Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/726

696 neither essential nor elementary, and endowed beyond all dreams of private munificence by legislation which subsidizes for their support the property, real, personal, and mixed, of the whole Commonwealth, for all of which he has never seen sufficient reason, Mr. Walker thinks we may now rest and be thankful. There have been demands that something should be done to make education more practical in the direction of applied science and industrial art. But Mr. Walker says: Be quiet; these things can only come in with a popular boom. This is his language: "It may be that, as a result of one or all these demands, we shall see the time when the turning-lathe and the sewing-machine shall be parts of general school supplies. The point I make is, that agitation and discussion of this subject are not incumbent upon us, who are called to administer the school system as we find it, not to revolutionize its fundamental principles or work experiments. When the time comes for such changes we shall all hear of it. It will be a voice as of the sound of many waters. The school system and its methods and subjects of instruction are surrounded by almost constitutional guarantees. The people created and cherish this system and these methods and the existing modifications thereof." Now, we respectfully suggest that, if President Walker proposes to keep things placid, he must be a little more circumspect in his statements, and not give occasion for indignant protest. It is not true of the school system under his jurisdiction that the people created it "and the existing modifications thereof." Those "modifications" were never called for or authorized by the people. The school system of New York has been revolutionized and perverted from its original purposes, and that not by popular initiation and approval, but by manoeuvring and indirection, by wire-pulling and huggermuggery. It has been prostituted to ends never contemplated by those who established it and have sustained it, and this has been done in express defiance of the known convictions and wishes of the people. President Walker probably knows this, and hence his apprehension of a popular explosion, and his exhortations to a cautious and gingerly treatment of fundamental questions. On the contrary, we think the subject can not be too often and too thoroughly ventilated.

The reader is referred to a previous article in this "Monthly," which shows that the New York school system was founded to supply elementary instruction to those unable to obtain it in preexisting schools. But, with the progress and diffusion of knowledge, and especially of practical scientific knowledge that bears upon the common avocations of life, there grew up a popular demand that our common-school system should do something to qualify boys for industrial pursuits. To give effect to this widely expressed desire, it was proposed to establish in connection with the public-school system a high school of technology and practical science, to help boys who were expected to learn trades and follow industrial occupations. It was submitted to a popular vote whether such an institution should be organized, and its distinctive and limited object was printed upon each ballot. The people pronounced by a large majority in its favor, and the "Free Academy" was the result.

But the object of this institution was never honestly carried out. Its faculty were ashamed of its vulgar "utilitarian" purpose; a "Free Academy" had no status among dignified institutions, and its officers did not cease their exertions till its object was abandoned, and the concern was transformed into a "regular college." The Free Academy was killed, and a new charter was obtained, instituting the "College of the City of New York."

With this "modification thereof"