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INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 JAMES E. RUSSELL 
 FREDERICK G. BONSER 
 
 rriJI.lSIl!;i) MY 
 
 . (Eulumbta 
 
 X1-;\V YORK CIT 
 1912 
 
INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 JAMES E. RUSSELL, PH.D., LL.D. 
 DEAN OF TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 
 and 
 
 FREDERICK G. BONSER, PH.D. 
 
 ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 TEACHERS COLLEGE. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
 a (Collrgr. dnlnmbia Hninr rBttg 
 NEW YORK CITY 
 1912 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 
 I. THE SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL LIFE i 
 
 JAMES E. RUSSELL 
 
 II. FUNDAMENTAL VALUES IN INDUSTRIAL 
 
 EDUCATION 23 
 
 FREDERICK G. BONSER 
 
 267769 
 
THE 
 SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL LIFE 
 
 JAMES E. RUSSELL 
 
THE SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL LIFE* 
 
 The American school is under fire it is always under fire. 
 Just now it is said that its curriculum is overloaded with fads 
 and frills which burden the child and hamper his training in 
 subjects essential to his success in life. Public opinion is 
 critical of a system which makes easy the advancement of a 
 few to positions of commanding influence, but which provides 
 no vocational training for the many who can not afford to 
 remain in school beyond the elementary grades. The demand 
 is for equality of opportunity in education without regard to 
 social rank or wealth or any special privilege, that kind of 
 equality which enables one to become a good American citi- 
 zen, and which, as I understand it, is established on the abil- 
 ity to earn a decent livelihood and the determination to make 
 one's life worth the living. 
 
 The instruction given in our public schools is chiefly of 
 two kinds : ( i ) humanistic, including language and literature, 
 history and civics, and the fine arts; and (2) scientific, includ- 
 ing mathematics, geography, physics, chemistry, and biology. 
 Our schools also provide for training in the practical arts 
 which are required in the study of these subjects, preeminently 
 the arts of reading, writing, singing, and drawing. Of late 
 years the attention given to hygiene has begotten systematic 
 training in gymnastics and athletic games. Our school work, 
 however, isJgQQkJti^zJepn of reproach with some, but prop- 
 erly understood it stands above criticism. That which is 
 worth knowing about human progress is for the most part 
 contained in books. The scientific studies, as well as the 
 
 * Reprinted from the EDUCATIONAL REVIEW, New York, December, 1909. 
 
2 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 humanistic, have been recorded in books; indeed, it would 
 hardly be creditable to our civilization if the achievements of 
 one generation were not made available for the generations 
 that follow after. And what form more enduring, what form 
 more available, than in writing which may be read by all 
 who are willing to master the conventional arts confirmed by 
 use and tradition! If our schools are culpably bookish, it is 
 because our teachers misuse the book and confound methods 
 of teaching with the acquisition of knowledge. Given some- 
 thing to learn, whether contained in a book or not, it is the 
 teacher's business to see that the learner approaches his task 
 in such a way as to make his progress certain and the results 
 secure. If motor expression will help ease the way or better 
 (Jefine the end, the good teacher will surely use it. And one 
 should know that reading, writing, and singing are as truly 
 means of motor expression as drawing or dancing or handi- 
 work. In so far, therefore, as the aim of learning is to acquire 
 knowledge, there is no good reason for spending an hour in 
 manipulation when the fact may be as well taught without 
 it in a minute. On the other hand, the fact which calls for 
 motor expression and the process which demands technical 
 skill, may never be acquired in their completeness without 
 persistent drill. But drill for the sake of technical skill is 
 one thing; motor expression for the sake of clarifying, 
 strengthening, and assimilating knowledge is another thing. 
 To learn by doing is well enough, if there is no better way; 
 to do, without learning from it, is to drop to the level of the 
 brute, a travesty on pedagogical insight. 
 
 The significance of motor expression in the learning process 
 came to consciousness in our schools only a generation ago; 
 indeed, we are only now becoming alive to its place and pos- 
 sibilities. Some got the notion at first that there was a 
 magical charm in the training of hand and eye. Manual 
 training was heralded as the remedy for all defects of vision, 
 mental and physical, and the claim was made that in whittling 
 paper-knives out of wood the boy was really shaping his own 
 character. To follow exactly the specifications of a blue- 
 
THE SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL LIFE 3 
 
 print drawing was thought to be the surest way of bringing 
 home the lessons of honesty, sobriety, and truthfulness. Until 
 within ten years, manual training was defended by its over- 
 zealous advocates on the grounds of its value as a mental and 
 moral discipline. It is difficult for us to see, even after the 
 lapse of so few years, why so great worth was imputed to 
 manual dexterity and so little value attached to good reading 
 or legible writing or correct translation. It is past our com- 
 prehension even now how any one could have supposed that 
 (mere doing could rank in educational value with the doing of 
 something worth while. The fact is, of course, that no one 
 really thought, regardless of what may have been said, that 
 making nothing and making something were one and the 
 same. The early projects in manual training may seem to 
 us trivial, but their value i- nut to be reckoned in terms of 
 accomplishment, but rather in terms of effort, They represent 
 an effort to secure at any cost the motor expression demanded 
 by child nature. If the teacher of the humanities and the 
 sciences would not employ it intelligently, here was a group 
 of enthusiasts who would use it anyway, unintelligently if 
 necessary. Public opinion, not always a safe pedagogical 
 guide, supported them, and the result is a place in the cur- 
 riculum for a subject which few know how to teach and 
 which perhaps no one should teach in the way at first pro- 
 posed. 
 
 In supporting the demand for manual training in the indus- 
 trial and household arts, public opinion outran the educa- 
 tional theorists. Fathers and mothers care relatively little 
 for formal discipline of any kind. They want tangible results. 
 They want their children to be able to read, write, and reckon. 
 Some go so far as to ask for an appreciation of good litera- 
 ture and the fine arts, and a working knowledge of history, 
 civics, and the sciences, but such are always in the minority. 
 The one thing that every parent wants, the one thing that 
 gives him most anxious thought, is how best to make his child 
 self-supporting. In manual training he sees a chance to 
 develop that skill of hand required by the craftsman; in the 
 
4 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 technical processes he discovers a likeness to the processes 
 with which he is acquainted in the home or in the industrial 
 world. The study promises material reward and he seizes 
 the chance to turn it to account in the vocational training 
 of his child. 
 
 Manual training in some form is here to stay. The teacher 
 needs it in teaching not one subject, but most subjects; the 
 public demands it because it offers the most obvious means of 
 beginning the training for vocational life. Under the com- 
 bined influence of pedagogical needs and public demands, the 
 content of our manual training courses has been radically 
 changed within the past decade. In the effort to give free 
 expression to the child, all manner of projects have been 
 carried out through hand work. Woolly sheep have sported 
 with polar bears under fir trees set in a desert of sand. Book- 
 binding and block houses, Indian war bonnets and water- 
 wheels, ink wells and Navajo blankets, bent iron jimcracks 
 and raffia baskets, book shelves and dolls' clothes, broom hold- 
 ers and picture frames all these and a thousand more mixed 
 up in indescribable confusion ! Is it any wonder that some 
 one should raise the cry of fads and frills? The wonder is 
 that any one should try to justify such work in school on 
 any ground other than mere recreation. Absurd as it may 
 seem when one reads over a list of manual projects actually 
 put before our children in school, there has been consistent 
 progress along two lines: (i) in the usableness of the com- 
 pleted article, and (2) in the design and artistic finish given 
 to it. The difficulty of children's making really usable things 
 contrasted with the ease of executing artistic design has largely 
 changed the character of manual training within the past ten 
 years. In fact, manual training to-day is little more than 
 applied design. In this respect it is quite worth while. It 
 is the best thing that has come into our schools in recent 
 years, and we can not afford to lose it. 
 
 Manual training as applied design is a subject quite dif- 
 ferent from the sloyd and formal projects of twenty years 
 ago. If manual discipline is no longer wanted for itself, one 
 
THE SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL LIFE 5 
 
 may ask why the term manual training should be retained. 
 Why not combine with drawing and call it all " art " or 
 " applied design " ? Another question Why should we have 
 distinct courses in the household arts in the lower grades of 
 the elementary schools? The work done in these lines is 
 either applied design or training in the technic of house- 
 wifery. This consideration raises another question: What 
 is the place of vocational training in the elementary school? 
 One characteristic of the American school system is appar- 
 ently fixed. The work of the first six years of the elementary 
 school is fundamental, the same for all regardless of sex or 
 future occupation. Six years of schooling is the usual legal 
 requirement, and there is a consensus of opinion that special- 
 ization should not begin before the twelfth or thirteenth year 
 of age. Some would defer it two years or more, but the 
 number of children leaving school at or before the end of 
 the sixth grade warrants the attempt to make the work of 
 the first six years of the elementary course complete in itself, 
 and as comprehensive as possible. Such a course should be 
 cultural in the best sense, a course calculated to put the child 
 in possession of his inheritance as a human being and fit him 
 to enter upon whatever work may be expected of him in the 
 years immediately following. With six years of good funda- 
 mental training, the child is ready at thirteen or fourteen to 
 look forward to his life work. The physiological age suggests 
 differentiation for the sexes. For those who go to college, 
 it is time to begin specialization along academic lines; for 
 those who are to become artizans or farmers or tradesmen, 
 as soon as possible, it is time to begin vocational training. 
 Specialization at the age of twelve to fourteen years should 
 begin gradually, and in the vocational lines it should be essen- 
 tially preparatory to the later years of trade school or appren- 
 tice training. My point is that when the boy or girl hears 
 the call of vocational life, specialization should begin and 
 gradually narrow into technical training for specific occu- 
 pations for some at the age of twenty-five in professions; 
 for others at the age of sixteen in the trades. Between these 
 
6 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 extremes will be found most vocations in which men and 
 women engage. A fundamental course of six years, at once 
 cultural and preparatory to the widest possible range of dif- 
 ferentiated courses beginning with the seventh grade, is the 
 chief desideratum of our American school system. 
 
