Kerschensteiner 
 Three lectures on vocational training
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 THREE LECTURES ON 
 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 . 
 By DR. GEORG KERSCHENSTEINER 
 
 Director of Education in Munich and Corresponding 
 
 Member of the Royal Academy of 
 
 Applied Sciences in Erfurt. 
 
 DELIVERED IN AMERICA UNDER THE AUSPICES 
 
 OF THE NATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE 
 
 PROMOTION OF INDUSTRIAL 
 
 EDUCATION 
 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
 THE COMMERCIAL CLUB OF CHICAGO 
 ion
 
 / 
 
 THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF CONTINUATION 
 SCHOOLS 
 
 The wealth of a country depends not only on the natural 
 riches of its soil, but also on the men who turn these riches 
 to account. It has always been the aim of industrial states, 
 or of states that desired to become industrial, to produce human 
 material more and more fitted for their task. It was prin- 
 cipally this object that induced absolute monarchs in Europe 
 to establish primary schools. These schools were to contribute 
 tpward making industries, or, as they were then called, manu- 
 factures, a more productive source of state revenue. 
 
 But the farther we penetrate into the question of educating 
 the masses to industrial capacity, the more we recognize that 
 the problem before us is not special but general, that it is in 
 fact nothing less than the problem of educating the whole man. 
 Educational works in the United States are full of this dis- 
 covery. In a description of the Lynn works Alexander 
 Magnus says : 
 
 There are three main problems that enter into production : the ma- 
 chine problem, the material problem, the men problem. The latter is the 
 most difficult problem, but also the most important one, in competitive 
 activity. 
 
 In an article in the American Federation of Labor on indus- 
 trial education I find the sentence: 
 
 There is a growing feeling that is gaining rapidly in strength, that in 
 industrial education the human element must be recognized, and cannot 
 be so disregarded as to make the future workers mere automatic machines. 
 
 This is perfectly true. The one-sided education of work- 
 men to dexterity is only an apparent solution of the problem. 
 
 825099,
 
 2 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 Of course industry requires an army of men trained to per- 
 form their special tasks as well as it is possible to perform 
 them. But dexterity only attains its full value when it is based 
 on insight. And one more thing is necessary. We require not 
 only dexterity and insight but also the education of the moral 
 character. Perhaps this development of character is the most 
 important part even in industrial education, for firmness and 
 principle will lead a man to acquire dexterity and insight, but 
 dexterity and insight are not always placed in the service of 
 character. 
 
 I do not assert that it always makes itself immediately felt, 
 when any branch of industry neglects to train its workmen to 
 insight and character. Many industries may profit for a longer 
 or shorter period by their one-sided purely selfish train- 
 ing. But if all the industries of a state were to confine them- 
 selves to the development of dexterity, or even of dexterity 
 and intelligence, the disadvantages of this method would soon 
 make themselves apparent. For neither men, nor the states 
 which they form, nor the industries which they carry on, can 
 live an isolated life. They are all bound together by more 
 or less common interests, linked together by a thousand chains. 
 The individual is not only a workman in one branch or another, 
 he is also a citizen of the state. And as a citizen his welfare 
 and interests are inseparably connected with the welfare and 
 interests of all other citizens. Every form of education, what- 
 ever its special aims may be, must seek to further the peace- 
 ful disentanglement of these interwoven interests at least, that 
 is to say, every form the realization of which requires schools 
 supported by public money. 
 
 It might be urged and I know that Americans favor this 
 view that it is not incumbent on the general community to 
 provide more than a general education. To do this is both its 
 right and its duty. But it has no duty and no right to use 
 public money for purposes of specialized forms of education. 
 This assertion cannot be justified. I have the conviction even 
 that education for a calling offers us the very best foundation 
 for the general education of a man. We are far too much
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF CONTINUATION SCHOOLS 3 
 
 inclined to assume, both in the old world and in the new, that 
 it is possible to educate a man without reference to some 
 special calling. This assumption is erroneous. The only part 
 of it that is true is that one calling requires more preparatory 
 education than another, and that in our higher schools a com- 
 mon preparatory education can be given simultaneously for 
 several learned and technical professions, exactly as the pri- 
 mary schools prepare their pupils for every kind of calling. 
 We are also still far too much inclined to assume that early 
 education for a calling must necessarily be a narrow and one- 
 sided education. Yet it lies in our power to make an education 
 for a calling as many-sided as any education can be. Well- 
 nigh every calling, if treated with sufficient thoroughness, nat- 
 urally involves an enlargement of the field of conception and 
 activity. Science enters today into the simplest work and in- 
 cites all possessed of the necessary gifts to develop their knowl- 
 edge, their dexterity, and their initiative. Indeed experience 
 has shown that the path of early education for a calling may 
 lead to very much better results than the path of early general 
 education with no definite calling as its goal. We might say, 
 the useful man must be the predecessor of the ideal man. 
 Everyone must be able to do some good and thorough work, 
 though it be of the simplest kind, of one sort or another. Not 
 till then will he be able not only to satisfy his fellow-men and 
 be of use to his country, but also to make his own life of 
 value to himself. And in the same measure as our lives gain 
 value for ourselves do we attain power to reach a higher stage 
 of culture. 
 
 If then the early education for a calling need by no means 
 be one-sided or devoid of general value, if rather it is for most 
 men, and especially for workers in industries, trades, and traffic, 
 well-nigh the only way to reach a higher stage of culture, it 
 cannot be regarded as a private matter; it becomes a matter 
 of the community, a matter of the state. The reason for this 
 does not lie in the advantages procured for any single branch 
 of industry, but in the fact that this is the only road to civic 
 education. Everyone who lives in a state and enjoys its pro-
 
 4 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 tection must contribute through his work, directly or indirectly, 
 to further the object of the state as a community for purposes 
 of justice and civilization. Not till then is he a useful mem- 
 ber of the state. And there can be no doubt that it is the 
 duty of all schools supported by public means to educate useful 
 members of the state. 
 
 Now if every individual is to contribute by means of his 
 work to the general welfare of the community, our first business 
 must be to provide him with the best opportunities of develop- 
 ing his skill and capacity for work. But the development of 
 skill in his calling must not be placed only in the service of 
 industry, or limited by industry. Its first object is the develop- 
 ment of a man's own joy in work and thereby of his joy in 
 life. For true joy in work can only grow out of real capacity 
 for it. Thus the skill in work and the consequent joy in work 
 that are cultivated in our trade schools prove themselves educa- 
 tional factors of the very highest importance. Through them 
 we are able to appeal to the hearts of the boys and girls of 
 our working classes. We can educate no one who is not 
 happy in his work; and this is the point where we can inti- 
 mately combine general and technical education. And there is 
 no other way of doing this. It is possible to make use of 
 skill in work and joy in work in an absolutely egoistic sense, 
 and it is in this egoistic sense, unfortunately, that most tech- 
 nical schools approach their task. They only concern them- 
 selves with the individual, whom they endeavor to make as 
 skilful as possible, while they pay no attention to the class 
 as a whole. This is also the weak side of factory schools, 
 which might otherwise be such admirable educational institu- 
 tions for training intelligent and skilful workmen and artisans. 
 It cannot be the interest of the manufacturer to give all his 
 apprentices an equally good special and general education. 
 He only concerns himself with the best among them, and not 
 those with the best character but with the best intelligence and 
 manual skill. Public schools have a very different object. 
 They can and they must accustom the pupil betimes to use his 
 joy in work and his skill in work in the service of his fellow-
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF CONTINUATION SCHOOLS $ 
 
 pupils and of his fellow-men, as well as in his own. It is in 
 their power to repress the general tendency of human nature to 
 employ our gifts only for our own advantage. And it is their 
 duty to repress this tendency, for if everyone were to use his 
 gifts only for his own advantage there would be an end to 
 all progress both for the industrial development of the nation 
 and for the state as a whole. 
 
 Pupils who have learned in schools of this kind to place 
 their joy in work and their skill in work at the service of 
 their comrades will then be able to learn the lesson that every 
 school ought to teach, of uniting readiness of service, consid- 
 eration for others, and loyalty, with insight into the aims of 
 the state community. Naturally the limits of this insight will 
 depend on the intelligence and age of the pupils. But even 
 when the teacher is compelled to be content with little, the 
 public school will always have means to accustom its pupils 
 to the habitual exercise of civic virtues. 
 
 Our present schools have not yet fully grasped the meaning 
 of this threefold task : first, education to skill in work and 
 joy in work; secondly, education to readiness of service, con- 
 sideration for others, and loyalty to schoolfellows and to the 
 school; and, thirdly, education to insight into the aims of the 
 state community. Well-organized schools fulfil the first task, 
 the development of personal capacity. It still remains to en- 
 large them to schools for social service, and our most important 
 task is to provide such schools for the mass of the population, 
 based on training for a trade. 
 
 But the schools for the vast majority of our fellow-citizens, 
 the real schools of the people, do not even suffice to fulfil the 
 first task, for they leave off precisely at the point at which 
 education by means of and for a special calling begins. This 
 is the same in the United States as in Germany. Not only 
 the struggle for life but also the struggle for education com- 
 mences for millions of our country-men at the age of four- 
 teen. The doors of the primary school have closed for them, the 
 doors of a higher school open only to the favored few. The com- 
 petition for daily bread drives the half-grown boys and girls into
 
 6 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 the market. They take what they find. True, the question of 
 the children's future has peered out of the background in the 
 mind of parents and relatives, but there has been no time to 
 answer it. Their eyes are fixed on the necessities of the mo- 
 ment. Posts are valued at the salary they offer, however un- 
 favorable the conditions may be for intellectual or moral 
 development. Some few have the force of character to struggle 
 through untoward circumstances. Their intelligence, their will- 
 power, perhaps also their home training, gives them strength 
 to overcome the forces that drag men down. Some few have 
 the good fortune to get into a factory or shop that has a nat- 
 ural interest in well-trained workmen. Some few find employers 
 who do not regard the young hand as a cheap workman but 
 as a human being who must be educated. But the innumerable 
 mass of weaker and less fortunate youths, of whom thousands 
 and thousands are also valuable human material, and the in- 
 numerable mass of real capacity, that find no warm-hearted 
 employer and no employment demanding intellect, drift like 
 shipwrecked men on the stormy ocean. Some reach the haven, 
 after a loss of many years; the majority lead a life never 
 brightened by the sun of joy in work. No one has ever taught 
 them to seek the true blessing of work. No one has ever taken 
 the trouble to point them to anything farther ahead than the 
 daily task by which they must earn their bread their whole 
 lives long. People tell us industry requires thousands of hands 
 fit to perform the same manipulation with the same unerring 
 skill hour by hour, month by month, year by year. I fully 
 believe that industry does require them. Division of labor is 
 the vital element of industry. But industry is not the aim 
 of human society. The aim of society is the increase of justice 
 and culture. And if industry permanently continues to reck- 
 lessly disregard this aim it becomes a danger, not only for the 
 state, but also, in the end, for itself as well. A democratic or 
 even a constitutional state that is ruled exclusively by the lust 
 of gain, by money and the machine slaves that money buys, is 
 doomed to inevitable ruin, as soon as the natural riches of the 
 soil become exhausted and the population becomes too dense.
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF CONTINUATION SCHOOLS ^ 
 
 Even the industrial state cannot dispense with strong moral 
 forces. These forces grow, but not in a people of machine 
 slaves and money princes. Moral forces, like skill in work, 
 grow on no other soil than that of joy in work. 
 
 Now it cannot be one of the first objects of industry to 
 further the development of a country's moral forces. Its first 
 object is the profitable use of economic forces. The struggle 
 for existence compels it to strain these forces to the uttermost, 
 to press the greatest manual and intellectual capacity . into its 
 service, and therefore to train its workmen to the highest degree 
 of dexterity. The capital invested in it clamors with reckless 
 insistence for its interest. No one has better represented the 
 psychology of gain-seeking capital than the great English 
 painter George Frederick Watts in his picture "Mammon," that 
 hangs in the Tate Gallery in London. It is true that capital 
 brings untold blessings to men. But it rarely unveils this 
 second face until it has ceased to be capital hungering for in- 
 crease or until it has discovered, as it must sooner or later 
 discover, that the third factor, moral capacity, cannot be neg- 
 lected with impunity. And even after this discovery it long 
 seeks to defend its position by ever stronger accentuation of 
 the need of pure skill, sometimes even until it is too late for 
 its own undertakings and for the state that has left it free play. 
 
