Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/376

 362 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

that we shall disagree ; for some will be content with a good provision for a corporal's guard, and others will maintain that the industrial army can best be made available only by educat- ing the whole body of troops, thinking any scheme which looks to fitting a few hundred older boys for a limited number of occupations of little value to the nation or to the boys them- selves.

At two points an attempt at adaptation has been made, neither of which, however, touches the boy under discussion. For the boy who is to be a captain of industry we have the technical school in some variety, from the Massachusetts School of Technology to the Armour Institute. At the other end of the educational chain we have the kindergarten, which postulates the truth that the child, as such, needs to have his fashioning faculties developed and proceeds to do this for purely pedagog- ical reasons. Between these two extremes there remain, how- ever, several missing links ; and it is to this middle ground, between six and sixteen years, that attention needs to be directed, for it is here that the problem of the education of the artisan must be solved.

In these years, between six and sixteen, appears the great army of working boys, numbering 20,000 in Illinois alone, and rising in some states to 50,000. For the larger number of chil- dren still attending school, not yet at work, there is little attempt at direct preparation for the life of an industrial nation. Except in the Workingmen's School in New York, and the Jewish Manual Training School in Chicago, there is little evidence, in any curriculum, of thought for the future of the working boy.

For the majority of American children there is no school life after twelve or thirteen years of age. The old apprentice- ship is gone, but the old tradition lingers, according to which the working-class child at the age of confirmation is ready to become the working boy.

Many children fall out of school early from sheer lack of interest in the purely scholarly course which, alone, is offered them ; and some parents, chiefly inexperienced immigrants,