 The present curriculum of our public schools, as I have 
 already shown, is chiefly composed of humanistic and scien- 
 tific subjects. We have made an attempt to introduce certain 
 industrial and household arts, but they are so lacking in 
 coherency as to raise serious doubts of their value as funda- 
 mental subjects. Nevertheless, there is another subject of 
 instruction as fundamental as any now contained in the cur- 
 riculum. If the humanistic studies are essential in the train- 
 ing of the child in his social relations, and the scientific in 
 his relations to the physical world in which he lives, it is 
 equally important that economic studies be included in the 
 curriculum to provide instruction in the industries from which 
 man gains his material possessions. Of course, I do not 
 mean economic studies in the elementary school for the sake 
 of technical training in any industry any more than I advo- 
 cate the study of poetry in the grades for the training of 
 the poet, or design for the artist, or biology for the physician. 
 I mean the study of industries for the sake of a better per- 
 spective on man's achievements in controlling the production, 
 distribution, and consumption of the things which constitute 
 his material wealth. For these he labors his life long; on the 
 use he makes of them depend much of his own happiness 
 and the well-being of his fellows. It is only by means of 
 such studies, whether pursued systematically in schools or 
 picked up under the adverse conditions of after life, that we 
 acquire the basis of judgment concerning the acts and aspira- 
 tions of our fellow-men, either those who provide the capital 
 for exploiting natural resources or those who do the work 
 required in the several industrial pursuits. In our political 
 life, no knowledge is of more consequence than that which 
 is concerned with the relations of capital and labor; for us 
 as a people there is nothing more to be desired than a sympa- 
 
THE SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL LIFE 7 
 
 thetic understanding of the conditions under which men earn 
 their living. Is a liberal education possible in this age with- 
 out a knowledge of these things which more than all others 
 make men free or leave them slaves ? 
 
 A threefold division of the curriculum humanistic, scien- / 
 tific, industrial has the advantage over the present twofold | 
 division not only in providing a more liberal education, but 
 also in affording a better preparation for the differentiated 
 courses which begin in the grammar school. The training 
 now given in language and literature, and in the arts and 
 sciences of the elementary school, is of prime importance as 
 a preparation for any course that a child may pursue later 
 on; in some respects, no other training can approach it in 
 practical worth even for the work of the lowest grade of 
 trade school. Nevertheless, it is an assured fact that our 
 boys and girls do not enter industrial life with the same 
 confidence that they exhibit in other fields for which their 
 academic training has fitted them. They see no fascination | 
 in industrial activity and they have no basis of judgment for I 
 choosing any particular career. The fault is largely due to 
 avoidance of industrial instruction in the schools, as some- 
 thing degrading if not positively unclean, and the setting up / 
 in its place of unattainable ideals at variance with the actual / 
 conditions of society. I would not check the ambition of any * 
 American child, however high the goal it is his birthright 
 as an American citizen but I would have the school help 
 him define the aim of his life in terms of his own natural 
 endowment and possible attainment. The child has a right 
 to this kind of guidance; the school must give it, and what 
 the school gives must be determined by sympathetic instruc- 
 tion along the lines leading to the goal. 
 
 The public, in giving support to manual training and the 
 household arts, undoubtedly intends these subjects to promote 
 closer relationship between the school and vocational life; 
 some teachers of these subjects unquestionably do use them 
 with precisely this intent; but efficient instruction presupposes 
 something definite to teach and a consistent way of teaching 
 
8 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 it. Subtract from our present manual training course that 
 which is essentially applied design and those exercises which 
 are intended to afford motor expression in the learning of 
 other subjects in the curriculum, and what is left is an inco- 
 herent, unorganized series of projects without purposes or 
 educational value. However good the artistic treatment, and 
 however desirable the assistance given in acquiring knowl- 
 edge of other subjects, the results now obtained contrast most 
 unfavorably with what might be secured from a series of 
 projects harmoniously organized to attain a specific end and 
 at the same time incidentally to provide for the necessary 
 motor expression and all needful application of artistic 
 design. In other words, motor expression and art training 
 may as well be secured as by-products in doing something 
 worth while as by making them ends in themselves. \Yhat- 
 ever value may attach to the subject-matter in such procedure 
 is clear gain. The plan I propose, therefore, is intended to 
 retain all that is of real worth in manual training and at 
 the same time to get something still more to be desired. It 
 is precisely the plan long followed by good teachers of reading 
 and writing. The child in his reading may as well read the 
 best of literature as the poorest, and in writing learn how 
 to express himself clearly, concisely, and in good form as 
 to follow everlastingly a copy-plate. 
 
 It may be interjected at this point that some teachers of 
 manual training have used the subject as a means of intro- 
 ducing the child to the complexities of social life, that it has 
 been a means of socializing him, that it has given him a 
 chance to find himself in the midst of a highly artificial and 
 conventional environment. If this be true, and the aim is 
 certainly not an unworthy one, the end may as well be attained 
 by putting the activities proposed on the high plane of real life. 
 
 The problem, then, is to organize the information within 
 the industrial field in such a way as to make it valuable, first, 
 in the education of the masses and, second, in technical 
 training for specific vocations. There is no lack of informa- 
 tion; what is knowable in any industry is beyond the reach 
 
THE SCHOOL AN& INDUSTRIAL LIFE 9 
 
 of any one save the most expert specialist, and even he is 
 tantalized by his inability to grasp all within his reach. That 
 a field is large, overwhelmingly large, ought not to deter the 
 educator from entering it. The scientific field, for example, 
 is large, overwhelmingly large, but when it is systemat- 
 ically classified the teacher is in a position to select that which 
 may have educational value even for the youngest child. 
 Without classification it might be possible to teach much of 
 practical value, but the school course from infancy to adult 
 life would present a sorry spectacle. The logical arrangement 
 of scientific information is the only criterion of the worth 
 of the completed scientific course. The selection of materials 
 for presentation at any particular stage depends upon peda- 
 gogical insight which takes into account both the goal to be 
 reached and the peculiarities of the learner. The way in 
 which children learn determines the method of approach to 
 any subject, but it sets no standard of worth upon the acquisi- 
 tion. The only criterion of excellence is to be found within 
 the subject itself in its relations to human needs. How the 
 child learns that 2x2=4 is a problem in psychology; whether 
 2x2 is actually 4, what relations it bears to other mathematical 
 facts, and whether it is worth learning at all, are problems 
 reaching far beyond child-psychology. In classifying the 
 information within a given field, we establish standards by 
 which we judge the relative worth of component parts and 
 discriminate between what is essential or characteristic, and 
 what is accidental or accessory. Such categories we have in 
 the humanities and the sciences, and they control the trend 
 of instruction throughout the school course. We need such a 
 guide to the industries in order that every step from the 
 kindergarten on to the technical school may fit into our plan 
 for industrial education. 
 
 Much confusion in the work of manual training has come 
 from a failure to distinguish between the psychological guide 
 to methods of teaching and organizing subject-matter, and 
 the logical guide to the sequence of topics and the value of 
 the component parts. The need of food, clothing, and shelter, 
 
io INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 for example, is easily brought home to a child. The psychical 
 reaction to the suggestion that he satisfy these needs for him- 
 self is an excellent starting-point for the study of primitive 
 life; it gives a splendid clue to ways of approaching certain 
 fundamental industrial processes, and for that purpose may 
 often be used advantageously in teaching. But to set up this 
 principle as a guide for making courses of study is to con- 
 found means and ends. Everything worth having in this 
 life has a place in the gratification of human wants language 
 and literature, science and fine arts, politics, law, and religion, 
 no less than food, clothing, and shelter. What is suitable food, 
 how it is produced, distributed, and prepared for eating, and 
 what becomes of it in nutrition is a subject for study quite 
 apart from the satisfaction of hunger. The need of sustaining 
 life may make the study of great importance, but it suggests 
 no classification of the knowledge abounding in the scientific 
 and industrial processes. Likewise the need of speech for the 
 interchange of ideas gives no clue to the systematic structure 
 of language, to say nothing of the vocabulary and the gram- 
 matical characteristics of any particular language. The con- 
 clusion, therefore, is that the method of rediscovery of ways 
 and means of satisfying human needs is no sufficient guide 
 either to what children should learn or to the sequence of 
 materials employed in instruction. 
 
 The industrial processes by which man acquires his material 
 possessions and shapes them according to his desires, are 
 directed to the transformation of natural resources. Raw 
 materials are produced and worked over; they are distributed 
 and put to use. Each step, if properly taken, adds to their 
 value. What constitutes value and what means are employed 
 to effect the change should be made the subject of instruc- 
 tion. True, the amount of human labor involved is immeasur- 
 able, the variety of human occupation almost inconceivable, 
 and the range of productive activity wellnigh beyond our 
 understanding, but the fundamental processes are limited and 
 relatively simple in their operation. 
 
 For pedagogical purposes, the materials of most signifi- 
 
THE SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL LIFE n 
 
 cance in the industries are (i) foods, (2) textiles, (3) woods, 
 (4) metals, and (5) clays and other allied earth materials. 
 Fuels, supplying great industries in themselves, occupy a 
 middle ground between industrial materials and the motive 
 power employed in the industrial arts. Commerce is that 
 industry which uses the products of all other industries in 
 making things available for human consumption. This classi- 
 fication has the advantage of fixing attention on the stuffs 
 out of which things are made and upon which human ingenuity 
 brings to bear its most lavish expenditure of industrial effort. 
 The next step is to single out the dominant processes in the 
 successive stages of production, manufacture, and distribution, 
 and their interrelations, peculiar to each class of materials. 
 The facts concerning these processes constitute the subject- 
 matter of instruction in the industries. The technical skill 
 required in the operation of any industrial process is the 
 object of vocational training. 
 
 A well organized course of study in the industries must be 
 the joint work of technical and pedagogical experts. The 
 scientist will be called upon to contribute his share, and his 
 contribution will be no inconsiderable amount. At one stage 
 of the course emphasis may be placed upon the processes of 
 production; at another stage the stress may be upon manu- 
 facture, distribution, or consumption. Nature study, agri- 
 culture, the fisheries, forestry, and mining will furnish indis- 
 pensable information. Geography, biology, physics, and 
 chemistry will each add their quota of knowledge. Facilities 
 for transportation, the production and transmission of power, 
 and the agencies of trade and commerce will have a bearing 
 on the problem. But the chief consideration in the course of 
 study is the ordering of the industrial processes by which raw 
 materials are transformed into things of greater value for 
 the satisfaction of human needs. 
 