 There is no escape from this natural fate of industry but 
 state intervention, not too long postponed, to supplement the 
 one-sided education afforded by industry, trade, and traffic. 
 It is in fact an entirely new duty that has arisen for the com- 
 munity since the economic revolutions of the last century. It 
 arose not only in the interests of industry but in the most 
 vital interests of the community itself. It is the imperative duty 
 of the state to create school organizations which deal with the 
 trade-training of boys and girls, which enter into the question 
 with the utmost thoroughness, enlarging and deepening it, and 
 thereby awakening in boys and girls many-sided capacity for 
 work and a living joy in work. 
 
 It will not be the object of this new school to replace the 
 training now given in the practical "work of factory and handi-
 
 8 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 craft. It is impossible to replace the school of life, hard and 
 yet so efficient, quite apart from the fact that it would be a 
 financial, economic, and social impossibility to remove all youth- 
 ful workers from workshops, offices, and factories, in order to 
 train them in special schools. It is true there are some such 
 schools that are intended to take the place of apprenticeship. 
 We find them in all civilized states. But they are exceptions. 
 As exceptions they may sometimes do good work, but seldom 
 in the sense for which they were founded. For the better such 
 handicraft and industrial schools are organized, the more surely 
 do they outstep their intended limits. Their pupils are no longer 
 satisfied with the position of workmen, and even those among 
 them whose intelligence and skill give them no claims to high 
 posts nevertheless seek to attain them. 
 
 The schools that we are considering here are continuations 
 of the primary schools, and they can be organized in various 
 ways. I say, they are a continuation of the compulsory primary 
 school, that is to say, a school compulsory without exception 
 for all who do not go to a higher school. The continuation 
 schools 'accompany boys and girls during their apprenticeship 
 to a trade, and do not forget those who are forced to spend 
 the spring-time of their lives as day laborers, messenger boys, 
 and unskilled workmen, far from the paradise of joy in work. 
 They fulfil two purposes: first, youthful workers and appren- 
 tices are still at the disposal of trade and industry; second, no 
 citizen of the state is left without an education extending up 
 to his eighteenth year. The completeness of the school organi- 
 zation depends on the means which society can provide for the 
 purpose and on the sacrifices which commerce, trade, and in- 
 dustry are ready and able to make. The schools are not merely 
 technical or trade schools. They only make use of the pupil's 
 trade as the basis of their educational work. The trade-training 
 which they give is not the object of the school. However 
 thorough this training in a continuation school, for instance, 
 in Munich, is, it is still only the starting-point for the wider 
 general training, for the education in practical and theoretical
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF CONTINUATION SCHOOLS 9 
 
 thinking, in consideration for others, in devotion to common 
 interests, in social service for the state community. 
 
 We Germans call them simply continuation schools. The 
 conviction of their necessity for the whole life of the state has 
 taken possession of the entire population more and more during 
 the last twenty years. In South Germany there is no city or 
 town, however small, without one such school, at least for all 
 boys. In North Germany the great industrial town of Essen 
 is the only larger town in which such a school is wanting. 
 These schools are compulsory in Bavaria, Wurttemberg, Sachsen, 
 Baden, and Hessen, for both town and country population, 
 up to the age of sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen. They are not 
 everywhere of equal educational value. There are still many 
 town executives that have not yet been able to relinquish the 
 old traditions out of which the schools arose as places for 
 repetition of elementary school work. Not all those who are 
 called upon to give judgment in this matter are thus far pene- 
 trated by the deep conviction that they have to deal with an 
 independent school organism, requiring exactly the same budget, 
 the same solicitude, and the same possibilities of expansion, 
 as the primary schools. But everywhere the organizations are 
 progressing, everywhere the representatives of industry and 
 trade are, with few exceptions, beginning to realize that this 
 new form of school can prove a blessing whenever its inner 
 organization adapts itself to the calling of the boy or girl. 
 Everywhere have these schools become an important affair of 
 the towns and receive the willing support of the governments. 
 The state subsidies in Prussia, which amounted to half a million 
 marks in 1885, had risen in 1908 to three millions. The num- 
 ber of schools in Prussia rose from 664, with 58,000 pupils, 
 to 2,100 schools with 360,000 pupils. In Wurttemberg a law 
 was passed in 1906 requiring every town of over five thousand 
 inhabitants to organize continuation schools for all apprentices 
 in commerce, industry, and trade. Bavaria is preparing a similar 
 law to transform the compulsory Sunday school for apprentices, 
 which has existed for the last hundred years, with two hours' 
 instruction, into a continuation school with six hours' instruc-
 
 10 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 tion, for many country parishes. The Bavarian towns have 
 already established continuation schools everywhere. Many 
 Swiss cantons, especially Zurich, have done the same, and some 
 Austrian crownlands, especially Lower Austria with the city of 
 Vienna, have taken up the idea of developing the continuation 
 school in the sense above indicated. In Vienna this autumn a 
 central building has been opened for a continuation school, with 
 something like sixty workshops, at a cost of eight million 
 crowns. And in 1908 a law was passed in Scotland permitting 
 every town to establish day continuation schools for apprentices 
 of both sexes. 
 
 We must now consider from what points of view the organi- 
 zation of these schools must be undertaken. The question will 
 be answered by the actual conditions under which the pupils 
 live. If the continuation school, which can only take the pupils 
 under its discipline for a small part of the week, is to exercise 
 an educational influence on them, it must seek to take hold of 
 the pupils by their egoistic interests in life, and to ennoble 
 these interests in the' process. The egoistic interests of the 
 pupils are contained in their daily work. The conditions under 
 which they carry on this work are in most cases very unfa- 
 vorable, especially when the pupils are workers in large in- 
 dustries. The best thing that the school can do here is to raise 
 the pupils' joy in their work. By so doing it is of use not only 
 to the pupils but also to the industry. But it can only raise 
 the pupil's joy in work by placing the practical work of the 
 pupil himself in the center of all school work and by teaching 
 the pupil to execute it as thoroughly as possible, to think out 
 the processes of the work, to give reasons for them, and to 
 make himself master of them. Thus it must be the business 
 of the school to group the organization of teaching round this 
 work, which is carried on in special workshops, laboratories, 
 and other similar places. All other teaching, commercial, scien- 
 tific, artistic, and moral, is brought into intimate connection 
 with it. This enables the school by degrees more and more to 
 enlarge the purely technical and mechanical training for a given 
 calling and to let it take the form of ever-widening intellectual
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF CONTINUATION SCHOOLS 1 1 
 
 and moral discipline. Most industries and trades as well as 
 commerce and agriculture allow of considerable development 
 in these directions. The degree of general culture which the 
 school can offer in these lines is not determined by the trade 
 but solely by the time which the school has at its disposal and 
 the intellectual powers of the pupils. In spite of all solicitude 
 for the general education of its pupils, the school always re- 
 mains on the firm ground of the real life by which the pupil 
 is daily and hourly surrounded. 
 
 In all large towns and in all purely agricultural parishes it 
 is always possible to gather most youthful workers together 
 according to their calling in special continuation schools, in the 
 center of which this calling stands. This kind of continuation 
 school ought to be made compulsory for all boys and girls up 
 to the age of seventeen or eighteen, or in any case as long as 
 apprenticeship lasts. No reason exists why these schools should 
 not be made compulsory. The state has established the com- 
 pulsory primary school because it has recognized the necessity 
 of a certain amount of culture for all the citizens of the state; 
 the same recognition must lead to the compulsory continua- 
 tion school. There are certain duties that every citizen must 
 take upon himself, in the interest of the welfare of the state. 
 
 The time to be allotted to the continuation school must de- 
 pend on the means at its disposal. I can imagine cases in which 
 it might amount to two or three hours daily. In Germany it 
 varies from six to twelve hours a week. As long as it is not 
 reduced to less than six hours weekly, quantity is less impor- 
 tant than quality. The evening hours must be excluded. Even- 
 ing schools can only be established for voluntary pupils. Those 
 who possess sufficient intellectual, moral, and physical strength 
 will attend these evening classes in addition to the morning 
 school, and not only for a time but consistently and regularly. 
 The case is quite different for the majority of young persons, 
 who do not possess this moral and intellectual power but never- 
 theless stand in need of education. For them it is of the first 
 importance that instruction should take place during the day, 
 within their hours of work, that the teacher may not have to
 
 12 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 deal with a will still further weakened by fatigue. In Germany 
 we have entirely given up holding compulsory continuation 
 classes in the evening, when neither teacher nor pupil, especially 
 in the winter months, is equal to his task. Most German states 
 grant a subsidy only to towns that hold their continuation classes 
 before seven o'clock in the evening. This is one of the cases 
 in which sacrifices must be made by employers, by giving their 
 apprentices the requisite time for school during the hours of 
 work. The will to make this sacrifice was often extremely 
 weak on the part of masters and manufacturers, but it received 
 powerful support in the trade-regulation law of the German 
 Empire, issued in the year 1897. According to paragraph 120 
 of these regulations every employer is put under the obligation 
 to dismiss his apprentices from work at the hours appointed by 
 the town for school purposes, under penalty of a fine. I must 
 add that the masters and manufacturers, especially of South 
 Germany, are almost unanimously reconciled to this order of 
 things. Indeed some employers and guilds in Munich have 
 offered to send me apprentices for longer instruction than the 
 means at my disposal permitted me to provide. 
 
 The joy in work which diffuses itself throughout these 
 schools must not be placed only in the service of intellectual 
 and technical training, but no less in the service of moral train- 
 ing, or, as I call it, of civic education. For this reason the 
 instruction must be organized as early as possible from the 
 standpoint of free community of labor. Only in this free com- 
 munity of labor can the two fundamental civic virtues be de- 
 veloped, namely, consideration for others and loyalty to others' 
 work. The workshops of the continuation schools, as we have 
 them in Munich, afford every facility for carrying out this 
 system : practical work leads in itself to the association of many 
 hands for a common purpose, in other words, to communities 
 of labor. But not only the practical instruction in school work- 
 shops and school gardens lends itself to this system ; it can be 
 applied with equal success to instruction in physics and chem- 
 istry, arithmetic, geometry, or gymnastics. Only at the first 
 stage, when it is a question of initiating the pupil into the
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF CONTINUATION SCHOOLS 13 
 
 elements of a subject, is it necessary to limit the instruction 
 to him alone and seek to secure his individual progress. The 
 individual must have attained a certain degree of proficiency 
 before he can join a group for purposes of common action. 
 That applies to the embryonic citizen as much as to the adult. 
 But in all other respects, and in all schools, the whole plan 
 of education must aim at turning as much school work as pos- 
 sible into work that can be done in common, at so arranging 
 the tasks and the whole order of the schools that smaller or 
 larger groups, or all the pupils together, are interested in the 
 success of the work and are responsible for it. 
 
 There are two other factors that serve this end in the con- 
 tinuation schools. The first is the association of pupils in 
 groups for free communities of labor, for purposes of self- 
 improvement, of amusement, of physical training, or of practical 
 charity. This is nothing new in England or America. On the 
 contrary, we in Germany are indebted to your schools for the 
 idea, and have much to do before we shall succeed in making 
 it take root with us. We have nothing in our higher or lower 
 schools to correspond to your leagues, societies, fraternities, 
 gymnastic associations, debating clubs, clubs for musical pur- 
 poses, etc. Many of these associations are admirably adapted 
 for the continuation schools, and can be placed under the direct 
 supervision of the pupils themselves. It is possible to intro- 
 duce a regular system of self-government in other things i-.s 
 well into the continuation schools, if only one condition is 
 fulfilled. The head of the school and his teachers must them- 
 selves be adept in the government of their own school and 
 must know how to enlist the various student associations in the 
 service of school interests. 
 
