Well, experience is more valuable than argument in answering assertions. A few years ago a man who had scarcely ever done any work in the school-room brought some theories on the subject of technical education over here from Germany, although he was an American. He went to Philadelphia and started a little class for the instruction of teachers. The majority of common school teachers sneered at his theories, so he proposed to silence all further opposition by a practical test. He started a model school for the purpose of demonstrating that what he asserted was practicable. He did not select the brighter pupils in the public schools, but went deliberately into the streets and picked up at random a lot of little gutter-snipes who had never been to school at all, or who, if they had, were persistent truants ever since. In a short time people saw—for it was necessary to have them see in order to make them believe at all—these ignorant children of the street doing better technical work in several directions than could be found anywhere else in the city except in establishments paying high prices for artistic labor. They carved wood, they modelled in clay, they made designs on paper, they stamped leather and brass and even showed some capacity for engraving and coloring in the direction of the higher arts.
The effect of this display should have been to have given the system prominence and practical demonstration in the public schools, but it amounted to little except the gathering of a few wide-awake teachers who wished to learn to teach as the theorist had been teaching. A few of those who took the course went into public school work elsewhere and have succeeded admirably ever since. In the city of Elizabeth, New Jersey, any child who wishes can now receive a technical education under the direction of the common school authorities. The work began in a single school with a single teacher. It has since been extended to all the public schools of the city, and two teachers work hard from morning until night. A strange development of this course of teaching deserves notice. Elizabeth is a city containing a great many large manufacturing establishments, and the modest young woman who had charge of the technical education in the public schools was amazed one day to receive a written request from a number of master mechanics in different establishments for a night school for their own benefit, for which they were willing to pay freely; and some of them told the teacher that their attention to the subject was first attracted by their own children doing clearer and more rapid work in the line of design than they, these master mechanics, who had been in the business all their lives, had ever yet succeeded in doing. So for months there was visible the astonishing spectacle of a lot of middle-aged men being taught their own business by a young woman who herself knew nothing whatever of their business.
The helplessness of the average American teacher when the subject of technical education is mentioned was shown amusingly a few years ago when one of the several superintendents who have general charge of the New York city schools devised a system of teaching from what he called object lessons. He prepared a manual and a set of charts and the Board of Education in compliment to him purchased a great many and placed them in the class-rooms. But it was almost impossible to have them used unless the superintendent himself took the work in hand. The teachers didn’t understand it. They said they couldn’t get the hang of it. The truth was they had never had any education of the same kind themselves and the matter was as foreign to their intelligence as Hebrew or Sanscrit would have been. But, mark the difference; when news of this system penetrated the wilds of the rowdy West, demands and orders for the material to work with came East rapidly, and I was told that a single State in the new West made more use of this system than all the Eastern and Middle States combined. The West knows what it wants; the teachers are closer to the children than in the East. This may be one of the blessings, or perhaps penalties, of life in a new country, but, whatever it may be, the results seem to justify a wish that all of us could be transplanted to a new country, for at least a little while, from the older centres of our American civilization.
General Walker, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says: “The introduction of shopwork into the public system of education cannot fail to have a most beneficial influence in promoting a respect for labor and in overcoming the false and pernicious passion of our young people for crowding themselves into overdone and underpaid departments where they may escape manual exertion.” Col. Auchmuty, the philanthropic founder of New York’s great “Trades School,” says: “What scientific schools are to the engineer and architect—what the law school and the medical school are to the lawyer and the physician, or what the business college is to the clerk—trade schools must be to the future mechanics.” President Butler, late of Columbia College’s faculty, now president of the Industrial Association’s great model school, says: “Manual training does not claim admittance as a favor; it demands it as a right. The future course of study will not be a Procrustean structure—absolutely and unqualifiedly alike for all localities and for all schools; but it will have in it a principle, and that principle will be founded on a scientific basis—the highest duty of the educator will be its application to his own particular needs and demands.”
Is the experience of practical educators like these to be cast aside in favor of the antiquated theories of teaching now in vogue?
Any one who wonders why country boys become prominent city men, and why there are about as many Western men in New York city in business as there are men from the East, can find out by looking closely to the difference between city and country systems of education. If a country village is too small to have a high school, it is nevertheless generally the case that the higher branches are taught to a large extent in the commonest of schools. College graduates find the profession of teaching a very handy means of paying their expenses while looking about the country and seeing where to begin the practice of law or medicine, or perhaps drop into the pulpit. Boys and girls of twelve or fourteen years may be found studying physiology, algebra and geometry, natural sciences and chemistry in schools all over the new West at a time when children of the same age in the large Eastern cities are slowly wrestling with the lessons and elementary text-books of geography and grammar and arithmetic. When competitive examinations for West Point cadetships are held in the West the general trouble is that the candidates are too young to enter the military academy even could they pass the necessary examination and succeed in winning the competitive prize. I saw such an examination myself in one Western town, which was narrowed down to two boys. These youngsters, the ablest of all the applicants, were aged respectively thirteen and fourteen years. They passed rigid examinations in mathematics, with scarcely a mark against them. That is more than could be done by any boys of similar age in the public schools of New York and Brooklyn and Philadelphia, the three largest cities in the Union.
The rapidity with which children pass through text-books in the newer States and more sparsely settled districts is the cause of the great number of so-called colleges which are found all over our country. There are more colleges by title in the United States than in all the rest of the world beside. Their standards are never those of the universities of Europe—seldom of Yale or Harvard. But they are higher than those of the ordinary high schools, and the young man or young woman who passes through them has a very fair general education, and is fitted to go on by private reading to almost any extent. In the larger cities of the East such opportunities are few. There is, perhaps, a single large institution in each city, like the High School of Philadelphia or the Normal College of New York, at which girls are educated, or the College of the City of New York, to which the better boys are sent for a full college course if they desire it. But these same facilities are demanded and obtained in the newer cities at a rate that would astonish the Eastern person who chose to look into the subject.
The most pressing need of our common school system is more teachers. With more teachers greater personal attention could be paid to each pupil, and smaller time would be required for the ordinary school course. In the cities it is the rule that boys and girls must leave school at a very early age in order to help earn a living for their respective families. The majority of them are children of parents who are very poor, who have to work terribly hard and save in every possible way in order to keep their families from starvation. Consequently the children go to work as soon as they are large enough to be accepted by any employer at any sort of occupation. Their subsequent opportunities for learning anything are necessarily limited. They must learn by general reading if at all, except for such few opportunities as are granted them by night schools, a beneficent class of educational institutions, which those who most need them are least able to attend, for how much studying can a boy or girl do after nine or ten hours of work in a counting-room or shop or factory? With more teachers our city children could obtain a fair high school education at the age of fourteen, and be better able to make their way in the world at whatever their work might be.
The best finishing school that the people of the United States have ever been able to avail themselves of is the course of home reading which one society or other has within a few years devised, and which some of them are conducting with great care and success. Systems of reading and consecutive study are devised, books are supplied, individuals are selected to receive and inspect examination papers to show the capacity of the students and to give suggestions according as the students may seem to require, and in this way one single society has now eighty thousand students, with more than a hundred instructors and inspectors. This system might be definitely extended at very small expense by the various States as part of the local system of education. Until the blunders of the common school system are modified or done away with, it is as little as the State can do to give an intelligent child this much of consolation and assistance for the time that it has been compelled to lose by incompetent tuition in the public schools.