knowledge, if the paradox may be allowed, it never seeks to increase it. But it is suspicious. In every effort to enlighten it discovers a conspiracy to undermine. Incapable of the intellectual effort of inquiry, it stagnates, and regards as a deadly enemy those who seek to disturb the serenity of its muddy pool.
When labor was only another name for a state of slavery, to teach men to labor skilfully was merely to raise them to a little higher grade of servitude. Hence it is only at a very recent period that it has occurred to mankind to teach skilled labor in the schools. All educational systems, our own among the rest, seem to have been intended to make lawyers, doctors, priests, statesmen, littérateurs, poets. But this is the age of steel, the age of machines and machinery. Tremendous forces in nature have been discovered and utilized, and these discoveries and their utilization have so multiplied vast enterprises that the importance of the mere ornamental branches of learning is dwarfed in their presence. “This is the practical age, and an educational system which is not practical is nothing. We shall still have our Tennysons, and our Longfellows, and our doctors of abstract philosophy; but there is little time to sentimentalize with the poets or speculate with the philosophers. There is work to do.[E9] The mine is to be explored and its treasures brought to the surface; more and more powerful machines are to be constructed to bear the burdens of commerce; new elements of force are to be discovered and applied to the constantly increasing wants of mankind.[36]
[36] “To know the ‘use’ either of land or tools you must know what useful things can be grown from the one and made with the other. And therefore to know what is useful, and what useless, and be skilful to provide the one, and wise to scorn the other, is the first need for all industrious men. Wherefore, I propose that schools should be established wherein the use of land and tools shall be taught conclusively—in other words, the sciences of agriculture (with associated river and sea culture), and the noble arts and exercises of humanity.—“Fors Clavigera,” p. 302. Part. III. By John Ruskin, LL.D. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1881.
On the subject of the demand for a more comprehensive educational system, Col. Augustus Jacobson says, with great force, “Youth is the expensive period of man’s existence. Youth produces nothing and eats all the time. If the youth is not trained there can hardly be a profit to mankind on his existence. As mankind is liable for, and bound to pay, his expenses, he should be so trained that he may repay them. He can only become a profitable investment by training. If he is left unskilled, the money spent on him is wasted. There is no profit on a whole generation of Spaniards or Turks. Mankind should be wise enough to reap the profit there always is in finishing raw material, by making human raw material into a highly finished product.”