 The second factor is the co-operation of the employers in 
 the trade taught at the school, in the common fulfilment of 
 the school tasks. This second factor has been little realized in 
 Germany, generally not at all. In Munich, however, I have 
 endeavored, wherever it was feasible, to gain the interest of 
 the employers for the school by conceding them certain rights 
 and imposing certain duties. I will tell the manner in which
 
 14 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 this was done in my second lecture. We must confess that the 
 interest of employers in their apprentices' education has not 
 increased during the last thirty years. We should gladly adopt 
 every means in our power to awaken it afresh. The best plan 
 is to induce the employers to make not only pecuniary but 
 also personal sacrifices for the school, even when the school is 
 a public one. We do not value a thing until it has cost us 
 something. By these means we enlarge the field of education 
 and the community of labor at the same time. We accustom 
 a greater number of persons through the school to take not only 
 a commercial but also a purely human interest in the apprentices 
 and to bear their share in the cares of education. The plan 
 has proved itself an excellent one in most cases, though not in 
 all. The general recognition that the Munich continuation 
 schools now enjoy on all sides is in large part to be attributed 
 to the adoption of this plan. 
 
 When the continuation school has by these means become 
 a true educational institution, not only for technical but also 
 for moral education, then it will also have become a suitable 
 medium for civic education and instruction. All teaching as 
 to the aims and tasks of the state and the common interests 
 of all members of the state has but little value as long as this 
 teaching does not fall on ground already made receptive and 
 fertile by corresponding habits of life. This applies especially 
 to schools like the German continuation schools, with their 
 limited hours of instruction and the quality of their pupils, 
 who have so frequently received no good home training. The 
 most thorough acquaintance with all the institutions of the 
 state and all the duties and rights of the citizens does not in 
 itself, as we know, suffice to make a citizen. A man may even 
 be an admirable teacher of civic science and a first-class villain 
 at the same time. We cannot develop character by teaching 
 and precept until the organization of school and instruction 
 has been laid out with the object of accustoming the pupil as 
 far as possible to fair and upright dealing. As to the form that 
 this civic teaching should take, I need say far less in your 
 country than in Germany, where civic teaching was until quite
 
 FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF CONTINUATION SCHOOLS 1$ 
 
 recently an unheard-of thing, and where people have learned 
 by degrees that civic teaching must become one of the funda- 
 mental tasks of all public schools, as soon as the pupil is ready to 
 receive it. A year ago I came across an excellent American book 
 which showed me with how much common-sense and insight this 
 subject is already treated in your schools and which in my writ- 
 ings and speeches I have repeatedly recommended my German 
 countrymen to study. It is the book of Dunn's, entitled Com- 
 munity and Citizen, which appeared in the autumn of 1909. 
 The book can be admirably applied to continuation schools, and 
 I hope that some of my teachers in Munich will before long 
 translate it into German, with the necessary revision of those 
 parts that refer to exclusively American conditions. In my next 
 lecture I propose to describe the details which show more clearly 
 how we give civic instruction in our Munich continuation schools. 
 The more we are able to base civic instruction on personal ex- 
 perience, that is, on the independent investigations and observa- 
 tions of the pupils, the more productive it will become. 
 
 The question remains whether the education of the masses 
 which we call by the name of continuation school in Germany, 
 and which we have realized in Munich and in some few country 
 towns, is equally practicable in the United States. One great 
 difficulty is doubtless the fact that in American trades and in- 
 dustries, if I am rightly informed, apprenticeship, as far as it 
 still exists, does not begin before the age of sixteen, and that 
 therefore so many of your boys and girls lose two of the years 
 that would be most valuable for systematic education between 
 the primary school and the commencement of apprenticeship 
 It should be the first care of educators to fill this great gap, 
 either by prolonging the term of elementary education or by 
 letting apprenticeship begin earlier, as it does in Germany. As 
 a rule both boys and girls are ready to enter a calling at the close 
 of their fourteenth year. In Germany at least we have no reason 
 to be dissatisfied with our experience in this direction. From 
 an educational point of view it is desirable to make fourteen 
 the age for commencing, for there can be no doubt that working 
 at a trade is or might be an essential factor in the formation of
 
 16 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 character. Nothing strengthens character more than honest 
 trade work, and I agree entirely with Mr. Hamilton, who said 
 in his speech at Harrisburg last February : 
 
 The contribution that honest toil makes to the child-character is just as 
 rich, possibly, as that of any other specific line of school work. Earnest, 
 self-directed effort is the base of all habit and the very cornerstone of char- 
 acter. Nothing so crystallizes the crude charcoal of childhood into the 
 diamonds of humanity as systematic self-directed effort. 
 
 What we have to beware of is that this industrial work, this 
 "honest toil," does not degenerate into drudgery. And this 
 danger will be avoided when a well-organized continuation 
 school keeps pace with the period of apprenticeship, giving it 
 meaning and thoroughness, making it many-sided, taking hold 
 of and ennobling all its interests. Even the hardest work ceases 
 to be a torment when we perform it with all our hearts. The 
 introduction of industrial work or manual training into the 
 upper classes of the primary school is without doubt a most 
 useful undertaking in the interests of industrial education. We 
 have long adopted this plan in Munich, although we have not 
 carried it so far as the ecoles professionnelles in Belgium and 
 France. Indeed, from a social and economic standpoint it is 
 much easier than the establishment of well-organized continua- 
 tion schools. For the elementary classes do not have to struggle 
 against the egoism of employers. But this cannot take the place 
 of well-developed continuation schools. For the aim and end of 
 all this training cannot be merely industrial education. Its 
 aim and end is the education of the man, whom it will not 
 permit to be identified with and lost in the workman. And 
 the modern state can never hope to become a state of culture 
 and justice till it has succeeded, by the right manner of instruc- 
 tion, in restoring to work, robbed of its divinity by the advance 
 of industry, its educational powers.
 
 THE ORGANIZATION OF THE CONTINUATION SCHOOL 
 IN MUNICH 
 
 In my last lecture I endeavored to show the principles on 
 which the continuation school is organized and the relation it 
 must bear to the whole life of the pupil. Before I describe the 
 organization of the continuation school in Munich, it may be 
 well to draw a picture of the characteristics which a continuation 
 school ought to have, if it is to be a true place of education for 
 the people, and perhaps also, in order to bring the form of the 
 school into stronger relief, at the same time to state what it 
 ought not to be. 
 
 The first fundamental principle of a rightly organized con- 
 tinuation school is that it must extend to the eighteenth year 
 of every boy or girl who is not being educated in a higher school. 
 It is of no advantage to a constitutional state to make its oppor- 
 tunities of culture accessible only to a small percentage. When 
 all citizens of the state have the right to participate in its affairs 
 and to exert influence on its executive through the suffrage, it 
 is the business of the state to provide all with an education that 
 will enable them to make a reasonable use of this right. During 
 several decades we believed in Germany that it was sufficient 
 to give opportunities for boys and girls to continue their edu- 
 cation after quitting the primary school and to leave the use 
 of such opportunities to their own free will. The United 
 States, France, and especially England are still of this opinion. 
 England points not without justifiable pride to the very large 
 attendance at its night schools. The evening courses at the 
 excellent School of Technology in Manchester were attended 
 by twenty-five thousand pupils, while Munich, having four- 
 fifths of the population of Manchester, had only about eighteen 
 
 17
 
 1 8 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 thousand pupils in its compulsory continuation schools in the same 
 year. But it is not enough to count only the number of pupils. 
 We must also ask, How many hours' instruction does each 
 receive? And we then find that in Manchester the pupil re- 
 ceived sixty-three hours a year, while in Munich he received 
 three hundred and thirty hours in the year. 
 
 In Germany everybody is now convinced that the voluntary 
 continuation school no longer suffices for the educational needs 
 of modern states. As long as the continuation school remains 
 optional, thousands of employers will prevent their youthful 
 workmen from making use of its opportunities, except at the 
 end of their day's work, when mind and body are fatigued. And 
 even in cases in which some reasonable employers would be 
 willing to grant their boys time for study, they would probably 
 do it only if the training in question were principally in the 
 interest of their own trade. The number of employers who 
 see farther and recognize that it is of the greatest importance 
 not only for business but also for the community at large not 
 to let the man disappear in the workman, but to take his moral 
 and civic education in hand betimes, is too small to achieve 
 any appreciable progress in the universal education of the 
 people by means of purely voluntary continuation schools. We 
 must remember that a voluntary continuation school will not 
 reach those who need it most, that is to say, the innumerable 
 boys and girls in our large towns who have a family only in 
 name or no family at all. No one will voluntarily seek an op- 
 portunity of culture after the burden and heat of the day, unless 
 he already possesses certain moral qualities that incite him to 
 attend to his own education at the cost of trouble and incon- 
 venience to himself. These are the reasons that have convinced 
 us in Germany that compulsory attendance at the continuation 
 school between the ages of fourteen and eighteen is absolutely 
 indispensable. 
 
 But if this compulsory continuation school is to be in reality 
 a home of education, it must in the second place engage the 
 interest of its pupils. But it can engage their interest only if 
 it interweaves its teaching with the trade of the pupil. For
 
 THE CONTINUATION SCHOOL IN MUNICH IQ 
 
 the most capable pupils desire to get on in their trade and by 
 help of their trade. Many have made it their choice from in- 
 clination, and have a lively interest in its technicalities. This 
 is a perfectly justified interest. If the school appeals to this 
 interest it may be sure of gaining the heart of its pupil. And if 
 it has gained its pupil's heart it can lead him whither it will, on 
 to theoretical as well as practical ground, and particularly on to 
 the ground of moral and civic teaching. 
 
 Now if the school is to be brought as much as possible into 
 intimate contact with the life of the pupil, it must, in the third 
 place, possess workshops and laboratories for practical work as 
 the center of its entire organization. There it can ennoble and 
 intensify the work of boys and girls, and put processes that 
 too frequently approach them only in a purely mechanical as- 
 pect on the basis of practical and scientific reflection. The 
 youthful worker of present-day economic life has in no way 
 remained an object of education in the same sense as was the 
 apprentice of four or five hundred years ago, in the times of 
 rigorous guild regulations. He has become more and more an 
 instrument of cheap labor. The larger the business, the more 
 one-sided is often the apprentice's training, and the smaller 
 the business, the more insignificant is generally the work in- 
 trusted to him. If then the pupil is to learn the meaning of real 
 joy in work this school must fill up the gaps left in the boy's 
 education by the present economic conditions of life. It can 
 do this only if it takes in hand the pupil's practical work and 
 makes this the center of its entire system of teaching. 
 
 If the school stopped here, however, it would but imperfectly 
 fulfil its purpose. The end of all education is not the techni- 
 cally competent workman, but the citizen of the state, who not 
 only seeks to advance his own welfare through his work, but 
 also consciously places his work in the service of the community. 
 The fourth essential of the continuation school is therefore the 
 attitude of regarding technical education only as means for 
 mental and moral training. I have already pointed out in gen- 
 eral terms how the organization must be adapted to this object, 
 and propose to show it more clearly now by the example of
 
 20 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 Munich. Not until the organization has entered on this path 
 will the continuation school prove itself valuable enough to 
 justify the large expenditure which it requires. 
 
 It would be extremely one-sided to establish schools of this 
 kind for- men workers alone. The more the population of a 
 country increases and the harder the struggle for existence con- 
 sequently becomes, the more is the wife obliged to contribute 
 to the support of the family and the more pressing is therefore 
 the necessity of giving girls opportunities of training, not only 
 in the hbusehold knowledge that helps to preserve a family from 
 ruin, but also in the different branches of trade by, which she 
 may later earn a livelihood. Indeed in greatly overpopulated 
 states the continuation school is even more important for the 
 girls than for the boys. In our great factory centers, where 
 husband and wife go out to work, family life and family edu- 
 cation are in innumerable cases well-nigh annihilated. Thus 
 a new source of danger for the life of the state arises. If it 
 were possible to develop a strong family feeling and to rein- 
 state the family in its old educational functions by training 
 women to their duties as mothers and housewives and giving 
 them the opportunity of performing these tasks our anxiety for 
 the education of growing lads would be considerably reduced. 
 The difficulty of organizing continuation schools for girls lies 
 in the fact that these schools have to fulfil a twofold task. In 
 the first place a girl must be trained for her vocation proper as 
 mother and housewife, and in the second place, marriage being 
 uncertain, for a calling by which she can support herself. It 
 is therefore necessary for both elementary and continuation 
 schools to keep these two objects in view. As long as the time 
 at its disposal is too short, it will have to pay chief attention 
 to the training of the housewife and mother and then turn to 
 the training for a vocation. 
 