 The simplest industrial processes are often the most primi- 
 tive. This fact suggests the desirability of sometimes ap- 
 proaching the study in the primary classes from the historical 
 standpoint. To make the study of primitive life, however, 
 
12 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 the dominant purpose of instruction leads to the introduction 
 of much superfluous material which tends to crowd the cur- 
 riculum and overburden the child. Wherever the approach 
 can be made advantageously by way of primitive life or by 
 plays and games which express children's emotions, that 
 method may be employed. The impetus gained in this way 
 should be directed to the apprehension of the systematic 
 knowledge contained in the field under consideration. When 
 textile processes, for example, are to be studied, the need of 
 clothing may be emphasized and means suggested for gratify- 
 ing the want. Projects for carding, spinning, and weaving 
 may be carried out in simple ways and illustrated by reference 
 to actual operations in bygone times or by the practises of 
 contemporaneous primitive people. But to rediscover every 
 step in the original development of these arts is to miss the 
 purpose of industrial education; it may be good industrial 
 history, but it is not good industrial training. The indus- 
 trial aspects of the study, as distinguished from the historical, 
 require that the child should acquire in some way and at some 
 time presumably in many ways and at widely separated times 
 a fairly well-rounded conception of textile processes and 
 become familiar with the most important types of textile 
 products. It is not enough to acquire a knowledge of the 
 primitive process of spinning, even spinning on a wheel, and 
 then to pass on to the weaving of a simple rug. Spinning is 
 an important industry in modern life; it means yarns for all 
 manner of fabrics made from a great variety of raw materials ; 
 it means thread of all kinds; it means cordage. How many 
 of our school children, how many adults, have any adequate 
 conception of the extent of these industries or their bearing 
 on everyday life? And yet the processes are simple, and, by 
 actual demonstration, supplemented by illustrations cut from 
 current magazines or by visits to neighboring factories, the 
 lesson can be taught in such a way as to make the learning 
 a delight and the knowledge a permanent possession. On 
 leaving the elementary school, every child should know, it 
 seems to me, the characteristics of cotton, wool, silk, and linen, 
 
THE SCHOOL AN3 INDUSTRIAL LIFE 13 
 
 both in the spun and woven forms, and have some notion of 
 their value as determined by the processes to which they have 
 been subjected. A proper combination of handwork, the 
 application of design and the giving of information should 
 produce the desired results without strain and with constantly 
 increasing interest in the study. At the end of a high school 
 course, possibly at the end of the grammar school, a girl 
 should be able not only to make many articles of clothing, 
 but also to discriminate in the choice of fabrics by reference 
 to what she has learned in school concerning the nature of 
 the several materials and the processes of manufacture. If 
 she doesn't get this knowledge in school, when and where will 
 she ever get it? And isn't it something which she has a right 
 to know? How much time will it take, I ask, to give her a 
 vastly better equipment in this field than ninety per cent of 
 adults have to-day? It is less a problem of instruction or 
 school administration, than it is a point of view and selection 
 of materials for instruction. Once accept my proposition that 
 this is worth doing, and the time can easily be found, and 
 some day we shall have teachers prepared to do the work. 
 
 Again, let me illustrate from another field from the clay 
 industries. Children like to make mud pies. The kinder- 
 garten turns this aptitude to good use in fashioning things by 
 hand molding. Of late, primary teachers have adopted clay 
 as a convenient medium for expressing art forms. The 
 result is thirty plaques, thirty ink wells, or thirty vases all 
 very pretty, decorated and glazed, when put in a row on 
 exhibition day. So far I have no criticism. My complaint 
 is that they stop right there. The chief processes in the clay 
 industries are very few; hand molding, turning on the potter's 
 wheel, pressing into set forms, and building up in permanent 
 shape, as in cement and concrete construction. Why not, 
 then, pass from hand molding, which can be approached 
 through primitive types, to the use of the potter's wheel ? A 
 single demonstration of this machine, with the use of illustra- 
 tions which may be had in abundance, will give the clue to the 
 entire round of the pottery industries. A few samples, vary- 
 
I 4 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 ing from unglazed earthenware to fine china, will complete 
 the teaching equipment. Next come brick and terra-cotta. 
 But who has ever heard of brick-making in school ? I should 
 like to hear of it because it is an immense industry, the 
 products of which are visible on every hand soft brick, hard 
 brick, fire brick, red brick, yellow brick, ornamental brick, 
 terra cotta. Why should not our children know more about 
 these things than we do? I venture to say that ten hours 
 of instruction judiciously spread over two or three years, and 
 properly correlated with nature study and geography, will 
 give to sixth grade children a better appreciation of one of 
 the staple building materials than ninety out of every hundred 
 adults have to-day. Is it worth the time? If so, the time 
 can be found. 
 
 I might illustrate my point by any of the staple foods, by 
 glass, by woods, or by metals. The working up of these 
 materials, the getting them ready for use, does not involve 
 many processes. The combination of processes is most intri- 
 cate and the variety of products simply indescribable, but with 
 an eye single to typical ways by which raw materials are 
 transformed it is not impossible to leave with twelve-year-old 
 children a lasting impression of the modes of operation in 
 any industry and the nature of the most important results. 
 
 I am well aware that this plan will be criticized by some 
 as being retrogressive, a return to a logical control of childish 
 activities, and by others as abandonment of the new educa- 
 tion through motor training. It may mean revolution, but 
 if it results in a richer and more unified curriculum one critic 
 is answered, and if the curriculum is thereby simplified the 
 other critic will get no hearing from the American public. 
 But how is the curriculum strengthened? First, it must be 
 conceded that the content of industrial education, as I have 
 defined it, has some value; whatever that may amount to is 
 a distinct gain. In the second place, the plan calls for richer 
 courses in arithmetic, nature study, and geography. The 
 quantitative measurements of arithmetic will find concrete 
 application in every step of the industrial process from the 
 
THE SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL LIFE 15 
 
 first step of production of the raw materials to the end of the 
 series when goods are turned to practical use. How much, 
 how many times, how often, in what proportion, at what cost, 
 are questions which must be answered by the child at every 
 turn. The computations called for in the manufacture, trans- 
 portation, and final distribution of any commodity are in daily 
 use in trade and commerce, and should be the staple require- 
 ment of the school. Nothing will vitalize the study of arith- 
 metic more than to create in the school a need for quantita- 
 tive measurement and for the employment of business methods 
 in business affairs. Such a situation suggests clearly the place 
 and scope of commercial training in the upper grades or high 
 school for those who are in training for commercial vocations. 
 The natural distribution of metals, fuels, clays, and other earth 
 materials, the climatic and physiographic conditions which 
 determine the location, amount, character, and availability of 
 our flora and fauna, the factors which control transportation 
 by land and water these are problems in geography which 
 become concrete and vital in the study of industries. The 
 correlations are so obvious that only a stupid teacher can 
 miss them. In nature study we shall find a real place for the 
 elements of agriculture and forestry; no longer aimless 
 meandering in any scientific field, but definite attention to 
 those occupations concerned with the production of materials 
 good for food, clothing, and shelter, the conditions calculated 
 to give best results, and the resistance which men meet in 
 doing their work. The growing of any crop, even in a win- 
 dow garden, will epitomize the farmer's labors in tilling the 
 soil, supplying plant food, utilizing light, heat, and air, over- 
 coming disease and insect pests, and reaping his harvest. 
 Every step takes on new meaning when the learner sees its 
 place in the series of operations culminating in the commercial 
 food supply of his own community, its sanitary regulation and 
 domestic consumption. The elements of physiology and 
 hygiene, and of physics and chemistry, are also called into 
 requisition ; they are all indispensable in fixing values of indus- 
 trial products and determining economy in technical opera- 
 
16 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 tion. What makes for hygienic living is as well worth know- 
 ing from the economic standpoint as what mechanical appliance 
 will most increase the output. A proper study of the indus- 
 tries, therefore, I contend, will bring about a unified and 
 closely correlated course in the biological and physical sciences 
 by way of supplying the information wanted by the child in 
 adjusting himself to the real world. 
 
 Perhaps some timorous soul will interpret my outline of 
 the pedagogical relations between the sciences and the indus- 
 tries as a denial of any independence to arithmetic, nature 
 study, and geography. Far from it. The scientific subjects 
 have a function of their own in the curriculum, as do the 
 humanities and the industries. The use of language and the 
 arts of reading and writing in studying the industries, even 
 the generous use of supplementary readings giving industrial 
 information, does not preclude the study of literature in pro- 
 gressively systematic form. The course of study in every 
 subject may have two aspects, one peculiar to itself by virtue 
 of which we recognize it as a distinct subject, the other rela- 
 tive to other subjects which the child may be learning. In 
 arithmetic, that which is peculiarly mathematical looks for- 
 ward to the systematic development of the science of mathe- 
 matics, and it is possible so to emphasize this aspect as to 
 make the study almost exclusively formal. The natural 
 sciences may be so taught as to have no direct bearing on the 
 child's experience. My thought is that any subject worthy 
 of a place in the school curriculum should be developed along 
 systematic lines characteristic of the subject itself by means 
 which function in the child's experience with other subjects 
 of information. This is only another way of saying that 
 whatever is learned should be applied in practise. Perhaps 
 better said, it is the harmonious interaction of all subjects 
 in the curriculum which gives zest to study, solidarity in the 
 knowledge acquired, and efficiency in converting knowledge 
 into power. The reason for this is that the learning process 
 is a unity; the child's experience in gathering information 
 from many sources is unified, and it is his own; his instincts, 
 
THE SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL LIFE 17 
 
 impulses, and all his activities belong to him alone, and how- 
 ever segregated the ultimate ends of his endeavor may be in 
 the mind of his teacher, he weaves all his experiences into 
 the fabric of his own life. Whether or not that fabric be 
 technically correct depends upon the systematic ordering of 
 his experiences; its serviceableness for any particular purpose 
 depends upon the materials which have entered into it. 
 
 One other important question awaits an answer. Will the 
 plan I have proposed tend to simplify the curriculum? My 
 answer is that at least four subjects will be combined into 
 one, and in some elementary schools one teacher will take the 
 place of four. Manual training, fine arts, domestic art, and 
 domestic science will drop out below the seventh grade, and 
 in their place we shall have the one subject of industrial arts, 
 the elements of industries. The term " manual training," if 
 used at all, will cover the forms of motor expression employed 
 in teaching reading, writing, and drawing, as well as the 
 manual exercises used in agriculture or weaving or pottery 
 making or carpentry. There will be no hours set apart in 
 the school program for work exclusively with the hands, and 
 teachers will not be expected to provide manual occupations 
 for every minute of the time assigned to any subject. When 
 manual work is needed it will be demanded as insistently and 
 employed as successfully in the humanities and the sciences 
 as in the industries. In the lower school, manual exercises 
 will be used as a means of self-expression, a method of teach- 
 ing rather than a subject of instruction or a way of acquiring 
 technical skill. That is, cooking in the lower school is to 
 enable the child to know what happens when heat is applied 
 to foods, and in what respects foods thereby are made more 
 serviceable; cooking as an art in which a girl should excel 
 belongs to a later period when she is fitting herself for house- 
 keeping. Technical skill is a distinct aim in vocational train- 
 ing, but in the earlier years of school the purpose is general 
 rather than specific, cultural rather than vocational. 
 
 In all industrial processes, wherever man transforms 
 materials into things of greater value, he employs a technic 
 
18 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 peculiar to the situation, and gives to the product a touch 
 which pleases his aesthetic sense. Earthen bowls might be 
 made, I suppose, without appreciable artistic merit, but the 
 fact is, that the crudest pottery shows an effort to attain some 
 ideal standard. This striving for artistic effect is as instinc- 
 tive in childhood as in primitive man, and no worker ever 
 loses it until he loses all pride in his handiwork. It is the 
 source of every fine art. It is self-expression, which is at 
 its best when bodied forth in doing things worth doing well. 
 The teacher of art, therefore, finds his best opportunity in 
 that field which offers greatest inducement to constructive 
 design. The art training which belongs in the elementary 
 school is that training which makes for a better appreciation 
 of aesthetic standards and which finds expression in making 
 things more pleasing than they otherwise would be. It adds 
 no burden to the curriculum; on the contrary, it enlivens it 
 and makes its tasks more pleasurable because more gratifying 
 to personal wants. 
 
