[50] Mr. James MacAlister, Superintendent of Schools of the City of Philadelphia, Pa., at the meeting of the American Institute of Instruction, Saratoga, N. Y., July 13, 1882.
What manual training will do for the pupil is expressed in the following terse paragraph by Col. Augustus Jacobson:
“The boy leaving school should carry with him mechanical, business, and scientific training, fitting him for whatever it may become necessary for him to do in the world. I would secure for society the advantage of all the brain capacity that is born and all the training it can take. It is possible and practicable to let every child of fair capacity start in life from his school a skilled worker, with the principal tools of all the mechanical employments, an athlete with the maximum of health possible to him, and thoroughly at home in science and literature. The child so trained would, when grown, be to the ordinary man of to-day what Jay-Eye-See is to an ordinary plough-horse.”
[E11] “Fortunately the past never completely dies for man. Many may forget it, but he always preserves it within him. For, take him at any epoch, and he is the product, the epitome, of all the earlier epochs. Let him look into his own soul, and he can find and distinguish these different epochs by what each of them has left within him.”—“The Ancient City,” p. 13. By Fustel De Coulanges. Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1882.
[E12] “In fact, memory comes from interest. What children are deeply interested in they will never forget. A boy who can never say his lesson by heart will remember every detail of the cricket or football matches in which his heart really lives.”—“Educational Theories,” p. 116. By Oscar Browning, M.A. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1885.
CHAPTER XIX.
AUTOMATIC CONTRASTED WITH SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION—Continued.
The Failure of Education in America shown by Statistics of Railway and Mercantile Disasters. — Shrinkage of Railway Values and Failures of Merchants. — Only Three Per Cent. of those entering Mercantile Life achieve Success. — Business Enterprises conducted by Guess: Cause, Unscientific Education. — Savage Training is better because Objective. — Mr. Foley, late of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on the Scientific Character of Manual Education — Prof. Goss, of Purdue University, to the same Effect — also Dr. Belfield, of the Chicago Manual Training School. — Students love the Laboratory Exercises. — Demoralizing Effect of Unscientific Training. — The Failure of Justice and Legislation as contrasted with the Success of Civil Engineering and Architecture.
A striking illustration of the defective character of both public and private systems of education, in the United States, is afforded by the statistics of commercial, railway, and other business failures. In 1877 a careful compilation of figures in regard to the shrinkage of railway values showed the following result:
“In round numbers, eighteen hundred millions of dollars, or thirty-eight per cent. of the capital reported as invested in two hundred of our railway companies alone, is wholly unproductive to the investors, and the greater part is wholly lost to them. This is sufficiently appalling, but when we consider how many companies that have managed to keep up the interest on their bonds have wholly, or almost, ceased to pay any interest on their capital stock, which stock, in turn, has shrunk to seventy-five, fifty, twenty-five, ten, in some cases five per cent. of its par value, it will seem to be a reasonable conclusion that the actual shrinkage and loss to somebody on the face value of railway investments in the United States has been fully fifty per cent.!”[51]