 It is very probable that most towns will have financial diffi- 
 culties in equipping really good continuation schools for both 
 boys and girls at the same time. The municipalities will be 
 obliged, as has been the case in Munich, to content themselves 
 at first with establishing the compulsory continuation school
 
 THE CONTINUATION SCHOOL IN MUNICH 21 
 
 for one sex. The better the school is organized, the more surely 
 in the course of time will public opinion demand the same 
 schools for the other sex and find ways and means to support 
 them from the public purse. 
 
 Before I proceed to give you a picture of the Munich or- 
 ganization, let me place before you a short sketch of the entire 
 school system of the town. The primary school is compulsory 
 for boys from six to fourteen, for girls from six to thirteen. 
 The number of primary-school pupils is seventy thousand in a 
 population of five hundred and eighty thousand. All children 
 from the day-laborer's up to the prime minister's attend these 
 schools. No fees are paid. 
 
 Kindergartens for children from the age of three to six are 
 attached to most primary schools. Attendance is voluntary and 
 not free of charge. 
 
 Girls and boys who pass up to higher schools to prepare for 
 the professions of scholars, engineers, clergymen, higher state 
 officials, etc., leave the primary school at the age of ten. There 
 are thirteen public and fourteen private schools for this pur- 
 pose (Gymnasia, Realschulen, Oberrealschulen, and higher girls' 
 schools). Attendance is not free of charge, but very cheap 
 about one dollar a month. 
 
 The compulsory primary school is followed by the com- 
 pulsory continuation school for all boys and girls who do not 
 attend a higher school. Attendance is compulsory for boys 
 during the whole of their apprenticeship but not beyond their 
 eighteenth year; it is compulsory for girls for three years. At- 
 tendance is free of charge. The compulsory continuation school 
 for boys is again followed by an optional continuation school 
 for persons over eighteen, which was attended last year by two 
 thousand six hundred pupils, and represented at least twelve 
 hours' weekly instruction. Attendance is not free of charge, 
 but also very cheap fifty cents to a dollar a month. 
 
 The compulsory continuation school for boys has eight to 
 ten hours' instruction weekly. The compulsory continuation 
 school for girls has at present only three hours' instruction 
 weekly; from the year 1912 it will have six hours. But side by
 
 22 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 side with this compulsory continuation school are a voluntary 
 continuation school, with six to twelve hours' instruction 
 weekly, and a voluntary eighth class in the primary school with 
 thirty hours of instruction a week. 
 
 The compulsory continuation schools for boys contain in 
 round numbers nine thousand four hundred pupils; the com- 
 pulsory continuation schools for girls contain seven thousand 
 five hundred pupils, the voluntary continuation schools for girls, 
 including the eighth class, three thousand seven hundred pupils. 
 All in all, therefore, there are about twenty thousand pupils 
 under eighteen years of age in these continuation schools. In 
 addition to these there are ten thousand pupils in the higher boys' 
 and girls' schools of the town (seven thousand boys and three 
 thousand girls). 
 
 Thus about one hundred thousand children, that is, 18 per 
 cent of the entire population and 93 per cent of all the boys and 
 girls between six and eighteen in Munich, attend the public 
 schools of the town. 
 
 The nine thousand pupils of the compulsory continuation 
 schools for boys are distributed in fifty- two trade schools and 
 twelve general schools. The trade schools are attended by all 
 boys who are apprenticed to any trade, the general schools by 
 unskilled workmen (about eleven hundred), day laborers, bar- 
 row men, errand boys, and servants. These general schools 
 also receive the apprentices of trades that are too small to have 
 special trade schools established for them. 
 
 The seven thousand five hundred girls in the girls' com- 
 pulsory continuation school are distributed over forty schools 
 in the town. They receive without exception household teach- 
 ing. Twelve hundred of the three thousand seven hundred 
 pupils of the voluntary continuation school are in the voluntary 
 eighth class, thirteen hundred in the household department of 
 the continuation school for girls, nine hundred in the commer- 
 cial, three hundred in the trade department. The classes of the 
 voluntary continuation school for girls are distributed in twenty- 
 one schools. 
 
 A trade school is established in Munich for every trade that
 
 THE CONTINUATION SCHOOL IN MUNICH 23 
 
 has at least twenty-five apprentices. Trades with a great num- 
 ber of apprentices (such as machine-builders, mechanics, lock- 
 smiths, joiners, bakers, butchers, publicans) have at their dis- 
 posal several trade schools in different parts of the town, in 
 order to shorten the distance to school. The only exception is 
 that the twelve hundred commercial apprentices are housed in 
 a single building in the center of the town. 
 
 The apprentices' trade schools, with their higher divisions 
 for journeymen and masters, that is, with their voluntary con- 
 tinuation schools, are distributed in seven schoolhouses through- 
 out the town. One of these schoolhouses contains only the 
 commercial apprentices, a second principally the different 
 branches of painters, a third the various building and arts 
 trades, a fourth the printing and reproducing trades, fine me- 
 chanics and machine locksmiths, a fifth the different kinds of 
 wood-workers. The butchers' trade school is combined with 
 the town slaughter-house. The gardeners' trade school has 
 its own grounds. Six of the fifty-two trade schools are still in 
 the buildings of the primary schools. 
 
 All trade schools are under the direct supervision of nine 
 head-masters or directors, with sub-directors for each single 
 school. 
 
 To most trade schools is attached an association of employ- 
 ers, who bear the expense of school material, take part in the 
 discussions on the plan of instruction, have the right of pro- 
 posing technical teachers, assist in the supervision of the prac- 
 tical subjects, co-operate in the examination of apprentices, and 
 help to spread interest in the school and to further its prosperous 
 development. This intimate connection of an employers' asso- 
 ciation with the aims and tasks of a trade continuation school 
 established by public money has in many cases proved an ex- 
 ceedingly useful arrangement. The interest of the employers 
 in the education of the apprentices is considerably increased. 
 And when this is achieved, the association naturally does not 
 content itself with furthering the education of the apprentices 
 in the school alone, but seeks to raise the standard of their
 
 24 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 calling in their own workshops as well. This is of course a 
 process that takes place very gradually. 
 
 Each continuation school also possesses its own school board, 
 consisting of a head-master of the trade school, a member of 
 the municipality, and three employers of the trade. It is the 
 business of this board to manage the affairs of the school and 
 especially to keep watch on the regularity of attendance. 
 
 Every apprentice spends one whole day or two half -days of 
 his working week in a trade school. As a rule this involves a 
 reduction in wages. Some employers' associations, however, 
 pay wages on both school and work days. 
 
 In the fifty-two trade schools there are about one hundred 
 and twenty teachers entirely attached to the school and about 
 three hundred who give lessons there in addition to other work. 
 The teachers are recruited from all kinds of professions and 
 vocations. Academic and normal-school teachers co-operate 
 with master-workmen, journeymen, artisans, and agricultural- 
 ists ; and they exert an excellent influence upon each other. The 
 artisan, the master, and the journeyman learn to respect the 
 schoolmaster, and the schoolmaster learns to respect the work- 
 man, who is engaged with him on the same educational problem. 
 
 The yearly expenditure for the compulsory apprentices' 
 trade schools and for the voluntary journeymen's trade schools 
 amounted last year, aside from the annual building expenses, 
 in round numbers to 900,000 marks. The individual continua- 
 tion-school pupil therefore costs about 80 marks, whereas each 
 primary-school pupil costs 93 marks, and each pupil in the 
 higher schools 200 marks. The expenses of the primary school 
 are borne principally by the town, the expenses of the higher 
 schools are with few exceptions borne by the state, and the 
 expenses of the continuation school are borne by state and town 
 together. 
 
 The annual net expenditure for the compulsory and volun- 
 tary continuation schools for girls amounts to about 400,000 
 marks, and is borne by the town alone. 
 
 So much for the external organization. When we turn to 
 the internal organization of the compulsory continuation school,
 
 THE CONTINUATION SCHOOL IN MUNICH 25 
 
 we find, as already pointed out, practical instruction in work- 
 shop, laboratory, shop, and garden in the center of every ap- 
 prentices' trade school. This instruction represents two to three 
 hours a week. 
 
 Teaching in drawing and arithmetic is most intimately con- 
 nected with this practical instruction. Nothing is drawn that has 
 not been made in the workshop. And every process in work or 
 construction is followed out in figures. By making out both 
 preliminary estimates and bills the pupil learns the value not 
 only of material and work but also of the time that has been spent 
 upon the work. It is particularly useful for the apprentice to 
 recognize by these bills how much the time he has spent on the 
 work and this of course is very great with apprentices in- 
 creases the cost of production. Special care is taken in making 
 out bills and estimates to let the pupil learn to calculate not only 
 the cost of materials and time but also all other items of cost, 
 arising from the deterioration of machines and tools, the in- 
 terest on capital, carriage, and various other sources of expense. 
 
 Practical instruction is also intimately connected with the 
 study of materials, tools, and machines. The pupil makes ac- 
 quaintance with these almost exclusively through his own practi- 
 cal work. He is especially familiarized with the mechanical 
 laws under which machines and tools work. 
 
 Moreover, whenever the work in hand demands a knowledge 
 of physics and chemistry to show the pupil the reasons for what 
 he does, or teach him how to make new experiments with sue-* 
 cess, he receives instruction in special laboratories in the con- 
 ceptions and laws required for well-considered work. 
 
 The technical education of the apprentice is never planned 
 with a view to letting him make masterpieces. On the con- 
 trary, we endeavor to let him find pleasure in simple, careful, 
 thorough, conscientious work in genuine materials, and to en- 
 courage him to new attempts through the feeling of security in 
 his own power. 
 
 His moral insight is enlarged by German lessons. We read 
 good authors in class and place at the pupil's disposal a selection 
 of good books from the school library for reading at home.
 
 26 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 In addition to this the pupils have one lesson weekly in re- 
 ligion up to their sixteenth year. 
 
 Civic instruction is generally planned as follows in the dif- 
 ferent trade schools: First, the historical development of the 
 trade to which the pupil belongs is discussed. He is shown in 
 the struggles of his fellow-workers the continually growing in- 
 terdependence of interests among all citizens of a community. 
 Concrete examples of devotion to a common cause are placed 
 before him. Thus by degrees he recognizes how the problems 
 arose which occupy town and nation today, and learns the duties 
 and rights of the individual within the state. 
 
 This insight is strengthened into the will to consider others 
 and to devote himself to common purposes by the association 
 of pupils in working groups, especially in the last school year. 
 
 Hygienic training is given not only by special instruction in 
 hygiene, but also by gymnastics and games on Sunday after- 
 noons and during the school holidays. An association of young 
 men of the cultivated classes, especially young army officers, 
 places well-trained leaders at our disposal on Sundays, who take 
 hundreds of apprentices for walks in the environs of the town. 
 
 The association of apprentices among themselves outside 
 the schools, for the pursuit of common interests, is, on the 
 other hand, but little developed. This is a kind of .thing that 
 cannot be done by command it must grow out of the spirit 
 of the school. Not only is the organization still too young 
 for this, but the whole conception of pupils' associations is 
 still too young in Germany. In one school alone a higher 
 mercantile school for girls has an institution of the kind been 
 developed with eminent success, thanks to the devotion of the 
 head-master. And in one trade school for boys a mutual- 
 assistance fund managed by the boys themselves works very 
 well. But these examples are still isolated ones. 
 
