Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/405

Rh many more possibilities for diversified specialties, we want more than schools of ornament, good as such may be. Unable to compete with the low prices of European or Indian manual labor, we leave it to our machinery, and expect our workingman to enable us to enhance the value of our articles by the helping presence of industrial brains and knowledge, so important and generally better paid than manual labor alone, and for that result we look to industrial training as a means.

So much for the economical consideration, now as to pedagogics proper:

Education, the fitting for life. Life, unless your father is a millionaire, and does not spend or lose his millions before he dies, sums up practically in an activity in some profession, an activity aiming at a decent self-sustenance; professions outside of poetry and art, the inspirations and special proclivities of which we will not discuss. Professions may be summed up as clerical, legal, and literary or scientific. We have unmistakably succeeded in perfecting the training preparatory for some of them, and, as it stands to-day, defy any European institution to supply accomplished clergymen or lawyers in a shorter time and at less expense. Literary men escape our arguments for the same reason as artists and poets.

Clergymen we want, in order to maintain the phase of culture and the methods of thought which it is their function to care for. Lawyers can do no harm, even if there should be too many of them, as law well understood by the greatest number in the community is a safeguard against the thrilling and dramatic in public life, an element not exactly in demand; besides that, a lawyer can always do good service in legislation; but how is it about our mainspring as a nation, our technical and scientific men? Gain, pleasure, or respectability, directly connected with a special branch or pursuit, makes one or another profession more or less desirable. Inductive knowledge has recently made gigantic strides. Scientific knowledge has acted as the great lever of respectabilities. The traditional liberal education is but a phantom of the past, and the parlor accomplishments of the old, refined type, lightly glancing over the poetical, the artistic, the ideal of human nature, etc., is slowly but surely making way for the less voluble but more serious and practical gifts of the thinking individual of modern times. Scientific culture is already recognized as an equivalent of the literary, if not its superior. Slowly but surely, the sciences have gained their due places, and an ignoramus alone would refuse to credit them with the motive power of our advance in civilization. Scientific professions, therefore, would be found desirable and respectable to-day as a specialty in the liberal arts so called. This granted, let us approach the subject