There are millions of intelligent little children in the public schools of the United States, receiving, doubtless, excellent intellectual or mental training. But they are not being trained for the actual duties of life as the savage child is taught to fight, to fish, and to hunt. They are not taught to labor with their hands, either skilfully or unskilfully. They are not given instruction in any department of the useful arts, notwithstanding the fact that in the case of a vast majority of them the alternative of earning their bread by the labor of their unskilled hands, or resorting to their wits for a support, will be presented immediately on their entrance upon the stage of active life. The apprentice system gave skilled mechanics to England, and her splendid manufacturing establishments are the result. The trained English apprentice became an inventor, and his inventions and art discoveries studded the island with workshops filled with automatic product-multiplying machinery.
The savage of Australia in Captain Cook’s time could kill a pigeon with a spear at thirty yards, but he couldn’t count the fingers on his right hand. The Southern Esquimau turns a somersault in the water in his boat with ease. But his more Northern brother has no canoe, and is ignorant of the existence of a boat; he has no use for a boat, because the sea in the latitude of his home is frozen the entire year. The savage is taught what he needs to know in his condition, and is taught nothing else; hence his skill in the few avocations he pursues.
The civilized boy in school is taught many theories, but is not required to put any of them in practice; hence he enters upon the serious duties of life unprepared to discharge any of them.[37] It may be said that he is in real danger of the penitentiary until he learns a profession or a trade. “Of four hundred and eighty-seven convicts consigned to the State Prison for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in 1879, five-sixths had attended public schools, and the same number were without trades.” It is noticeable also that during the same period “not five were received who were what are called mechanics.” In the penitentiary of the State of Illinois four out of five of the convicts have no handicraft. The fact that the skilled workman is far more likely than the common laborer to keep out of the penitentiary is a powerful argument in favor of joining manual training to the mental exercises of our common schools.
[37] Discussion of the subject of technical education at a meeting of the Society of Arts, London, England, 1885.
Dr. Gladstone, F.R.S.: “It should be their aim in [elementary schools] to give such a notion of the value of materials and the use of tools as could afterwards be turned to use in any required direction. There were two great difficulties in the way of doing this. The first and greatest was the inveterate notion that education consisted of book-learning.... Another difficulty was the ignorance of teachers in this respect. If an endeavor were made to introduce some knowledge of science into schools, they generally found that the teachers had some kind of theoretical knowledge, but it had been obtained mainly from books; and what was chiefly wanted was that things should be taught as well as words and before words.”
Prof. Guthrie, F.R.S.: “This method of bringing the hand and the mind to work together really lay at the basis of all true technical instruction; where the mind alone was employed the knowledge acquired passed away, but when the mind and the hand had been educated together the knowledge was never forgotten.”
The general adoption of a comprehensive system of mechanical education in the public schools would quickly dispel the unworthy prejudice against labor which taints the minds of the youth of the country. The splendid career which this age opens to the educated mechanic should be made clear to the vision of every boy in the land, and he will see, in the tools he is taught to handle, the key not only to fair success, but to wealth and fame. Professor Thurston, President of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, thus sums up the mighty power wielded by the mechanic:
“The class of men from whose ranks the membership of this society is principally drawn direct the labors of nearly three millions of prosperous people in three hundred thousand mills, with $2,500,000,000 capital; they direct the payment of more than $1,000,000,000 in annual wages; the consumption of $3,000,000,000 worth of raw material, and the output of $5,000,000,000 worth of manufactured products. Fifty thousand steam-engines, and more than as many water-wheels, at their command turn the machinery of these hundreds of thousands of workshops that everywhere dot our land, giving the strength of three million horses night or day.”[38]
[38] Inaugural address, as President of the American Society of Engineers, New York, November 4, 1880.