 The organization I have described at present exists in this 
 complete form only in Munich. I have already said that Wiirt- 
 temberg has adopted the same organization for the whole country, 
 that similar institutions are to be found in Baden, that the canton
 
 THE CONTINUATION SCHOOL IN MUNICH 27 
 
 of Zurich in Switzerland has quite recently promulgated a new 
 Continuation School Law which in many respects resembles its 
 Munich predecessor, and that, finally, the city of Vienna has 
 erected at a cost of eight million crowns a central building for 
 apprentices' continuation schools, the framework of which is 
 exactly the same as in Munich. Thus it is seen that South 
 Germany, Austria, and German Switzerland have started on 
 the road of Munich's continuation-school organization. Also in 
 North Germany the greatest energy is being expended on the 
 problem of compulsory continuation schools, but at present 
 without any attempt to base the organization on the school 
 workshop. 
 
 The reason for this must be sought not only in the fact 
 that pedagogical opinion in North Germany is still very strongly 
 permeated with the idea of so-called general culture, but also 
 in the difference between the South German and the North 
 German employer.. The latter is mostly an ardent opponent of 
 the school workshop. And another reason is perhaps the diffi- 
 culty with which organizers and schoolmen can make up their 
 minds to accept the innovations of a colleague. It is a funda- 
 mental characteristic of human nature that everyone who has 
 a question to solve likes to have contributed his own share 
 to the solution. There is a German riddle that illustrates what 
 I mean : "What is the difference between God and a German 
 professor?" And the answer is: "God knows everything, and 
 the German professor knows everything better." This "knowing 
 better" is always a hindrance to the quick realization of a good 
 thing. I do not wish to throw a stone at anybody. For we 
 can all make the same observation about ourselves. We are 
 all inclined to know things better than our colleagues. Espe- 
 cially when we have worked on a special hobby, consistently and 
 energetically, for many years, it is unspeakably difficult so to 
 enter into the ideas of another man, who does not agree with 
 us, that we can do him justice on all sides. Nevertheless ex- 
 perience will show in the case in question that the purely theoret- 
 ical continuation school which entirely avoids practical teaching 
 will not fulfil its purpose. In your country it is hardly probable
 
 28 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 that this experience will be necessary. You have already excel- 
 lent school workshops in schools of the most various kinds, the 
 value of which for the education of the man as opposed to the 
 workman has been brilliantly demonstrated in the publications 
 of the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Educa- 
 tion. The essential reason why the continuation school should 
 not become a purely theoretical school is that its limitation 
 to theoretical instruction would form an almost insuperable 
 barrier to transforming our schools into educational institutions 
 for community life. The transformation of schools into insti- 
 tutions of this kind, or, as I express it, into communities of 
 labor, is the fundamental problem of all school organization. 
 Its solution is the task of the present century. As long as our 
 schools of all kinds, not the continuation schools alone, are not 
 organized as communities of labor, they will not prepare their 
 pupils as they should for the great labor-community that sur- 
 rounds us, the state. I can give no better illustration of what} 
 I mean than in a quotation ifrom your excellent countryman, 
 Professor John Dewey, in his Moral Principles of Education: 
 
 I am told that there is a swimming-school in a certain city where 
 youth are taught to swim without going into the water, being repeatedly 
 drilled in the various movements which are necessary for swimming. When 
 one of the young men so trained was asked what he did when he got into 
 the water, he laconically replied : "Sunk." The story happens to be true ; 
 were it not, it would seem to be a fable made expressly for the purpose of 
 typifying the ethical relationship of school to society. The school cannot be 
 a preparation for social life, excepting as it reproduces, within itself, typi- 
 cal conditions of social life. 
 
 All our present schools are such swimming-schools on dry 
 land, as far as social education is concerned. We may give our 
 pupils a vast amount of instruction as to their relation to state 
 and society. But we do not accustom them to regard their 
 work from this point of view, and we give them no opportunity 
 of making practical use of their knowledge in the service of 
 their fellow-pupils. Our schools are therefore no schools for 
 social service. But nothing could be better adapted for this 
 purpose than the continuation schools I have described, in as 
 far as they are intimately combined with workshops and labora-
 
 THE CONTINUATION SCHOOL IN MUNICH 29 
 
 tories. For there is no place more suitable for uniting pupils 
 for community of labor than workshops, laboratories, and ex- 
 perimental gardens. 
 
 The only path to real state-community is to accustom the 
 children from their earliest years to do their work not only for 
 their own personal advantage but also for the advantage of their 
 youthful companions. Only thus can we hope to develop the 
 two great fundamental virtues of devotion to aims outside our- 
 selves and of consideration for the interests of others. And only 
 thus will it in all probability be possible to preserve our great 
 modern constitutional states from the dangers that threaten 
 them through their own industrial, economic, social, and politi- 
 cal development.
 
 THE TECHNICAL DAY TRADE SCHOOLS IN GERMANY 
 
 The development of German industry and of German com- 
 merce since the foundation of the German Empire is one of 
 the phenomena which both we at home and our neighbors 
 around us regard with astonishment, and which force us in- 
 voluntarily to ask what were the intrinsic causes that brought 
 this development to pass. Hand in hand with it we see also the 
 advance of the entire system of technical schools. All German 
 states are paying increasing attention to these technical-school 
 systems. The sums paid from the public purse for technical 
 instruction have reached a height unknown before. In 
 Prussia, the largest state in Germany, the state expenditure for 
 continuation and trade schools amounted in the year 1886 to 
 570,000 marks; this expenditure rose in the year 1893 to 2,300,- 
 ooo marks, in the year 1903 to 6,300,000 marks, and attained 
 in the year 1908 the height of 12,000,000 marks, or, in round 
 numbers, three million dollars. The expenditure for technical 
 schools has risen in a similar manner in Austria, where it 
 amounted, with the exclusion of Hungary, in the year 1896 
 to 5,200,000 crowns, in the year 1906 to 10,300,000 crowns, and 
 in the year 1908 to 14,500,000 crowns. 
 
 It is natural to presume that these rapidly rising curves of 
 industrial development and technical training both at home and 
 abroad stand in intimate connection with one another. We may 
 be inclined to give technical training credit for a considerable 
 portion of this industrial development; for it might be reasoned 
 that technical training must have preceded the visible results 
 of this training. But it is equally possible that industrial devel- 
 opment preceded the development of technical training, and 
 that thus the requirements of industry were the direct or indirect 
 causes for the establishment of new technical schools. And it is 
 
 30
 
 TECHNICAL DAY TRADE SCHOOLS IN GERMANY 31 
 
 also quite possible that though our technical and commercial 
 schools have not failed to influence the development of German 
 industry and trade they have by no means been the determining 
 factors in it. 
 
 It is not my object at present to investigate these questions. 
 Some of the answers will present themselves in the course of 
 our inquiry into the development of German technical schools, 
 their number, scope, and ideals. 
 
 In spite of the great expansion of the technical-school system 
 in Germany, it is not difficult to obtain insight into its essential 
 features, owing to the German tendency to unification, and es- 
 pecially to the fact that the schools have arisen partly or entirely 
 through state initiative. It will be advisable to distinguish three 
 groups of schools, according to the grade of training to which 
 they aspire. German industry and trade require, precisely like 
 the German army, a number of intellectually highly-trained 
 officers, a number of well-trained subalterns, and an army of 
 efficient soldiers. 
 
 The group of technical officers is almost exclusively re- 
 cruited from the German technical colleges. These institutions 
 are open only to students who have passed through the nine 
 classes of the secondary schools. They educate the technical 
 leaders of industry and also the state and municipal officials who 
 are intrusted with the execution of technical problems. They 
 receive their pupils after a school course of twelve or thirteen 
 years, including the primary and secondary school, running from 
 the pupil's sixth to his nineteenth year. Frequently a year of 
 practical work is thrown in between the secondary school and 
 the technical college. These technical colleges supply us for 
 the most part with the higher technical heads of factories, whose 
 duty it is to strike out new paths and discover new tasks and 
 methods. 
 
 Two different kinds of schools exist for the training of 
 subaltern officers: the middle and the lower technical training 
 schools. The technical middle school expects its pupils, as n 
 rule, to possess the knowledge and dexterity that are acquired 
 by a six-year course at a higher secondary school. This six-
 
 32 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 year course is a continuation of the first four years in the 
 primary school. Its concluding examination gives throughout 
 Germany the right to serve one year in the army instead of 
 three. Two years' practice in the workshop is generally re- 
 quired before admittance to these technical middle schools. It 
 is the purpose of these schools to provide industry with skilled 
 men, who can serve immediately under the technical leaders as 
 competent helpers either in the office or in the works. They 
 also train the subaltern technical officials for the municipal and 
 civil service. The time allotted them for this task is from two 
 to two and a half years. The pupil is therefore about twenty 
 years of age when he leaves school. (Compare also in Abhand- 
 lungen und Berichte iiber technisches Schnlwesen the report of 
 Director Rommberg of Coin, p. 83.) In place of the qualifica- 
 tion for the one-year military service that is gained by the con- 
 cluding examination of a school with six classes, the pupil can 
 undergo an entrance examination for the technical middle trade 
 school. 
 
 In addition to these schools there exist a great number of 
 technical lower trade schools for the training of foremen, en- 
 gine-fitters, masters, or other lower officials for the constructive 
 and business departments of works and factories. The condi- 
 tions of admittance are graduation from the primary school 
 (with eight classes) followed by at least four years' practical 
 work. In other words, only thoroughly trained workmen are 
 received in these schools. The period of instruction varies from 
 one to two years. Foremen proper, as required in industries, 
 that is to say, workmen placed at the head of a group of other 
 workmen in factories, are as a rule not trained in either of these 
 trade schools. These men must be possessed not only of suffi- 
 cient technical experience but also of special qualities of char- 
 acter, which are inborn and cannot be acquired in a two years' 
 school curriculum. In the opinion of most German manufac- 
 turers it is best to take these foremen from the ranks of the 
 most capable workmen. What they lack in technical training 
 is supplied by the third group of schools. 
 
 This third group of schools might be designated as techrtical
 
 TECHNICAL DAY TRADE SCHOOLS IN GERMANY 33 
 
 workmen's schools. They are spread all over Germany, in the 
 shape of continuation schools, factory schools, apprentices' 
 schools, Sunday and evening schools. Their essential charac- 
 teristic is that school attendance generally runs parallel with the 
 training in practical work. In all large and most small towns! 
 of Germany, apprentices and other youthful workers are under 
 the obligation of attending a continuation school for from six 
 to nine hours weekly during the working days. This continua- 
 tion school must as far as possible take the practical work of 
 the apprentice as the basis of its teaching. In some few cases 
 factories have established schools as part of their organization, 
 in which every apprentice without exception receives higher in- 
 struction for from two to four hours daily. In other places, 
 again, special apprentices' schools have been established for 
 locksmiths, machine-builders, joiners, weavers, plumbers, etc., 
 which take the place of the ordinary apprenticeship. Moreover 
 in all German towns evening and Sunday trade schools exist 
 for workmen, similar to those common in England and America. 
 I class all these schools together under the name of technical 
 workmen's schools. 
 