 A systematic course in the industries will have the addi- 
 tional advantage of making it easier to teach everything else 
 in the curriculum. Not only will the study of industrial 
 processes give rise to concrete problems in mathematics and 
 the natural sciences, but the practical character of such prob- 
 lems will incite children to find the surest and most business- 
 like way of solving them. Time will be saved for drill in 
 every other line. With fewer subjects and more practical 
 problems, I should confidently expect better results in the 
 three Rs and a more thorough discipline resulting from work in 
 every subject. There would be no attempt to cover the whole 
 field of human effort; the standard set in the study of indus- 
 tries whereby only the essential processes should be included 
 in the course of study would react upon the courses of study 
 in the humanities and the sciences. Let it be agreed that 
 only fundamentals have a place in the elementary curriculum, 
 and it will be comparatively easy to insist upon thorough work. 
 Under such conditions there can be no excuse for not getting 
 it. Those who believe, as I do, in the educational value of 
 
THE SCHOOL AND INDUSTRIAL LIFE 19 
 
 work well done, will join hands right here with those who 
 advocate a curriculum which imposes tasks worth doing well. 
 My conclusion is that industrial education is essential to 
 the social and political well-being of a democracy. It is the 
 privilege of all, rather than the duty of a few, to be informed 
 on matters affecting the social welfare of the body politic. A 
 knowledge of how men get a living, the nature of their work, 
 and the value of it, is a prerequisite to intelligent apprecia- 
 tion of the dignity of labor. A sympathetic understanding of 
 the conditions underlying industrial competition will make 
 for civil order and social stability. Training for citizenship 
 may not safely disregard the dominant interests of the great 
 majority of citizens. The public school must teach that which 
 all should know. If only six years can be had for this work, 
 the work must be done in six years. There is no alternative. 
 It must be done in such a way, too, that children will grasp 
 its significance and carry its impressions throughout their lives. 
 It must establish such habits of thought and conduct that all 
 subsequent work will be aided by the discipline. This is the 
 ideal of the elementary school. Joined with the humanities 
 and the sciences, a study of the industries rounds out the 
 education of the citizen and equips him to begin his voca- 
 tional training. On the threshold of active life it puts him 
 on a par with his fellows. It assures him that kind of equality 
 which is the opportunity of every American. 
 
FUNDAMENTAL 
 VALUES IN INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 FREDERICK G. BONSER 
 
FUNDAMENTAL VALUES IN INDUSTRIAL 
 EDUCATION* 
 
 \Yhen the American people become fully conscious of an 
 idea for reform, the idea expresses itself in practical applica- 
 tion with astonishing and often wasteful rapidity. There is 
 occasionally a suggestion that the present-day conduct of 
 industrial education may be an illustration of this tendency. 
 
 Recent conditions have brought about a consciousness of 
 need for more intelligence and training among the workers 
 in industrial vocations that is almost phenomenal in its breadth 
 and intensity. This need has expressed itself in a demand 
 for a kind of school work which would produce immediate 
 returns in terms of increased skill and technical efficiency 
 in industrial vocations. Numerous and varied interests have 
 combined to bring about a response to this demand in the 
 form of many industrial schools whose chief end is frankly 
 vocational. Much, too, has been said and written about these 
 schools in the immediate past, but very little, relatively, has 
 been said, written, or accomplished toward realizing a solu- 
 tion for this industrial education problem through the gen- 
 eral or regular school system. Naturally conservative, the 
 public school has responded but slowly to this new demand 
 which has come with such a rush. Public elementary and 
 secondary schools have been developed largely on the theory 
 that they were supplementary to vocations. Their end point 
 has been cultural or liberal. A segregation of industrial edu- 
 cation and training has thus come about in many instances 
 whereby an almost complete separation of liberal education 
 
 * Reprint of TECHNICAL EDUCATION BULLETIN, No. 10, published by 
 Teachers College, Columbia University. 
 
 23 
 
24 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 and industrial education has resulted. Whether this segre- 
 gation is not dangerous, and also unnecessary and therefore 
 wasteful, we shall try to indicate after more fully considering 
 the problem in its more fundamental aspects. 
 
 Although slow in responding by adequate courses of study 
 and programs of work, the general school system has not been 
 insensible to the demands made upon it. Two entirely dif- 
 ferent elements have contributed to focus attention and effort 
 upon the problem of readjustment looking to the appropriate 
 recognition of the industrial arts. The one already suggested 
 is the recent demand for a higher degree of skill and efficiency 
 in the industrial worker. The other embraces a number of 
 historic influences which have been developing with increasing 
 clearness in the field of pedagogy since the Renaissance. In 
 the realism of Bacon, Comenius and Pestalozzi ; the naturalism 
 of Rousseau; the doctrines of apperception and many-sided 
 interest of Herbart; the principles of development by partici- 
 pation of Froebel; and the general pragmatism evolved in 
 recent years through the scientific and sociological movements 
 in education in all of these we see a progressively broad- 
 ening tendency to bring the work of the school into a more 
 vital relationship with the immediate world of activities and 
 interests in which the child lives. Xnture study, agriculture, 
 drawing, hand work, manual training -tic art, domestic 
 
 science, housewifery, household arts, and manual arts are all 
 terms for kinds of work which have helped to overcome the 
 isolation between the school and life. But viewed from the 
 standpoints of both the vocations and pedagogy, results have 
 been somewhat disappointing. Degrees of skill and efficiency 
 commensurate with vocational standards have not been at- 
 tained; and thought content has not been sufficiently rich 
 to assure that educational value demanded of a school study. 
 The movement to organize, enrich and more scrupulously to 
 evaluate on the basis of educational worths the field of subject 
 matter in the industrial arts is the movement characterizing 
 the attitude of the school as an institution to-day. 
 
 To meet these common needs those of the vocations and 
 
FUNDAMENTAL VALUES IN INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 25 
 
 those of the child in the most satisfactory way possible means 
 practically a complete revision in our evaluation and selection 
 of subject matter for the whole school curriculum. It means 
 working over the materials and methods of education and 
 training on the basis of the most vital life needs of the present 
 time. Such perspective must be maintained that the part will 
 not be exalted above the whole. Justification for every topic 
 considered will have to be in relationship to some appreciable 
 value and on the basis of some fundamental principle. 
 
 Among the distinctions which it will be necessary to keep x 
 constantly in mind is that of educational value as distinguished \ 
 from merely training value. Training primarily develops skill 
 in a form of activity; educational value means valuean con- 
 trolling conduct. Anything which helps to shape one's attitude 
 of mind, one's habits of thinking, one's standards of appre- 
 ciating or one's bases of choice has educational value in a 
 degree measured by its influence for good in one or more 
 of these directions. Now merely learning a number of neuro- 
 muscular co-ordinations such as those involved in sewing, 
 cooking, woodwork, clay work, or any other form of " manual 
 training " can not be shown to have contributed much to any 
 one of these larger educational values. After getting clear 
 notions of what is to be done, the lower centres of the brain, 
 and the spinal cord are the only parts of the nervous system 
 much employed in these activities. Here is the vital weakness 
 in " manual training " as an educational subject so long as 
 it retains its etymological significance in the character of its 
 work. Mere motor training does not require much use of 
 the frontal lobes of the brain. Repetitions of motor activities 
 for the sake of greater skill soon reduce themselves to the 
 same type and level of activity as practice in penmanship and 
 have no more educational value. That motor activities have 
 educational value is by no means to be ignored; but because 
 of the danger of overestimating them and exploiting them I 
 at the expense of much greater values, it is the more necessary ^\ 
 clearly to distinguish our measures of worth. 
 
 In the foregoing distinctions, it is believed that there lies 
 
26 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 the basis for distinguishing between the appropriate work of 
 the general school system, elementary and secondary, and the 
 specialized school for specific technical training. It is offered 
 that the general school system should provide as a part of its 
 legitimate work thos'c phases of the industrial arts which arc 
 primarily educational; and that whenever specialized training 
 whose chief end point is a high degree of skill, and technical 
 efficiency becomes the primary aim, the work of the segregated 
 trade or vocational school or course should begin. This atti- 
 tude for both the elementary and the secondary schools in the 
 general system would limit work in manipulation of materials 
 and processes of construction actually participated in to those 
 whose purpose is the development of clear ideas and apprecia- 
 tive insights. On sufficient investigation and development, it 
 may appear that if time is given to the hand work of all kinds 
 adequate for the development of industrial intelligence, indus- 
 trial insight and industrial appreciation, all of the demands 
 made from the standpoint of the development of muscular 
 control and co-ordination, constructive instincts, and manipu- 
 lative skills will be accomplished, save as these activities need 
 that refinement and speed which can be acquired <>nly through 
 the repeated practice of the trade or the trade school. 
 
 It is not the purpose of this discussion to enter at all into 
 the problem of the specialized work of the trade school \vhose 
 purpose is frankly the development of skills in specific voca- 
 tional activities, but rather to confine itself to those studies 
 in the industrial arts and their social relationships which are 
 appropriate to the public, democratic elementary and secondary 
 schools. In our zeal to give adequate place to the industrial 
 arts, we shall try to avoid giving an emphasis to their tech- 
 nical content which would make them overshadow that broader 
 education to which they contribute. 
 
 That we may keep our perspective in the problem, we shall 
 rely upon a principle which we believe to be supported alike 
 by psychology, sociology and ethics. Simply stated, this prin- 
 ciple holds that there are more qualities, needs, and forms of 
 activity in which individuals arc alike than in which they are 
 
FUNDAMENTAL VALUES IN INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 27 
 
 different. Those fundamentals of greatest life worth are com- 
 mon to all. They are scarcely dependent upon or involved 
 in vocations at all, excepting as vocations are means to ends. 
 Said Theodore Roosevelt recently, " If a man is himself the 
 right kind of man, he will speedily find among the anthracite 
 miners as among the farmers in the East, or the planters in 
 the South, or the ranchmen in the West, or mechanics or 
 lawyers or bankers, that the vital differences and vital affinities 
 have to do with the quality of the man and not with the acci- 
 dents of his position or labor save as these tend to shape the 
 above mentioned qualities." Those necessary modifications 
 of work based upon individual differences in aptitudes and 
 capacities which differentiate people into appropriate voca- 
 tional groups only intensify the need for the efficient develop- 
 ment of those qualities common to all, for it is in just these 
 elements that differences are hostile ^nd ^hateful to true 
 democracy. 
 
