Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/829

Rh In the first place, the schools must recognize the true nature and place of the industrial instinct: that it is the creative instinct; one of the profoundest of the human soul, and one of the earliest to manifest itself. The plays in which the child finds his greatest delight are all embryo industries. My little two-year-old, who with his blocks and sticks builds a barn for his rubber camel, is as truly creating as the architect who, with greater skill and knowledge, constructs a palace. Why should not the joy in producing, which forms so large a part of the child's happiness, be carried forward into the industries of maturer years, deepened and ennobled by a knowledge of industrial relations, by experience of the value of industrial products, and, above all, by the consciousness of duty done in the contribution made to human comfort and well-being? Give this instinct a proper development, join with it the best human intelligence and the best human benevolence, and you have the ideal man—the man perfect as his "Father in heaven is perfect."

In the second place, the schools must make a wise selection from the accumulated knowledge of the world. They must impart that knowledge which will enable their students intelligently to decide which one of the special heights of industry or art each is best fitted to climb. They must give that knowledge which will reduce to a minimum the difficulties in the way of change from one industry to another, often rendered necessary by the accidents of time and fortune.

All classes of citizens must have the knowledge which will form a basis for intelligent sympathy and appreciation among different classes of workers, and necessary to their action at the ballot-box, in order that each may recognize all as honorable and necessary, essential parts of one grand industrial whole.

In the third place, the public schools must develop general industrial power:

(a.) —They must take the best physiological knowledge the age affords, and under its guidance develop a body capable of enduring all the strains and fatigues likely to be brought upon it by at least the ordinary exigencies of life.

(b.) —They must impart the knowledge which it is their duty to give—according to the laws of mental assimilation—as discovered and interpreted by the best students of mental growth, to the end that mental dyspepsia may be avoided, and that the Best intellectual conditions may exist for the quick and accurate solution of at least the ordinary problems of life.

(c.) —They must give such a development of the sense of the beautiful as will enable our people, not simply to enjoy the beautiful in the objects about them, but such as will give a finesse and finish x to whatever work they undertake, whether it be the culture of corn, the making of a coat, the building of a house, or the