 In many cases these technical workmen's schools are affili- 
 ated with the technical middle schools. They make use of the 
 same workshops and classrooms and have the same teachers. 
 The more gifted pupils can go up from the workmen's schools 
 to the middle and even to the higher technical schools, provided, 
 in the latter case, that they are able to pass the entrance examina- 
 tion. They have a considerable advantage over many pupils of 
 these higher schools in their thorough practical training. This 
 is a point on which of late years special stress has been laid in 
 admittance to the lower and middle trade schools. Only as an 
 exception and under quite peculiar circumstances is it considered 
 advisable, in the interest of industry, to admit young men to 
 the lower trade schools who have been trained, not in the work- 
 shop, but in the office. The possibility of thus moving up from 
 one school to another not only provides industry with capable 
 workmen but also builds a ladder by which men from the middle 
 and poorer classes may mount up to better-paid posts. The
 
 34 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 technical middle schools thus also supply a social want. On the 
 other hand it is, as a rule, impossible in Germany for a pupif 
 who has passed through the technical middle school to enter the 
 technical colleges as a matriculated student, and thus to gain, 
 the qualification for a leading officer of industry. The only 
 technical middle school that accords its pupils the right of ma- 
 triculation as students in the technical courses of the university! 
 is the Trade Academy of Chemnitz in Saxony. There is no 
 other German school of the same kind. Industry, however, pays 
 little attention to this system of qualification, and although the 
 pupils of the technical middle schools rarely become students 
 in the technical courses of the university, we nevertheless not 
 infrequently see them in higher industrial posts. Englishmen 
 and Americans will find it difficult to understand such rigoroute 
 distinctions, for they are more accustomed than we in Germany 
 to inquire not what school a man has attended but what he has 
 learned and what he can do. Yet the German system is not 
 altogether without justification. Examinations rarely give a 
 true picture of a man. We rarely succeed in so ordering them 
 that memory is not placed at an advantage over real capacity. 
 But in spite of the fact that a man's best qualities generally re- 
 main hidden from the examiner, our technical colleges in Ger- 
 many, which have a very high standard for the training of 
 engineers, analytical chemists, and architects, must demand a 
 fairly homogeneous and intellectual preparatory training if 
 their scientific training is to proceed on the same lines as hereto- 
 fore. This homogeneous and intellectual training is as a rule 
 to be had only in the German nine-class middle schools which 
 begin after the first four classes of the primary schools. It 
 would be of the greatest danger to Germany's industries if the 
 scientific standard of her universities were to be lowered. 
 
 The technical middle schools, or, as I have called them in 
 the title, the technical day trade schools, do not exist for all 
 trades and industries in Germany. The industries in the service 
 of which such schools have already been established are the 
 various kinds of metal industry, textile industry, wood industry, 
 shipbuilding, smelting works, and foundries. Another group
 
 TECHNICAL DAY TRADE SCHOOLS IN GERMANY 35 
 
 of these day trade schools belongs to the building trades, both 
 above ground and under ground, carpentry, masonry, drainage, 
 concrete and iron works, and the different kinds of art trades, 
 printing, lithography, and chemical engraving. A third group 
 deals with commercial subjects. In addition to these we have 
 a number of lower technical schools adapted for home industries, 
 for instance, schools of weaving, carving, basketmaking, lace- 
 making, etc. Finally, household schools and schools for needle- 
 work and dressmaking must not be forgotten. These schools 
 for home industries are of the greatest importance in an over- 
 populated country like Germany, or a country poor in agriculture 
 like the Alpine districts of Austria, and they are accordingly 
 beginning to attract the attention of the state in a very high 
 degree. Particularly in Austria the organizers of home indus- 
 tries have in some places succeeded by good schools in so raising 
 the standard of production as to lead to a not inconsiderable 
 export and to increase the prosperity of districts possessing no 
 advantages of the soil, in a manner undreamed of before. The 
 establishment of day trade schools has sometimes been the 
 cause of more economic and social profit in these cases than in 
 the large industries. Our magnificently developed chemical in- 
 dustry as well as our food industries are at present almost en- 
 tirely without technical middle schools. Neither are there any 
 public day trade schools for the clothing branches of industry. 
 But the chemical industry is admirably provided with higher 
 officials by our scientific schools, and numerous private schools 
 (millers' schools, brewers' schools, tailors' academies, and 
 women's schools) provide instruction in the clothing and some 
 food industries. 
 
 In Germany, with an area of 540,000 square kilometers, that 
 is, about one-third of the seventeen northern states, the number 
 of technical day trade schools supported by states, provinces, or 
 parishes, and therefore public schools, amounts in round numbers 
 to five hundred. There are about the same number of agricul- 
 tural schools. Among the industrial and trade schools are nine 
 technical universities, three mining academies, and five com- 
 mercial universities; twenty higher and eighteen lower technical
 
 36 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 middle schools for the various metal industries, nearly forty 
 middle schools for the weaving industry, nearly fifty for the 
 building trades, about twenty for the wood trade, twenty-fivie 
 so-called Kunstgeiverbeschulen, and thirty more for special 
 branches of art trades. Still greater is the number of higher 
 and lower technical middle schools in Austria, which has been 
 systematically spreading a net of these schools over all its states 
 since the year 1873. It would be purposeless to give the numbers, 
 as the Austrian system does not correspond with the German. 
 We must be careful not to work with figures alone, in describing 
 technical schools. People are only too prone to lose their heads 
 over figures. But the number of schools is not the principal 
 thing. So long as a country has pretty well what it needs, the 
 inner organization of its schools and their relation to the re- 
 quirements of its industries are of infinitely more importance. 
 
 In order to give a picture of this inner organization and its 
 relation to industry let me consider some of the principal groups, 
 the schools for the metal industry, the schools for the weaving" 
 industry, and the schools for the building trades. 
 
 Among the schools for the metal industry the most numerous 
 are the royal schools for machinery and technical electricity. 
 They are mostly higher technical middle schools, combined in 
 some cases with lower technical middle schools. In Prussia 
 there are fifteen of these : Aachen, Altona, Breslau, Coin, Dort- 
 mund, Duisburg, Elberfeld, Essen, Gleiwitz, Gorlitz, Hagen, 
 Kiel, Magdeburg, Posen, Stettin ; in Bavaria there are two higher 
 and three lower schools. Those Prussian towns in which cutlery 
 and hardware are developed have in addition special trade 
 schools royal trade schools for hardware in iron and steel : 
 for instance, Remscheid, Schmalkalden, Siegen, and Solingen, 
 which export their wares over the whole world. All these 
 schools, and especially the schools for machinery, have developed 
 from the most modest beginnings. They were originally in 
 Prussia, in the first half of the last century, so-called provincial 
 trade schools. They had to teach simply artisans and foremen, 
 and took their pupils at the age of fourteen from the elementary 
 school. In the year 1870 there were about thirty such schools.
 
 TECHNICAL DAY TRADE SCHOOLS IN GERMANY 37 
 
 At this date they were reorganized. Admittance was granted 
 only to pupils who had passed through the five lower classes of 
 our general middle schools. This means going far beyond the 
 mental horizon of the elementary-school pupil. These schools 
 underwent a second transformation in the year 1878. Most of 
 them were then changed into middle schools with nine classes, 
 for purposes of general education, the so-called Oberrealschulen 
 of today. Only five of the old schools retained the organization 
 of a so-called technical middle school (Gleiwitz, Breslau, Hagen, 
 Barmen, Aachen). The third transformation took place in the 
 year 1880. In this year a higher technical middle school for 
 machinery, of the kind already described, was established in the 
 town of Coin. A lower technical middle school, a so-called fore- 
 men's school, was attached to it. A few years later a similar 
 school was established in Dortmund, and ever since this system 
 has been adhered to. The development of schools in Bavaria 
 has proceeded on the same lines as in Prussia, since the last 
 decade of the last century. 
 
 The development of the lower schools for machinery in 
 Prussia has been exceedingly satisfactory, and the pupils turned 
 out by them have been able to meet all the requirements of in- 
 dustry. They have never trained foremen. They give men from 
 the primary school with long practical experience a technical 
 training suitable to the preparation they have received, and leave 
 the manner of their subsequent occupation to industry. The 
 teaching lays special stress on the training of the understanding 
 for the principles of mechanics and the laws of solid bodies. It 
 comprises the elements of mathematics (addition, subtraction, 
 multiplication, and division, powers, square and cubic roots, 
 equations of first and second degree, geometry, trigonometry, 
 and the calculation of surfaces and contents of simple solids) ; 
 mechanics (the laws of the elementary statics and dynamics of 
 solid and fluid bodies, the laws of solid bodies) ; physics (heat, 
 gases, fundamental laws of optics) ; chemistry (the elements and 
 the chemical compounds that are important in machinery, metals 
 and metaloids) ; technical drawing (drawing in projection, geo- 
 metrical and freehand drawing, and especially freehand sketch-
 
 38 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 ing); mechanical technology (founding, forming, forging, 
 rolling, etc. ) ; the most important tools and machines for metal 
 and wood, the most important parts of machines, the elements of 
 machine-building, the principles of technical electricity, simple 
 building-constructions, sometimes practical exercises in physical 
 and electrotechnical laboratories, for taking measurements with 
 the simplest instruments. To this must be added instruction in 
 German, arithmetic, the writing of cost-estimates, and the in- 
 spection of factories. All these subjects are spread over four 
 half-yearly terms. The certificate awarded at the end of the 
 course gives the right to the title of master and to the engage- 
 ment of apprentices. Therefore we call these schools "privi- 
 leged schools." 
 
 It is not devoid of interest to note the answers given by lead- 
 ers in industry to inquiries lately made by the "German Com- 
 mittee for Technical Schools" with a view to more thorough 
 organization. They point out that it matters little how far the 
 pupil advances in the different subjects of instruction, but it 
 matters a great deal whether he is thoroughly grounded in 
 them; that it is not a question of increasing theoretical knowl- 
 edge but of enlarging practical experience; that these lower 
 technical schools train too many office men and too few foremen, 
 fitters, and masters ; that their chief aim should be to develop 
 readiness of apprehension, the ability to draw, business capacity, 
 and interest in natural science ; that men who have passed through 
 the state schools have on an average a better general and techni- 
 cal education than the pupils of private schools, and that it would 
 therefore be in the interest of industry if all technical schools 
 in Germany were exclusively in the hands of the state. In many 
 cases the answers assert that even at admittance the very greatest 
 attention should be paid to the practical experience possessed 
 by the candidate. Four .years are not considered sufficient. 
 They demand a four-year apprenticeship and after this four 
 years' work as journeymen. And they urge the necessity of 
 advising the pupils on leaving school not to crowd into the 
 offices, but to seek positions in the workshops, which stand higher 
 in repute and are better paid than the former.
 
 TECHNICAL DAY TRADE SCHOOLS IN GERMANY 39 
 
 The higher schools for machinery go considerably farther 
 than these just described. They presuppose a fairly good general 
 education, such as is gained in a six-class middle school in Ger- 
 many, and generally demand in addition two years' practical 
 work. On this they base a curriculum of two and a half years' 
 instruction. The subjects taught are in the main the same as 
 those of the lower machinery schools, but they are treated more 
 scientifically and give the pupils the knowledge requisite for 
 simple construction under supervision or for reproduction. In 
 mathematics the pupils go as far as differential and integral 
 calculus ; in mechanics, to which the greatest attention is paid, 
 they study the elements of heat in physics, machine-building, 
 and technical electricity, and they receive particularly careful 
 instruction, both theoretical and practical, in laboratories espe- 
 cially fitted up for these three subjects. All proprietors of 
 works and factories lay stress on the importance of laboratories, 
 and the Memorial on the Technical Schools of Germany points 
 out that many of them mention the necessity of technical ex- 
 periments and continued observations that might well be placed 
 in the hands of men trained in technical middle schools. Natu- 
 rally great importance is attached to training in drawing, not 
 only geometrical drawing but freehand sketching, and on the 
 reproduction of machines and parts of machines from memory. 
 Many regard education in the faculty of space-conception as 
 absolutely necessary in these schools. In mechanical technology 
 the pupil is introduced to tools and machines, to smelting, found- 
 ing, forging and rolling processes, and to the study of raw ma- 
 terials; in building construction, to the combinations of stone, 
 wood, and iron, to the construction of vaults, roofs, and stair- 
 cases, and to the elements of graphic statics. To this is added 
 instruction in business matters, book-keeping, bills of exchange, 
 specifications, and estimates. The time allotted for everything 
 is on an average forty to forty-two hours a week, during a 
 course of two or two and a half years. 
 