 From the standpoint here proposed, in^iitAu studies would 
 be the same, in the elementary school, for all children, regard- \/ 
 less of sex or 'future vocation the same for prospective doc- 
 tors or lawyers as for prospective mechanics or farmers. The 
 end point is that common knowledge, experience, appreciation, 
 and sympathy which are necessary to effective manhood and 
 womanhood in any life activity. By elementary education 
 we mean just this period of growth in which the content of 
 the curriculum is undifferentiated on the basis of either social 
 or individual specialization, a period in which interests are 
 common and general for all. Growth is toward efficient func- 
 tioning in any field of human activity. Values are all broadly 
 humanistic. 
 
 As an elementary school subject, industrial arts must stand 
 the same test, be measured by the same standards, as any other 
 elementary school subject. Broadly, this test is, first, that it 
 shall consist of a body of thought and experience sufficiently 
 important to human well being to justify acquainting all chil- 
 dren with its content. In the second place, this subject matter 
 must be susceptible of such gradation and treatment that it 
 
28 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 will lend itself to the interests and capacities of school children 
 and to the practical possibilities of school instruction. As a 
 secondary school subject, industrial arts must meet just as 
 fully the test of rich thought content and humanistic values 
 as any other appropriate secondary school subject. Sec- 
 ondary education differs from elementary education chiefly 
 in requiring certain forms of differentiation in response to 
 differences developing in individual interests, capacities, and 
 inclinations in groups of social activities. Interests are still 
 broadly relational to general social life, yet are developing 
 in the direction of special forms of activity. Values are still 
 humanistic but in a more restricted field. Highly developed 
 technical skill is not the chief end point of the handwork. 
 Increased knowledge of scientific principles and processes in 
 industrial fields, maturing judgment in interpreting industrial 
 problems and relationships, and growing standards of indus- 
 trial phases of social life are the elements without which a 
 secondary study of the industrial arts is almost devoid of 
 educational values. 
 
 Based upon this preliminary survey. 1 shall now offer three 
 definite propositions and develop each in some detail : 
 
 First, that the industrial arts, rightly interpreted, contain 
 a body of thought and experience sufficiently vital to human 
 well being to give the subject a place in the elementary and 
 secondary school curriculum on a basis of thorough respecta- 
 bility and validity. 
 
 Second, that properly organized, the industrial arts will 
 involve a revitalizing and motivating of much of the other 
 subject matter of the school curriculum, providing valid tests 
 for selection and elimination on the basis of really, human 
 values. 
 
 Third, that the social and liberal elements in the study of 
 the industrial arts are more significant than are the elements 
 involved in the mere manipulation of materials.. 
 
 That the industries are of vital importance is evident when 
 we recall that matters of food, clothing, shelter, transporta- 
 tion, and numerous other industrial items are topics of almost 
 
FUNDAMENTAL VALUES IN INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 29 
 
 hourly consideration. In 1900, of all of the people in the 
 United States engaged in gainful occupations, 76.3 per cent 
 were employed in productive industry of some kind. It is 
 just because this industrial experience is so vital to the race 
 as a whole, both now and in the past, that it is valid as experi- 
 ence for every child that he may understand and appreciate 
 its significance. 
 
 To live to-day with an intelligent understanding and appre- 
 ciation of the industrial world requires profoundly more 
 knowledge and experience than were required two generations 
 ago. Conditions of to-day make the school the only institu- 
 tion through which this body of experience can be systemat- 
 ically acquired. Looking into the available field it is very 
 easy to see the extent of its content. By the Census Bureau 
 of the United States, there were in this country, in 1900, 354 
 separate industries of a purely manufacturing type with a 
 host of supplementary industrial and commercial occupations 
 concerned with the production, transformation, and distribu- 
 tion of raw materials and finished products. Measured by 
 their relationship to general human well-being many of these 
 are insignificant. But by a rather natural grouping on the 
 basis of materials used, those of greatest importance may 
 readily be resolved into five or six general classes. The five 
 groups suggested by Dean James E. Russell of Teachers Col- 
 lege in the preceding article, include those industries relating 
 respectively to food products, textiles, wood products, iron 
 and other metals, and clay and allied earth products. Our 
 work so far with foods has been called domestic science; with 
 textiles, domestic arts; and with wood, metals, and clay, 
 manual training. The designing and decorating of projects 
 of whatever kind have been included by drawing. But every 
 one of these subjects has been largely formal and the work 
 accomplished with little relationship to the industries repre- 
 sented. The side of execution has been developed to the 
 almost total neglect of thought content or humanistic value. 
 
 Now it is offered that by taking proper units of work from 
 each of these five fields, a subject of study can be developed 
 
30 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 largely taking the place of the four subjects, drawing, manual 
 training, domestic science, and domestic art, which will include 
 the really most vital and fundamental elements in all of these. 
 It is offered that this subject will have a body of thought that 
 will command respect, and that in developing a knowledge 
 and intelligent understanding of social and economic rela- 
 tionships essential to every child, and an appreciation for and 
 sympathy with the work of industrial vocations, it will be 
 as valuable as any other subject in the elementary school. 
 In developing such a course, definite units typical of important 
 industries must be selected. These will have to be graded 
 in such sequence that simple phases are developed in the lower 
 grades, more complex phases as the pupil proceeds into higher 
 grades. The units will have to be offered in such order that 
 there will be provided the proper opportunities and motives 
 for the development of power and some degree of efficiency 
 in the manipulation of materials. The projects in wood, for 
 example, will have to be so selected as to be within the range 
 of possible construction for the respective grades, and will 
 have to be in such sequence as to develop a growing knowledge 
 of the use of tools, and a growing complexity in the principles 
 and processes of construction. But this will be just as easily 
 accomplished if the dominant motive is the thought side of 
 the piece of work as a type study in some large industry as 
 if the chief end point were skillful manipulation. The making 
 of a cabinet in wood, of a garment in textiles, of a cold chisel 
 in iron, of bread, or cheese, or sugar among foods, are all 
 so rich in thought material that every one of them may be 
 taught without any of that formal grind that so often robs 
 all manual school work of any real developmental value. The 
 great point of emphasis for all of these studies in the ele- 
 mentary school is not skill in manipulation is not the art side 
 primarily in any instance. The manipulation of materials 
 work with the hands in wood, iron, textiles, foods, or clays 
 is here for the purpose of helping the mind to grasp the 
 meaning of these industrial activities, to utilize expressive 
 capacity along with acquisition. It is to clarify ideas and 
 
FUNDAMENTAL VALUES IN INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 31 
 
 appreciate meanings, feelings, difficulties, and excellencies, and 
 not to make mechanics or cooks, or dressmakers, or special 
 workers in any other field. Through the work of the school 
 the child must get this fundamental knowledge and experi- 
 ence once furnished by his everyday life. 
 
 I shall now try to suggest a number of units of industrial 
 work which will illustrate possibilities. Recalling the sug- 
 gested grouping into five fields, namely, foods, textiles, woods, 
 metals, and clays and allied earth products, we shall see that 
 each furnishes an extensive quota of subjects. Divisions of 
 foods which readily suggest themselves are cereals, fruits, 
 vegetables, milk products, meats, eggs, and fish. Under 
 cereals we have the commercial processes of milling, starch 
 making, sugar and oil manufacture, canning, and cooking. 
 Several of the most fundamental processes involved are pos- 
 sible of demonstration by the children in the schools. The 
 grinding of corn and wheat may be accomplished in the vari- 
 ous ways in which this has developed historically; a mill may 
 be visited where the work is done in a small but modern way; 
 the various products from milling the kinds of flour and 
 meal made may be shown by samples and their relative con- 
 stituents and values learned as well as the methods of their 
 respective production ; finally through books, the large descrip- 
 tive phases of the milling industry may be taken up. The work 
 would not all come in one grade. Simple cracking of grains 
 by stones and grinding by the mortar and pestle may be taken 
 up in a very early grade; visits to mills may come later, in 
 the fourth or fifth grade; and the larger phases of the industry 
 considered perhaps later in a more systematic study of indus- 
 trial geography. Starch and sugar making may also be 
 demonstrated as large industries. Canning still has a small 
 place as a domestic industry and may serve as a point of 
 departure for the larger industry. For fruits and vegetables, 
 studies are possible in canning, evaporating, preserving, pick- 
 ling, sugar making from beets and grapes and cooking. 
 Under milk products are the industries of butter and cheese 
 making, and of condensed milk manufacture. In the study 
 
32 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 of meats, eggs, and fish, while little can be done comparable 
 with the handling of these products by large packing houses, 
 simple processes of drying, canning, preserving, pickling, and 
 cooking can be taken up, and the simpler by-products, as soap 
 making and fertilizers, can be studied first hand. In none of 
 these, not even the cooking, is it to be assumed that children 
 in the grades, would develop much skill on the art side no 
 more than it is to be assumed that their study of poetry, pic- 
 tures, or music in the grades will make poets, artists or 
 musicians of them. But through the participation in the 
 typical processes of these industries in so far as this is pos- 
 sible, as points of departure for the study of the larger phases 
 of the industries from pictures, museum materials, and books, 
 the children will have become intelligent and appreciative in 
 many elements wherein they are now ignorant and unsym- 
 pathetic. 
 
 In textiles, the four great staples, wool, cotton, linen, and 
 silk, may be studied in all of the fundamental processes of 
 their manufacture. For wool, it is possible in lower grades 
 to begin with a sheep pelt and have the children themselves 
 accomplish the washing, combing, carding, spinning, dyeing, 
 weaving, fulling, shearing, shrinking and pressing of the 
 wool. Later studies may be given to the commercial methods 
 of manufacture, to the differences between worsteds and other 
 wools, to the content of felt, shoddy, cashmere, mohair, alpaca, 
 and camel's hair. In the study of cotton, the ginning, clean- 
 ing, carding, and other processes may be reproduced by the 
 children. Mercerization and other commercial processes may 
 come in upper grades. The various combinations of cotton 
 and wool, testing, dyeing, cleaning, washing, and numerous 
 other topics, as well as descriptive studies of the great milling 
 centres and processes, of wages, of the social conditions of 
 labor, of the extent and meaning of these industries, of allied 
 industries as custom clothing manufacture, sweat shops, and 
 so on. may all be taken up in their proper relationships in 
 upper grades. Flax may be grown in the school garden and 
 rippled, retted, broken, scutched, heckled, spun, dyed, woven, 
 
