Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/379

 THE WORKING BOY 365

time they fall into the abyss. Many of them end as tramps, beginning their career as little children roaming the streets of the great cities in search of a dozen different occupations in a year.

This nation will be what the children make it ; and they will be very largely what the schools make them. Today they are growing up industrially incompetent ; and they will continue to do so until we make the schools as democratic for the years from ten to sixteen as they are now for the years from six to ten.

In the interest of the national welfare this horde of incom- petents should be checked. And to this end I plead for the occupancy with manual training of the years from six to six- teen. As the industrial life becomes inadequate to its old func- tion of making the craftsman it behooves the nation to widen its conception of the public schools to embrace this task.

Instead of workingall head and no hands in the primary school, and all hands and no head forever after in some wretched, brainless manipulation, let us have every child using both head and hands in every grade from kindergarten to high school. Let us make the tool as much at home in the schoolroom as the pen and pencil. Let the boys work at woods and metals as they now read books and write letters, learning the qualities of materials by handling them constructively. Let us have the girls as intelligent concerning the nutritive qualities of foods and the perils of drinking-waters as they are concerning the American Revolution.

When the school library and school workshop are coordinate parts of the public school system the Fourth of July floods of oratory concerning the dignity of labor may, perhaps, be safely dammed into narrower channels; for the dignity of labor will then form a part of the daily experience of the boys and girls. Today their experience teaches them that this nation believes that there should be scientific and literary education at the cost of the community, extending over several years, for one set of children ; while for another and much larger set there are at most four years of meager reading, writing, and arithmetic, fol-