 The pupils trained in these schools find employment in Ger- 
 many not only in industry but also in the service of the state. 
 The latter is particularly the case when they can show good
 
 40 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 practical ability. But their number is not great. In Prussia 
 in the year 1904 the higher schools for machinery were training 
 nine hundred and forty pupils. If we apportion this number 
 among the half-yearly terms, we get in round numbers one hun- 
 dred and ninety pupils per term ; that is to say, the higher schools 
 for machinery throughout all Prussia turned out one hundred 
 and ninety pupils in 1904. If we consider that probably half 
 of these enter state service not many remain for private posts. 
 The technical middle schools for the metal industry are for the 
 most part distinctly divided into higher and lower schools. This 
 is not yet the case in the building trades. But the necessity for the 
 division is making itself more and more felt. We are endeavor- 
 ing to place working builders, that is, master masons, master 
 stone-cutters, master carpenters, and foremen, in schools of 
 their own, with a lower standard, and to train technical builders, 
 both for private and state posts, exclusively in the higher middle 
 schools, the so-called building trade schools. These schools were 
 originally founded for the theoretical training of ordinary 
 builders. The first school of the kind was established as a pri- 
 vate undertaking in the year 1820 in Munich by Mitterer and 
 Schopf, and raised to a public institution in 1823. The second 
 school was founded in 1831 in Minden, Prussia. This was 
 also the work of a private man, the district building-inspector 
 Haarmann. In both cases the founders were inspired by their 
 recognition of the fact that the theoretical knowledge and the 
 ability in drawing of the working builders were entirely insuf- 
 ficient. Other building schools followed later, partly established 
 by the state, partly by private business men, but in the latter 
 case first subsidized by public money and eventually passing 
 into the hands of state or commune as public schools. But they 
 were all founded as lower middle schools. Not till later, after 
 state and commune had begun to require a certain class of tech- 
 nical workmen, and after the public for its own security had 
 begun to take an interest in the training of private builders, was 
 the standard of these schools raised. To these external causes 
 we must add an internal cause, which has made itself apparent 
 in all technical schools in the course of their historic develop-
 
 TECHNICAL DAY TRADE SCHOOLS IN GERMANY 41 
 
 ment. Every school has in itself a motive for progressive ex- 
 pansion. This process of transformation is seen not only in 
 Germany, but in all countries. It may even be a danger for 
 technical schools, in spite of its intrinsic justification. The 
 teacher is constantly seeking to make his instruction wider and 
 more thorough, and this pushes the pupil, at first unintentionally, 
 beyond the limits of artisanship. But as it is impossible for a 
 trade to flourish which is being automatically drained of its 
 most intelligent members, it must be a fundamental principle, 
 in the organization of all technical schools, to preserve the pupils' 
 joy and interest in personal, manual work. 
 
 In Germany there are at present forty-five higher technical 
 middle schools for builders. They are trade schools, and train 
 their pupils in five half-yearly terms to become either independent 
 masters or assistant workmen for office or building (drawers 
 and foremen), or technical workmen for the state, the army, 
 the railway, or the municipality. The conditions of admittance 
 are : an age of sixteen, an entrance examination, or the certifi-t 
 cate for the voluntary, one-year military service, and, as in the 
 machinery schools, practical work of at least twelve months' 
 duration. Exceptions are sometimes made to the last condition. 
 In South Germany the four half-yearly terms are frequently 
 placed in the winter months, so that the pupils can return to 
 practical building-work during the summer. Paragraph 89 of 
 the German Military Law allows pupils who have passed the 
 final examination with honors certain privileges in going in for 
 the examination for the one-year voluntary military service. 
 
 Most German building-trade schools have been equipped for 
 building above ground, but some few also embrace underground 
 building, as well as iron construction and concrete building. In- 
 struction in German trade schools for building above ground 
 generally embraces the practical subjects, construction, drawing, 
 the theory of building and composition, and also the preparatory 
 subjects, such as algebra, plane geometry, geometry of solids, 
 and trigonometry, physics, chemistry, projection, freehand draw- 
 ing, modeling, surveying, and the study of materials. The only 
 general subjects are German, the theory of business and law,
 
 42 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 and arithmetic, including cost-estimates. The number of weekly 
 lessons is on an average forty-four, so that the weekly number 
 during the five half-yearly terms amounts to two hundred and 
 twenty. In the department for underground building some of 
 these subjects are curtailed in order to gain time for instruction 
 in earthwork, road-building, canal construction, bridge-building, 
 railway-building, and the theory of machinery. The principal 
 part of the hours for instruction about one hundred and ten 
 is engrossed by the technical subjects, while only twelve to fifteen 
 hours remain for general subjects. 
 
 I do not wish to say that this peculiarity of the German 
 building schools is worthy of imitation. In fact far too little 
 attention is paid to general culture in most German technical 
 middle schools. In this point they compare unfavorably with 
 the French and Austrian schools. I shall return to this subject 
 later on, and only remark here that the reorganization of build- 
 ing schools in Austria of December 17, 1909, bears witness, in 
 my opinion, to a deeper insight into the essence of true technical 
 culture. According to the regulations of this organization it 
 is to be the task of the new trade schools for builders to foster 
 the study not only of technical subjects but also of those pertain- 
 ing to general culture, with a view to supplying the trade with 
 men whose education is not inferior to that bestowed in the 
 general middle schools. Consequently these schools entitle their 
 pupils to the one-year voluntary military service and exempt 
 them from the theoretical part of the master builders' examina- 
 tion. The Austrian schools receive pupils at the age of fourteen 
 with the education given by eight years in primary schools. 
 These schools consist of a four years' course, which includes 
 thorough practical teaching both in school workshops and on 
 private and public buildings. The first practical introduction to 
 the trade takes place in the first and second year in the school 
 courtyard. The third year consists of two winter half-years, 
 interrupted by a summer half-year spent in practical service on 
 buildings, and only the fourth year is devoted entirely to theory. 
 
 I have already mentioned that the lower middle schools for 
 builders in Germany lag far behind the higher middle schools.
 
 TECHNICAL DAY TRADE SCHOOLS IN GERMANY 43 
 
 They are mostly attached to the higher schools. Only in Austria 
 have they recently been made entirely independent as building 
 schools for artisans. They consist there of two technical courses 
 of five months in the winter; the conditions of admittance are 
 graduation from the primary school, apprenticeship, and three 
 years in a continuation school. 
 
 The schools for metal-workers and builders were not founded 
 originally to meet the requirements of trade and industry. This 
 was, however, the case with the schools for textile industries. 
 The introduction of the power-loom turned the workman him- 
 self into a machine. All that he had to do, or that he still has 
 to do, is to watch the unvarying movement of a machine that 
 is complete in itself. He has nothing to do with the process 
 of weaving and nothing with the building of the machine. Thus 
 he generally lacks any kind of stimulation from without, and 
 consequently remains devoid of any higher mental or technical 
 development. Yet even the textile industry requires intelligent 
 workers who can be made use of as foremen and directors. This 
 fact led manufacturers to demand the establishment of lower 
 schools for weaving and spinning, and in some cases even to 
 take the matter into their own hands. In other districts, where 
 weaving was extensively carried on at home in the winter months, 
 schools were founded in order to give peasants' daughters and 
 servants, and young men as well, an opportunity of at least 
 learning how to make linen, half-linen, and cotton fabrics for 
 personal use. This last object was the origin of the numerous] 
 weaving workshops in Hanover and Silesia. As the artistic 
 taste for hand-woven carpets, curtains, and furniture covers is 
 increasing in Germany, it is not improbable that these simple 
 opportunities of instruction will spread still farther in poor 
 districts, as has been the case in Sweden. Later on, after the 
 number of power-looms had multiplied exceedingly, and the 
 processes of weaving wool, cotton, linen, silk, and velvet had 
 been correspondingly developed, the sons of manufacturers be- 
 gan to feel the need of higher schools. The foundation of these 
 higher schools was also favored by the desire on the part of 
 the manufacturers to make themselves independent of foreign
 
 44 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 countries. In the first half of the nineteenth century young 
 men who wished to learn the secrets of weaving were forced to 
 go, at great expense, to Lyons, where both public and private 
 weaving schools had long existed. 
 
 German industry was also greatly hampered by the difficulty 
 of procuring patterns, and the necessity of training pattern 
 draughtsmen became self-evident. Courses in drawing had be- 
 come especially indispensable in the schools for the woolen in- 
 dustry, in which the pattern is generally attended to by the same 
 employee who has the post of supervision in the machine-room. 
 The higher weaving schools could be made use of for this pur- 
 pose. A factory-pattern drawing school was soon attached to 
 the oldest German weaving school, in Elberfeld, founded in 
 1845. A second weaving school was founded in 1854 at Muhl- 
 heim on the Rhine, and a third in 1855 at Krefeld. The Elber- 
 feld school was also enlarged, at the suggestion of the manufac- 
 turers, by a chemical department for dyers, printers, and 
 bleachers. In the same manner the development of German 
 trade made it necessary to add commercial courses to the weav- 
 ing schools, for the instruction of clerks in drapers' shops and 
 factories in the knowledge of wares and the processes of work 
 in the different branches of the textile industry. And finally 
 the weaving schools are sometimes combined with courses for 
 dressmaking, frequented mostly by female pupils. These courses 
 are most numerous in Berlin, the principal seat of dressmaking 
 in Germany. 
 
 The technical middle schools for textile industry are particu- 
 larly developed in Prussia, where they were reorganized in the 
 year 1896, as a result of conferences held between the directors 
 of the weaving schools and experts in the trade. The influence 
 of the textile industry made itself particularly felt on this occa- 
 sion in the specialization of the different schools in the various 
 districts in the kinds of weaving for which they were required. 
 In this point also the technical middle schools for the textile 
 industry are distinguished from those of the metal and building 
 trades. In the latter, as opposed to the textile schools, there is
 
 TECHNICAL DAY TRADE SCHOOLS IN GERMANY 45 
 
 a strong tendency toward unification, special stress being laid on 
 the technical basis common to all the different branches of the 
 trade. Later on Bavaria followed the example of Prussia. 
 
 In the conditions laid down for the admission of pupils to 
 the lower and higher weaving schools it became clear that neither 
 state nor municipality had the same need for skilled technical 1 
 workmen in textile branches that they had in the metal and 
 building trades. Admittance to the higher and lower middle 
 schools is generally granted to all pupils in possession of a fair 
 school-training. It is left to the discretion of the director to 
 exclude pupils with insufficient training from the higher schools. 
 One year's practical work is usually required of the pupils before 
 entrance. The higher weaving schools generally comprise three 
 half-yearly courses, and the lower weaving schools have gener- 
 ally a half-year course ; in each half-year course there are about 
 forty- four lessons a week. In the higher schools these lessons 
 are divided among the following subjects : setting up the frames, 
 putting in and taking out the patterns, machines, materials, dyes, 
 designing, and the law concerning the trade. These subjects are 
 treated differently, according to whether the school is arranged 
 for the woolen, half- woolen, linen, half -linen, jute, or cotton 
 industry. The lower, half-year, weavirig schools deal with the 
 same subjects, which are of course considerably reduced in 
 amount. The number of day trade schools for the textile in- 
 dustry in Germany is twenty-seven. There are in addition a 
 great number of workshops and schools for teaching weaving, 
 lacemaking, and embroidery. 
 
 Besides these three large groups of public trade schools, sup- 
 ported with public money, by the state and municipalities, with 
 which we must also reckon the South German trade schools 
 for the wood industry (which are, however, without exception 
 devoted exclusively to the training of master artisans), there still 
 remain a certain number of trade schools dispersed through the 
 country in the service of the most various trades, and supported 
 partly by public money, partly by employers' associations, partly 
 by purely private means. Saxony is the country that possesses 
 the greatest number of trade schools. It would take us too
 
 46 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 far to discuss these schools, although "we should meet very 
 interesting institutions among them, especially adapted to 
 be of use in smaller trades. Day trade schools with a longer 
 and a shorter curriculum are also attached to these German 
 continuation and artisans' schools. For instance, day trade 
 schools for joiners, art-locksmiths, jewelers, goldsmiths, book- 
 binders, stone-carvers, decorators, machine-drawers, and build- 
 ers are affiliated with the continuation schools in Munich. These 
 trade schools seek to inspire new life in handicrafts that here 
 as in all other countries have suffered cruelly from the advance 
 of industry. There are similar day trade schools connected 
 with continuation schools in most German towns. The most 
 prominent among these are the German art-handicraft schools 
 (Kunstgewerbeschulen}, of which at present about forty are 
 supported by public money, and which embrace a great number 
 of different day trade schools for different branches of art- 
 trades. 
 