FUNDAMENTAL VALUES IN INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 33 
 
 and bleached. The children of several schools have done most 
 of this, making their own apparatus. Allied textile materials 
 may be studied in this connection jute, hemp, manila, sisal, 
 China grass, and other important tropical fibres. Silk may 
 be grown, spun, woven, and dyed if desired, as the eggs of 
 the silk-worm may now be had for the asking. The textile 
 field with its manifold phases and its profound importance 
 offers a wealth of material. An art education of the highest 
 order lies latent in its study. Studies in color harmony, design 
 and decoration in textiles themselves, in dress, laces, rugs, 
 carpets, curtains, and other furnishings of many kinds are 
 of everyday importance and the raw material for such studies 
 lies all about us. For woods, we may study milling, rough 
 and finished, carpentering, cabinet making, box making, and 
 cooperage first hand. Not to make carpenters or coopers or \ 
 cabinet makers, but to learn the kinds and qualities of woods \ 
 used and the reasons, the processes of handling and the rea- 
 sons, the tools used and the reasons, the stains, varnishes, and 
 paints used and the reasons, the appropriateness of selections 
 of wood and design to the purposes, the relation of wood- 
 working industries to other industries and to our whole social 
 life these are the aims. In metal work we can easily demon- 
 strate simple processes of smelting, forging, molding and 
 casting, steel making, and milling in iron; we can show plat- 
 ing, pressing, riveting, and soldering in tin; rolling and cast- 
 ing in zinc and lead; and plating, engraving, and hammering 
 in copper, illustrative of the same processes in nickel, silver, 
 and gold. A simple demonstration is here possible of many 
 processes with little more than a test tube or crucible, a gas 
 or alcohol lamp, and the raw materials. The smaller forms 
 of these industries are further illustrated in blacksmith shops, 
 foundries, tin-shops, and jeweler's shops. This field of metal 
 work is bristling with opportunities for fine art education not 
 yet begun to be appreciated. It is not that these studies are 
 impossible that has kept them out of the schools but that we 
 have not thought them worth while. For clay and allied earth 
 products, we have possible studies in the processes of pottery 
 
34 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 making, the making of brick and tile, stone cutting, lime and 
 cement construction, and perhaps porcelain and glass. Besides 
 these five larger fields, foods, textiles, woods, metals, and clay 
 and allied earth products, there are a number of miscellaneous 
 industries basketry, paper making, printing and illustrating, 
 book-binding, upholstering, leather work, making of toys and 
 games, making electrical apparatus, and a few others of large 
 import which may be utilized. 
 
 That drawing is adequately provided for is clearly evident 
 when we remember that, rightly taught, every project in 
 wood, metals, textiles, or clay would have to be designed and 
 that many projects in paper, wood, textiles, and clay would 
 call for decoration. Appropriate design and decoration the 
 largest motives in all phases of drawing would call into 
 usage practically every form of line, light and shade, and color 
 together with underlying principles and great variety of 
 application, suitable to elementary school children. This 
 work, together with the illustrative drawing in other subjects, 
 and the development and drill work necessary for these w< mid 
 furnish adequate opportunity for the development of both 
 such intelligence and power as are possible in the grades. The 
 work in all phases of industrial construction would furnish 
 material for cultivation of appreciation. Masterpieces would 
 be necessary in all lines as a part of the plan of study good 
 and artistic pieces of wood work, of metal work, of textiles, 
 of china and other pottery, would all be helpful and stimulating 
 as well as would the products of fine art in pictures, statuary, 
 and architecture in the study of decorative design. Studies 
 of color harmony in clothing, in household equipment car- 
 pets, curtains, and wall-papers, in furniture, and in china are 
 productive of the most useful type of cultivated taste. All 
 artisanship leads to art. 
 
 I have tried to show by this brief enumeration of a few 
 typical industries the wealth of possibilities in a field vital 
 to us all but of which most of us are profoundly ignorant. 
 As I have grouped these four lines of work now called manual 
 training, drawing, domestic science, and domestic art, it per- 
 
FUNDAMENTAL VALUES IN INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 35 
 
 haps occurs to one that nothing is included of agriculture 
 or other forms of producing raw materials. While our broader 
 term industrial includes these, it is found that for purposes 
 of classification, all of that matter having to do with pro- 
 duction, or with scientific processes, as such, for the elementary 
 school, may well be placed with the work in nature study. 
 Those descriptive phases of each industry taken which cannot 
 be demonstrated or observed first hand, together with the 
 transportation, trade, and allied activities in the distribution 
 of commodities, make up the appropriate subject matter of 
 industrial and commercial geography. Although the three 
 phases will constantly overlap, points of emphasis may be 
 illustrated by the use of one or two units. In the study of 
 iron, for example, the oxidation of iron by the use of coke 
 in a test tube or crucible as a demonstration of a scientific 
 process may be clearly called nature study. Melting down 
 pig iron or making steel for the purpose of casting, rolling, 
 and milling and studying these processes as typical of great 
 industrial operations together with visiting a foundry and 
 metal shop to see the processes on a larger scale, may be 
 called industrial art. Studying the location of iron mines and 
 the methods of mining, the transportation of ores, the location 
 and description of the chief iron and steel plants, a considera- 
 tion of the great variety and character of iron and steel 
 products, and the distribution and trade of these products, are 
 appropriate topics in industrial and commercial geography. 
 In the raising of corn, questions of soils, methods of fertiliz- 
 ing, drainage, time and methods of planting, cultivation and 
 harvest, insect pests, relation of birds to corn growing, and 
 all other questions of this kind until the corn is placed upon 
 the market belong with nature study or agriculture. But 
 when the corn is taken to a starch factory, and the processes 
 of starch making begin, the work is in the field of industrial 
 art. The location of corn belts, of starch factories, and the 
 transportation and trade of starch are matters of geography. 
 However, we need think of no hard and fast lines of distinc- 
 tion. It is not what we call the work that is essential. That 
 
36 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 we somehow get it provided for reasonably without crowding 
 is the essential point. 
 
 Let it be not thought that the organization of this type of 
 work will over-emphasize the utilitarian. We are prone to 
 forget how really little of genuine culture^ the majority of 
 pupils get from the elementary school as it is. Something 
 must be done to make the school seem, and in fact be, more 
 really worth while. In the report of the Commissioner of 
 Education for 1908, we learn that in 1906-07 the proportion 
 of children of school age, from five to eighteen years, who 
 were actually attending school was 69.6 per cent. In 1900 
 the proportion was 72.4 per cent. This shows a loss of 2.8, 
 or nearly 3 per cent. Parents are challenging the schools 
 and are permitting, or even encouraging, their children tc 
 withdraw from school that they may do something useful. 
 The remoteness of school work from life must be over- 
 come. The use of the industries is basic as a material out 
 of which and upon which to build that culture of hand and 
 brain and soul which makes the individual alert, inventive, 
 intelligent, appreciative, and moral in any vocational activity 
 which either choice or circumstance may impose. Such treat- 
 ment of the industries as is proposed would vitalize every 
 subject of the school curriculum. The subject matter of arith- 
 metic, geography, history, and English is largely the materials, 
 the sources, the relationships, the evolution, and the social 
 significance of man's activities in procuring food, clothing, 
 and shelter, his first and most fundamental needs. Again I 
 would say, have no fear of the term utilitarian as a basic 
 principle for educational activity. Culturetriat is genuine 
 is founded upon and vitally involved in utilitarian activities. 
 It is but the expression of these most fundamental utilitarian 
 and social relationships in their idealistic aspects that gives us 
 much of our most cherished art, literature, and music. 
 
 By the introduction of these forms of study the method of 
 our work is also markedly improved. Processes and prin- 
 ciples are approached with a real motive. Situations are pre- 
 sented as problems to be solved. Their solution often involves 
 
FUNDAMENTAL VALUES IN INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 37 
 
 constructions in laboratories and shops, excursions, investiga- 
 tions, and questions of people and books. Throughout, the 
 social relationships the principles of interdependence, need 
 of ethical co-operation, and the industrial and commercial 
 unity of mankind may be brought vividly to the conscious- 
 ness of the pupils. In studying the evolution of vocations, 
 institutions, and customs of the past history in all its phases 
 constant comparisons may be made to show the bearings of 
 these early developments upon conditions of the present. The 
 skill in building, in the carving of stone, in the making of 
 tapestries, in fine work in brass and other metals, in painting 
 upon canvas or upon wall spaces, in the staining of glass, in 
 the making of fine China and other potter's wares would all 
 lead into appreciative studies sooner or later of such men 
 as Phidias, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Christopher Wren, 
 Josiah Wedgwood, William Morris, and a host of other worth- 
 ies quite as important as the names of the military heroes 
 whose names alone stand for history in the minds of most 
 young people. In present-day references, this work will 
 establish an appreciation of our dependence upon the well 
 being of our foreign neighbors for supplies and markets; a 
 permanent attitude of fellow feeling for mankind wherever 
 found; and an attitude making against prejudice and snob- 
 bishness. 
 
 It is surprising to follow out the implications of this study 
 of the industries in their bearings upon the other subjects 
 of study. The work is bristling with problems which con- 
 stitute the real materials of arithmetic usable in common, 
 practical life. Arithmetic should help to teach us the economic 
 necessity of the intelligent use of raw materials, the avoid- 
 ance of waste, and the conservation of resources, as well as 
 its fundamental technical operations. It might easily be 
 shown that the content of nearly every other school subject 
 is vitally enriched. Nearly every unit of appropriate indus- 
 trial subject matter reaches out into the field of geology, 
 geography, history, social science, mathematics, economics, 
 literauire and art. 
 
38 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 In the reorganization here proposed, there is no enlarge- 
 ment of the curriculum in the number of subjects, but rather 
 a reduction. For the four former subjects, drawing, manual 
 training, domestic science, and domestic art, we shall now have 
 the one subject, industrial arts. This one subject, representing 
 a content of thought and experience rich and vital in human 
 values, may take its place in the elementary school as dignified 
 and respectable as geography or history or arithmetic. 
 
 From all points of view that of intrinsic interest in the 
 content, that of the vital relation between the content and 
 life, that of the more substantial bearing of the work upon 
 any calling the child may afterward follow, that of vitalizing 
 the other subjects of study, and that of making the school 
 really democratic by furnishing equal opportunity for the 
 development of all kinds of normal minds and aptitudes 
 from all of these points of view, this plan seems to commend 
 itself as desirable for the elementary school. 
 
