But they can accomplish all they need either as members of school boards, or as advisory committees on industrial education.
As to the danger of vocational schools being emasculated there is no such danger. No one who understands anything about the matter expects to have vocational or industrial schools articulated with the elementary or high schools in the manner manual training has been and is articulated, but have these lower schools separate in just the same manner as manual training high schools or technical high schools are separate from the academic schools, yet are under the same organization and management without any detriment to their usefulness.
It is true that, if specific industrial education is yoked together with academic education in the high school, industrial education will be emasculated. But then it is due to a managerial blunder of trying to straddle two horses and there is no excuse to make such a managerial mistake the pretext for the creation of an expensive separate system of education. Manual training, as we understand it, was never emasculated because neither by the originators, and the writer is one of them, nor subsequently, was manual training in the elementary and high school considered anything else but an adjunct to academic schools for cultural purposes and down to the N. E. A. meeting at Boston in 1903, Professor Woodward, the father of the American system of manual training, disclaimed any other but cultural purpose for manual training, without any distinct vocational aim.
At the above meeting Dean Woodward, in referring to the manual training work done at St. Louis said: “The secondary school should enable a boy to discover the world and find himself. I use the word ‘discover’ in the sense of uncover—that is lay bare—the problems, the demands, the opportunities, the possibilities of the eternal world. A boy finds himself when he has taken a correct inventory of his inherited and acquired tastes and capacities”. While many friends of manual training were disappointed in finding it did not revolutionize trade education, it never intended to do that and therefore was not emasculated.
Paul Kreuzpointner.
[Chairman Committee on Industrial Education, American
Foundryman’s Association.]
Altoona, Pa.
THE I. W. W.: AN OUTLAW ORGANIZATION
To the Editor:
I wish to express my hearty appreciation of John A. Fitch’s article in The Survey of June 7, on the I. W. W. It is illuminative. The I. W. W. is the one organization that is both hated and feared by our most eminent leaders in business, politics, and religion. There are good reasons for this. The I. W. W. pays no homage to heroes and great men of the past; it has little respect for the laws of the land, because it believes these laws were made to keep them in bondage; and it entirely ignores and repudiates the church, as it holds that the church has always been an instrument to keep the people in ignorance and subjection.