 Before I conclude let me recapitulate the foregoing state- 
 ments and at the same time institute a comparison between the 
 German and the American schools. We may say that most 
 German day trade schools had their origin in endeavors to im- 
 prove the condition of small trades. They commenced at a 
 time in which industry played no important part in Germany. In 
 the same measure as industry developed, and still more when 
 the state began to require capable technical workers of a middle 
 grade, did these day trade schools also begin to expand beyond 
 the limits of their first purpose. The next step is the division 
 into two departments, an upper one for better trained technical 
 assistants and a lower one for artisans. The imperial German 
 labor law had an extremely favorable influence on the develop- 
 ment of this lower department. But the manner of their origin 
 proves that they were not meant to replace apprenticeship to a 
 master or manufacturer;! on the contrary, they more or less pre- 
 suppose practical schooling in trade and industry, and make it 
 their office to fill the gaps left by this purely practical schooling, 
 to widen practical experience, to teach the working classes the 
 science and art of their vocations, and as far as possible to give
 
 TECHNICAL DAY TRADE SCHOOLS IN GERMANY 47 
 
 them a business training. The system of apprenticeship is not 
 dying out in Germany. Thanks to the imperial German labor 
 law and the continuation and lower trade schools it has fostered, 
 and thanks as well to institutions for the furtherance of trade, 
 and the consequent increase in skilled production, apprentice- 
 ship has gained in educational value not only in trades but also 
 in industries. Schools that replace apprenticeship are rare in 
 Germany. In Austria and Switzerland schools of this kind have 
 existed for the last twenty years, but during these twenty years 
 they have remained at a standstill. Nor can I discover any 
 strong inclination in these three countries to spend public money 
 on such schools. These countries have also kept the primary 
 school free from specialized industrial education. On the other 
 hand, during the last ten years we have been continually laying 
 more stress on the introduction of manual training into the 
 elementary schools, or, as I express it, on the transformation. 
 of textbook schools into working schools. In the Munich pri- 
 mary schools we have in the eighth class five hours' wood and 
 metal work a week for all boys, needlework and domestic science 
 with teaching in the school kitchen for all girls. In many Ger- 
 man schools, as well as in Swiss schools, and still more in Swed- 
 ish schools, we find the demand of the Circular of the New 
 York Education Department of February, 1910, to the effect 
 that industrial arts of a more general character are to be intro- 
 duced in the primary grades as well as in the grammar grades, 
 more and more frequently realized. 
 
 If I seek to compare German and American trade schools, 
 I find that our higher trade schools most resemble your technical 
 colleges. Only we must not forget that there is no transition 
 contemplated from our higher trade schools to our technical 
 universities, and that one or two years' practical work must 
 either be presented or taken in special preparatory courses be- 
 fore admittance to the school. 
 
 Our numerous lower trade schools have no counterpart in 
 the United States. The trade schools of the United States are 
 generally intended to take the place of apprenticeship. The 
 German trade schools on the other hand are intended, with few
 
 48 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 exceptions, to make up for the deficiencies of apprenticeship. 
 Only the trade schools for girls take the place of apprenticeship, 
 because no good system of apprenticeship exists for girls' trades, 
 such as millinery, dressmaking, cooking, kitchen-management, 
 shirtmaking, etc., as it does for boys. If in Germany the system 
 of apprenticeship should ever approach to a similar decay, then, 
 in my opinion, there would be no other plan for industrial schools 
 than the establishment of specialized trade schools for all trades, 
 beginning at the close of the elementary school and extending 
 over four years. For there are only two roads for the indus- 
 trial education of the masses : either a good system of appren- 
 ticeship, with trade schools that supply the wants of and broaden 
 education, as do our Munich continuation schools, or specialized 
 trade schools. There are no other means to this end. Capacity 
 in industry and trade flourishes only on the soil of early, 
 thorough, and many-sided technical, business, and civic training. 
 If the public life does not give this, then the public school must 
 give it, or industry will decay. The intermediate industrial 
 schools recommended by the above-mentioned circular of the 
 New York Education Department will perhaps help this result 
 in the United States, but, on the other hand, they may grow 
 unawares into specialized trade schools. Furthermore, the prin- 
 ciples inculcated by the same circular for the organization of 
 these trade schools are excellent, especially the three which de- 
 mand "that the trade schools should absolutely abandon all col- 
 lege-preparatory work, that all instruction in mathematics and 
 science must be such as to be directly usable, and that trade 
 schools must necessarily take on varying forms in different lo- 
 calities." These trade schools then become admirable institu- 
 tions for the affiliation of continuation and evening schools, 
 precisely as they are in Germany. But before we proceed to a 
 system of trade schools spread over the whole country and in- 
 tended to replace apprenticeship, we should first make the most 
 detailed inquiries as to the causes of the decline of the old 
 system of apprenticeship and use every means at our disposal 
 to stop it. For however good such trade schools may be, they
 
 TECHNICAL DAY TRADE SCHOOLS IN GERMANY 49 
 
 have, besides their immense cost, other defects which have so 
 far considerably checked their diffusion in Europe, 
 
 It is of course beyond doubt that at the present moment 
 the German trade schools are of great use to German trade and 
 industry. But it is not easy to determine to what extent the 
 day trade schools have contributed to the development of Ger- 
 man industry and commerce. It appears to me certain that 
 they have not been the prime factor. 
 
 I pointed out at the beginning that the number of men 
 turned out by the Prussian higher schools for machine-building 
 is far too small, even if one half were to join the ranks of in- 
 dustry every year, to be of any appreciable influence. The 
 middle trade technical workers required yearly by German 
 industry must amount to at least tenfold the number now fur- 
 nished by the schools. I can give you a still stronger proof 
 of the truth of this assumption. In the course of this year the 
 Bavarian government had occasion, for the purpose of reor- 
 ganizing the building-trade schools, to make an inquiry in the one 
 hundred and forty- three districts of the country as to the num- 
 ber of independent builders. They asked what percentage had 
 passed through the building-trade school. The number of inde- 
 pendent builders in the one hundred and forty-three districts 
 of the kingdom amounted to nine thousand four hundred and 
 one. Among these there were only six hundred and seventy-two, 
 or 7 per cent, who had passed through the entire curriculum of 
 a building-trade school, and fourteen hundred and sixty, or 15^2 
 per cent, who had taken single half-year courses. Thus nearly 
 80 per cent of all independent builders had been to no trade 
 school at all ; many of these had been to a higher general school, 
 and many had enjoyed no other teaching than that of the pri- 
 mary and continuation schools. 
 
 Considerable influence on industrial education will probably 
 be exercised by the continuation schools of the German Empire, 
 which have recently undergone a remarkable extension. These 
 schools are also supported by public money. Their influence 
 is naturally greatest in towns and states in which their organiza- 
 tion, like that of Munich, provides not only drawing and com-
 
 50 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 mercial training, but also, by means of workshops, purely 
 technical training as well. There can be no doubt that 
 these continuation schools, which begin where the elementary 
 school ceases and carry on the education of all youthful workers, 
 whether apprentices or not, without exception, from their four- 
 teenth to their eighteenth year, raise the standard of character 
 in the masses, who without them would be mostly without 
 secondary education. Thanks to these continuation schools, 
 even the poorest and least favored by circumstances need not 
 remain without further education. And thanks to the fact that 
 the German continuation schools appeal to the vocation of the 
 pupil and turn it to account as the starting point of education, 
 every youthful workman can profit by them in his own particular 
 calling. In states outside Prussia there is hardly a town without 
 a compulsory continuation school. In the states of South Ger- 
 many there is not a single exception. 
 
 I nevertheless attribute the lion's share in the rise of German 
 industry and commerce to other causes. Possibly one of the 
 chief of these is the German character, with its tendency to 
 reflection, its thoroughness, tenacity, and capacity for subordina- 
 tion. Another cause is perhaps the German merchant, with his 
 flexibility, his adaptability, and his zeal in the study of foreign 
 languages and foreign conditions. A third cause may have 
 been German poverty.' Before 1870, when the German Em- 
 pire became a great political and at the same time a great eco- 
 nomic power, Germany was a poor country. Now nothing is 
 better calculated to develop the innate forces of a people than 
 poverty. The mental versatility of the Germanic races, Swedes, 
 Norwegians, Scotch, and English, is possibly chiefly to be 
 ascribed to the fact that they have been forced for thousands 
 of years to strain every nerve in the struggle against fate. One 
 of the best weapons that poor races possess for this struggle is 
 their faculty of dispensing with things. The Germany of today 
 has grown rich within one generation. It remains to be seen if 
 it has strength enough, in spite of its wealth, to work and 
 struggle in the sweat of its brow. History generally teaches the 
 contrary. Yet our overpopulation and the tension existing
 
 TECHNICAL DAY TRADE SCHOOLS IN GERMANY 51 
 
 in all other civilized states may perhaps supply us with the same 
 motives that we formerly owed to poverty. 
 
 One factor, however, has certainly been of eminent impor- 
 tance in the development of German industry. That is the 
 scientific training of German engineers ; in other words, the 
 serious scientific spirit that rules in our German technical uni- 
 versities. In the great decisions of the battlefield it is the ca- 
 pacity of officers and leaders, with their military discipline and 
 their iron sense of duty, that turns the balance of the day. A 
 small band with the right man at its head may cope with ten 
 times its number under an indifferent leader. The same thing 
 applies to the technical officers on the field of industrial fight. 
 The scientific mind that guides the German engineers, which 
 grew out of the German middle schools with their rigorous 
 expectations and their firmly established school discipline, is 
 a chief factor in industry, equaled only by the earnest German 
 scholar, who devotes his life to the investigation of purely scien- 
 tific problems in the laboratories of our universities, without 
 regard to their practical possibilities and with no concern for 
 material profit. When Professor Baeyer in Munich spent years 
 in the attempts to make artificial indigo, before these attempts 
 were crowned with such brilliant success, it was neither use nor 
 money that stimulated him, but only the great problem of trans- 
 forming inorganic substances into a color that had hitherto 
 been a product of vegetable vitality. And among other eco- 
 nomic causes it is certainly this spirit of unselfishness, of devo- 
 tion to an ideal aim, that has led our technical officers of in- 
 dustry to victory. 
 
 We thus arrive at the conclusion that real scientific culture 
 in union with that discipline of character which teaches thorough- 
 ness and devotion to aims lying outside of ourselves are of no 
 less importance for the industrial development of a country 
 than technical training. Technical capacity alone will not suffice. 
 In my opinion, the German day trade schools suffer from the 
 fact that they pay almost exclusive attention to technical train- 
 ing. I have already repeatedly remarked that the courses of 
 instruction in our technical day trade schools differ undesirably
 
 52 VOCATIONAL TRAINING 
 
 from those of our eastern and western neighbors, in the small 
 attention paid to civic education, which is to me identical with 
 the formation of character. Among the answers given by Ger- 
 man manufacturers to the inquiry of the German Committee 
 for Technical Schools there is one which lays its finger on the 
 essential point of all education : 
 
 A far more important problem for the machine-builders' schools than 
 the exact amount of instruction in the single branches is to develop the 
 character and intelligence of the pupils. Teaching suited to the future call- 
 ing must be regarded merely as a means to this end. We shall always be 
 able to work successfully with men of character and intelligence, whether 
 their schooling has led them further in one branch of knowledge or another. 
 Knowledge learned at school can never be more than the simple rudiments 
 of the knowedge gained by experience in special work. 
 
 This lesson which a German machine-builder gives the com- 
 mittee must be taken to heart by the German day trade schools 
 and all the trade schools of the world. Technical instruction must 
 be regarded in the first place as a means of character-training, 
 and it must be supplemented by other forms of instruction with 
 a view to making it as many-sided as possible. In the life of 
 great economic groups and of nations there are moments, and 
 they are the critical moments, in which neither knowledge nor 
 skill, but character, decides the day character that has learned 
 to regard its own egoistic interests as of no account when their 
 sacrifice is demanded by the welfare of the community to which 
 we belong, the welfare of the service that we have chosen, the 
 welfare of the subordinates intrusted to our care.
 
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