 For the secondary school the problem changes somewhat 
 by virtue of the need for differentiation of courses for various 
 types of students. When this differentiation rests upon the 
 natural basis of the needs of growing children it will certainly 
 begin more nearly at the close of the sixth grade than of 
 the eighth. As has already been suggested, the solution pro- 
 posed is for a common, democratic secondary school with 
 courses of study adapted to the needs of those five groups 
 of life callings, the professional, commercial, agricultural, 
 industrial and household. That these courses may be equally 
 democratic, each must be as rich in educational or life values 
 as any of the others. Naturally some subjects would probably 
 be taken in common by all students. But others would be 
 elected because of their bearings upon the natural interests, 
 aptitudes and inclinations of the student. The chief concern 
 about any subject introduced should be its richness in valid 
 educational content. If studies for the industrial and house- 
 hold arts groups are made up largely of scientific and 
 geographical principles and problems in direct relationship to 
 shop and laboratory work; of the historic settings and rela- 
 
FUNDAMENTAL VALUES IN INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 39 
 
 tionships of the industries as they have developed; of the 
 larger economic and social values of the industries; of the 
 thoughts and feelings enkindled by man's reflection upon and 
 emotional interpretation of the meanings and higher signifi- 
 cance of his work as expressed in his literature, music, and 
 art (if the studies in metals, woods, and clays are all shot 
 through and through with these vital human values, then will 
 the work be truly educational and cultural. ^ v 
 
 There would be much concentrated attention upon the 
 processes and practice in the dominant industries studied, of 
 course. Shop work in wood, metals, and clay for boys, and 
 in textiles and foods for girls should be as rigidly intensive 
 and thorough for students electing industrial and household 
 studies as are foreign languages for classical students. Appre- 
 ciation of technical excellence can not be fully developed 
 without active participation in production. Attempts to do 
 skillful work are necessary fully to appreciate its meaning. 
 That " inner felt series/' so emphasized by Professor James, 
 is an essential to the highest appreciation in an art activity. 
 Probably two usual periods each school day in actually doing 
 shop or laboratory work of some kind could be required and 
 justified on an educational basis. So long as the student is 
 dealing primarily with ideas, with activities full of meaning, 
 and not merely with hand manipulations, the work has educa- V 
 tional worth. 
 
 I have maintained that this is not specifically vocational 
 training no more so for the industrial or household or com- 
 mercial groups of students than is their appropriate work for 
 the professional group. Values emphasized throughout are 
 human. The end point is primarily the intelligent and efficient 
 development of the boy and the girl, not of the industrial 
 commodities which they are to produce. But I believe it is 
 equally valid to maintain that this form of education is of the 
 very highest value as applied to vocational work. Every 
 week the boy spends in such a school should make him just 
 so much better qualified to enter an industrial vocation with 
 power for more rapid adjustment to its needs, and growth 
 
40 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 toward mastery of its technic. Statistics already beginning 
 to accumulate point to the fact that a boy with a high school 
 course including industrial subjects will have a much greater 
 earning capacity in a trade the second year after graduation 
 than will the boy who left school at the beginning of the 
 secondary period and worked continuously at the trade during 
 the whole four years spent by the first boy in school. From 
 the vocational standpoint, viewed in its narrowest sense, such 
 an education pays. Viewed from the broader standpoint of 
 citizenship and efficient life in its fulness there is incompar- 
 ably more in possibility for the boy with such an education 
 than for the boy without it. 
 
 In making this appeal for a type of public school education 
 for industrial workers, I am not condemning the numerous 
 technical, continuation and other supplementary schools found 
 in many parts of our country for those already out of school 
 and at work. Nearly a million young men and women in the 
 United States are working in such schools to-day, be^ 
 they failed to obtain proper education in the public schools. 
 Many of them do this work in the evening after the strenu- 
 ous day's work of some industrial or commercial vocation. 
 These are young men and women of sterling quality or they 
 would not spend several evenings of each week for a number 
 of years in their endeavor for self improvement. Let us have 
 such schools so long as a need exists for them. But to me, 
 these one million young people are just one million reasons 
 why the public elementary and secondary schools should 
 awake to their responsibility and so establish the work of their 
 daily offerings that no one may be driven out of them to secure 
 rthy education. To me this hue and cry for separate and 
 numerous schools for industrial training is a most scathing 
 indictment of the practical efficiency and the boasted democracy 
 of our whole school system. The Massachusetts Industrial 
 Commission found, by personal visitations to 3,157 families 
 whose children had dropped out of school from the middle 
 and upper grades, that 76 per cent of them would have kept 
 the children in school if they had felt that it was really worth 
 
FUNDAMENTAL VALUES IN INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 41 
 
 while. The whole discussion on this question is a direct 
 charge that the subject matter, interests, and methods of the 
 schools are remote from the real, vital, life business of our \ 
 day. There is a valid demand that the materials and work 
 of the schools should be all shot through with the most funda- 
 mental relationships of daily life activities. Not the organiza- 
 tion of a new kind of school, nor yet the introduction of new 
 subjects into the curriculum is the permanent solution of this 
 problem. It lies rather in the building over of our common 
 subjects of study to fit the needs and interests of our day. 
 And this is just as true of the secondary school as of the ele- 
 mentary school. 
 
 So far, I have tried to indicate that the industrial arts 
 rightly interpreted contain a rich and worthy body of thought 
 and experience, and that properly organized they involve the 
 revitalizing of practically the whole school curriculum. May 
 we now dwell for a little upon the larger social and cultural 
 elements involved in their appropriate study. I have alluded 
 to the fact that as a common humanity we have more interests 
 and qualities which are alike than which are different. In 
 practically all of the great life values by which we measure 
 human worths, our standards are wholly independent of voca- 
 tions, as such. To confine effort to those processes alone by 
 which man secures food, clothing and shelter stops at a point 
 which is on the same level as the dominant life interests of 
 squirrels, rabbits and wolves the provision of mere creature 
 comforts. The higher ideals of human life are above this 
 plane. Making book racks, or sewing on buttons, or forging 
 cold chisels, or making soap, are, in themselves, not worth . 
 much in relation to those higher values of love, social service, 
 contemplation of the meanings of life, and the enjoyment of 
 the products of art, literature, music and social intercourse. 
 Thousands upon thousands of our working people are denied 
 most of these higher privileges under present school and social 
 conditions. Many, perhaps even more of us, are so uncon- 
 scious of these conditions and limitations that we feel no 
 obligation or opportunity to remove them. By many who do 
 
42 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 know these repugnant and unwholesome conditions, they are 
 ignored. In our short-sighted way, we are sometimes even 
 advocating and encouraging a system of narrow vocational 
 teaching which will still further exploit the helplessness of 
 the workingman and draw more closely the limitations about 
 the lives of his children. Not a little of the advocacy of voca- 
 tional training of to-day is directly encouraging the evils of 
 child labor. Not a little of it is directly preparing men to 
 attack our property, our institutions, and even our lives in 
 their attempts to cure evils of which they are the victims but 
 whose causes they radically misunderstand. The problems 
 of democracy can not be settled by dynamite nor by the dis- 
 trust and opposition of classes whose interests are really com- 
 mon. Are not these questions of the political and social lives 
 and ideals of our industrial people of as vital significance to 
 us as their capacity for material production? Let us look 
 into certain facts that we may interpret their bearings. 
 
 In the manufacturing industries of the United States, there 
 were at work in 1900, over 168.000 children under sixteen 
 years of age, both an actual and a proportionate increase over 
 1890. In the report of the Government Investigation Corn- 
 ion on the condition of women and child wage earners 
 in the United States, just issued, we find that in New York 
 City, in one of the largest industries 96.6 per cent of the 
 factories employing women and children were violating some 
 provision of the child labor laws. Thirty-three per cent of 
 the factories visited violated at least one of the provisions of 
 the law regulating the hours of labor for women and girls. 
 In some of our states men are working twelve or fourteen 
 hours a day for seven days a week while other men are out 
 of work, driven to chanty or crime to support their families. 
 Laxness everywhere prevails in the enforcement of the laws 
 we have to protect children and other workers. But in the 
 matter of legislation itself the story is even more dishearten- 
 ing. It is doubtful whether in a single state the workman is 
 fully protected from loss of life or injury by compensation 
 from the employer in those vocations involving risk of life 
 
FUNDAMENTAL VALUES IN INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 43 
 
 or limb. Courts even interpret constitutions as placing prop- 
 erty rights above human rights. Seven of our states exempt 
 children entirely from most of the restrictions on child labor 
 in the canning industries on the ground that these industries 
 deal with perishable materials thus setting a higher value on 
 sweet corn, tomatoes and beans than upon child life and its 
 rights to natural growth! 
 
 Ten states permit children under fourteen to work in fac- 
 tories and workshops. Eight states still let boys of twelve work 
 in mines. Fifteen states permit children under sixteen to work 
 at night. Thirty-five states do not have the protection of the 
 eight hour day for their working children. Although given 
 expression over half a century ago in England, Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's " Cry of the Children " is charged with as much mean- 
 ing and need for response in America to-day. As was true 
 then, also to-day, many children 
 
 " are weeping in the playtime of the others, 
 
 In the country of the free 
 
 They know the grief of man without its wisdom; 
 They sink in man's despair without its calm; 
 Are slaves without the liberty of Christdom; 
 Are martyrs by the pang without the palm." 
 
 And to those who know details of shop life, and of the 
 home life in the thirteen thousand tenement houses in New 
 York City licensed for the making and finishing of clothing 
 where the labor of all members of the family can be utilized 
 without reference to age or factory law, Thomas Hood's 
 " Song of the Shirt " chants a message as true for us to-day 
 as it was a century ago in a land across the sea. Women, 
 men, and children as well, here: 
 
 " Stitch stitch stitch, 
 
 In ooverty, hunger and dirt, 
 Sewing at once with a double thread, 
 A shroud as well as a shirt." 
 
 Government agents found such women and men working 
 on garments while children in the house were suffering from 
 
44 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 contagious diseases, these garments to be sent out to the trade 
 all over our country. In 1822, Daniel Webster, in his Ply- 
 mouth Oration uttered these words: "I fear that they (the 
 people) may place too implicit confidence in their public 
 servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in 
 this way they may be dupes of designing men and become the 
 
 instruments of their undoing " In verification of 
 
 this prophecy, note the words of one of these Xew York 
 employers who finds home work profitable: " If public opinion 
 is against tenement-made goods it cuts no figure whatever." 
 And this in a democracy where the sovereign power lies in this 
 same public opinion in just that measure in which it chooses 
 to exert itself! One is reminded very much of the story of 
 a certain man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and 
 fell among thieves; and all of those upon whom fortune had 
 imposed the really greatest obligation for helpful service 
 passed by upon the other side. Democracy can prevail among 
 a people only by developing conceptions of social obligations 
 and duty which will make vocational differences in life sink 
 into relative insignificance beside the greater common well- 
 being of our whole people. The problem includes both the 
 worker himself and those whom he has trusted with political 
 and other social authority and responsibility. Justice and 
 intelligence in those who are led must find co-operative justice 
 and intelligence in their leaders. Common ideals must actu- 
 ate both. 
 
 In seeking for this common denominator of experience in 
 establishing common ideals, I submit that the same great 
 appeals made to men and women of culture by the best 
 products of man's creative genius are universal. The same 
 masterpieces of literature, art, and music which stimulate 
 appreciation, aspiration, and deeds of service among men and 
 women who practice law, medicine and theology appeal just 
 as strongly to men and women who practice in woodwork, 
 metals, or textiles when these masterpieces are presented to 
 them aright. When dramas or concerts of a high order are 
 
FUNDAMENTAL VALUES IN INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 45 
 
 offered in the New Theatre, or the Metropolitan Opera House, 
 or in the parks especially to the people of industrial and com- 
 mercial vocations, our newspaper editors manifest surprise 
 that these people are so appreciative, and so uplifted. It would 
 only be surprising if they were not. The distribution of 
 human nature in its fundamental elements is democratic. 
 
 Securing a point of contact for the working man with the 
 products of genius other than that which is mechanical seems 
 to be one of the great difficulties. This difficulty certainly lies 
 partly in the deplorably low and insufficient ideals and meth- 
 ods in the selecting and teaching of masterpieces in literature, 
 art, music, and history in the. public schools. The narrow- 
 ness in selection and the academic method of instruction both 
 contribute to the sad fact that these subjects often fail entirely 
 to awaken any appreciative response in the boys and girls 
 to whom they are taught. The literature, art, and music do 
 not all need to be about industrial activities to reach the life 
 interests of the individual workers. They too have the prob- 
 lems and fears and hopes that find comfort in the expressions 
 of the best thoughts and feelings of the master poets, artists, 
 and musicians. Man must have an anchorage in something 
 of permanent worth to which he may relate the efforts of 
 his daily life. " Man's reach should exceed his grasp," said 
 Browning's Del Sarto. It is perspective, character, idealism, 
 appreciation of higher possibilities that all men need to make 
 them rise to realization of their fullest capacities. " The hand 
 can never execute anything higher than the character can 
 inspire," said Emerson. 
 
 Our workingman's character is our concern quite as much 
 as the cunning of his hand. To develop this attitude of mind 
 that will give the man an appreciation of the meaning and 
 significance of his work is the problem. That great and un- 
 realized possibilities lie in the appeals of the literary master- 
 pieces which might be appropriately used in schools, an exam- 
 ination of available material will certainly reveal. Points of 
 contact almost direct with the craftsman's work are found in 
 the best contributions of the great masters. Go with George 
 
46 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 Eliot into the shop of one Antonio Stradivarius, a maker of 
 violins, and hear his words to his profligate artist friend: 
 
 " \Yho draws a line and satisfies his soul, 
 Making it crooked where it should be straight? 
 
 God be praised, 
 
 Antonio Stradivarius has an eye 
 
 That winces at false work and loves the true. ... 
 
 'Tis God gives skill. 
 
 But not without men's hands. He could not make 
 
 Antonio Stradivari's violins 
 
 Without Antonio." 
 
 This conception of the working-man's co-operation with 
 God in the progressive creation of the social world lifts the 
 craftsman from the plane of artisanship to that of art, no 
 matter what the work may be. Emerson identifies man with 
 the Creator in this resolution of man's world to his needs in 
 the lines: 
 
 " The hand that rounded Peter's dome, 
 And groined the aisles of Christian Rome 
 Wrought in a sad sincerity; 
 Himself from God he could not free; 
 lie huilded better than he knew; 
 The conscious stone to beauty grew." 
 
 The heroism of genius in the service of industry is appre- 
 ciated and exalted again and again in the messages of litera- 
 ture. Longfellow pays high tribute to the world's great pot- 
 ters in his Kcramtts. He also shows his appreciation of the 
 craftsman's own delight in his work as his Michael Angelo 
 says : 
 
 " In happy hours, when the imagination 
 Wakes like a wind at midnight, and the soul 
 Trembles in all its leaves, it is a joy 
 To be uplifted upon its wings, and listen 
 To the prophetic voices in the air 
 That call us onward. Then the work we do 
 Is a delight, and the obedient hand 
 
 . er grows weary " 
 
 Shakespeare, Browning, Tennyson, Kipling, Carlyle, George 
 Eliot, Dickens. Victor Hugo, Emerson and many others whose 
 perspective of social relationships was broad and deep, have 
 given us much that has peculiar fitness for the man whose 
 
FUNDAMENTAL VALUES IN INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 47 
 
 vocational contribution is made by the united cunning of 
 brain and hand. 
 
 Would not the acquaintance of the boy and girl with such 
 master appeals from literature showing that there are points 
 of common interest with their everyday work lead them to 
 set a new value upon literary treasures? It is not his work 
 in itself that is so destructive to the spiritual life of the indus- 
 trial worker. It is rather that he has so little else in his life. 
 In Shop, Browning utters a protest against the narrowness 
 of life which is so characteristic of our day : 
 
 " Because a man has shop to mind 
 In time and plaoe, since flesh must live, 
 Needs spirit lack all life behind. 
 All stray thoughts, fancies fugitive. 
 All loves except what trade can give?" 
 
 One of the great purposes of any worthy education is to 
 teach men and women how to use their time of leisure so 
 that it is an uplift to them rather than a stumbling block. 
 They must be taught to look up for their pleasures and not 
 down. If history, literature, art, and music are to reach out 
 through life and enrich its leisure as well as to dignify and 
 ennoble its work, the interest in these and the appreciation of 
 their possibilities must be cultivated in the schools. History 
 certainly has a large functional mission here in the life of the 
 workingman. We are the sum of the whole past; and the 
 whole past is needed to explain us. I mean by history that 
 crystallized experience of the race in solving the problems 
 of human progress, that study of the past which enables the 
 student to penetrate and interpret the life about him. It is 
 that study of the past which will stimulate activity, cultivate 
 appreciation of values as to what is worth while, develop 
 insight and judgment in making choices, enter functionally 
 into the direction of experience. " The highest effect of art 
 is to make new artists," said Emerson. Nothing so stimu- 
 lates creative activity as the proper study of history. Our 
 industrial worker needs to know Palissy, Watt, Arkwright, 
 Morse, and Edison, but quite as much he needs to know 
 
48 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 Moses, and Homer, and Dante, and Shakespeare, and 
 Beethoven, and Wagner. Practical progress is forced upon 
 him by the workaday world, but he can win for himself the 
 currents of spiritual force and stimulation from the supermen 
 of the past in these idealistic fields only by communion with 
 them. Literature, art, and music are studied appropriately 
 in the public schools only when they cultivate interest in and 
 appreciation of man's evolution toward a fuller expression of 
 his ideas and ideals of the true, the beautiful, and the good. 
 Industry itself may be so studied that it will lead one to appre- 
 ciate that its ultimate end is to utilize the material world in 
 the development of man's best qualities that this is really 
 most of all a psychological and social world and not a world" 
 merely of material problems and processes. 
 
 The need has never been greater for the individual to 
 exert a wise and intelligent force for social control. The 
 live political and social issues of to-day are of especial sig- 
 nificance to the working man. Some of the most pressing 
 problems confronting us are those of the relationship of 
 organized capital and organized labor, of property rights and 
 human rights as involved in the claims of working men and 
 women to reasonable protection of life, limb, and health, 
 physical and moral; of the elimination of the evils of child 
 labor: of the regulation of predatory corporations and inter- 
 
 of the appropriate disposal of public servants who vio- 
 late their trust ; and of other large questions of social read- 
 justment, all involving every citizen directly or indirectly. 
 That such tragedies as the recent Washington Place fire in 
 Xew York City, the removal of John Mitchell from the 
 
 nal Civic Federation by the Miners' Union, and the 
 method of selecting the junior senator from Illinois, should 
 all occur within a past so recent indicates the need of an 
 awakened public conscience as applied to all forms of social 
 intelligence and social control. Moreover a desire for a larger 
 
 nal participation in political life is surely asserting itself. 
 The certainty of the early provision for the popular election 
 of United States senators, the general enactment of primary 
 

 ^FUNDAMENTAL VALUES IN INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 49 
 
 election laws, the extension of the right of initiative and 
 referendum, and of the attainment of suffrage responsibilities 
 by women all mark a very definite forward step in the evolu- 
 tion of democracy. With over seventy-five per cent of our 
 people engaged in productive industry of some kind, we 
 must look well to the development in these industrial groups 
 of that insight, intelligence, and appreciation necessary to their 
 functioning as sovereign citizens. If we are really to have 
 a democracy it must be an intelligent democracy truly appre- 
 ciative of the highest human values. 
 
 In conclusion, a brief summary of the larger points in the 
 foregoing is offered. First, it has been proposed that any 
 education of vital worth must look fundamentally to the de- 
 velopment of those qualities and functions which make us alike 
 more than of those which make us different, not ignoring 
 in any sense those individual differences taken account of by 
 sound pedagogy; second, that the subject matter of the indus- 
 trial arts includes a body of thought rich in values for human 
 well-being; third, that the appropriate development of the 
 curriculum in elementary and secondary schools with indus- 
 trial arts properly co-ordinated provides reorganizing stand- 
 ards of value, and motivation for parts of nearly every other 
 subject; and fourth, that in the elementary and secondary 
 schools the coming into a participating and appreciating ex- 
 perience of this body of thought is of more importance than 
 the development of mere technical skill in the manipulation 
 of materials. It must not be forgotten that this discussion 
 has not included the specific trade training represented by 
 trade courses or trade schools. 
 
 I have in no measure been insensible to the importance and 
 values of motor development and of all forms of manual 
 activity involved in industrial arts processes, nor have I mini- 
 mized these. I have but tried to impress the principle that 
 these activities are but parts of a larger problem which is 
 no less than the development of efficient manhood and woman- 
 hood. Vocation is a means to an end. Life in its most 
 abundant form is above merely making a living. 
 
50 INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 
 
 Industrial Arts, as a school subject, is the distilled experi- 
 ence of man in his resolution of natural materials to his needs, 
 for creature comfort, to the end that he may more richly 
 live his spiritual life. But this experience must ever be in due 
 relationship to the experience of the race in living this spiritual 
 life itself or our true purpose is defeated. The making of 
 products in wood, metals, textiles, clay, or food materials, in 
 themselves, has relatively little of high spiritual value. The 
 test of all lies in the spirit, the meaning, the significance of 
 the work. Working for the product alone or for the pay alone 
 is altogether different from working in the spirit of Stradi- 
 varius when he proclaimed that not God Himself " could 
 make Antonio Stradivari's violins without Antonio." 
 
 The maximum of industrial efficiency is greatest among / 
 men who feel the relationship of their work to life as a whole. 
 \Ve have no fear of a mere utilitarianism from a study of the 
 industries if it is made but the basis and point of departure 
 to values of permanent worth, inspiring to intelligent; crea- \ 
 tive service. No activity in human life can be made really 
 significant unless we interpret this as most fundamentally a 
 world of life purposes, moral worths, and spiritual ideals. 
 The Master teacher gave us the watchword for guidance long 
 ago when he proclaimed that " Life is more than meat and 
 the body is more than raiment." 
 
 The problem of to-day is that of a fundamental readjust- 
 ment of the school's work in terms of present-day life needs, 
 all viewed in their proper perspective. Under this readjust- 
 ment the industrial arts will receive that attention and that / 
 emphasis which are an appropriate measure of their impor- 
 tance in life itself. 
 

THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW 
 
 
 r 
 
 DEC 101915 
 
 FEB 5 1920 
 
 DEC 15 t9!5 * 
 
 APR 15 Mb JUL 1 
 
 \\& 
 
 1926 
 
 B 5 1916 
 
RSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY