Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/341

Rh was, I believe, quite devoid of any idea of physiological or mental reactions of definite and independent educational value.

This system was seized upon in America by men of the industrial type of mind, and was valued for what I may call its bread-and-butter reaction. While I do not sympathize with their main thought, I do not wish in any way to discredit that part of it which was undoubtedly admirable. These men looked upon the high schools of America and saw that many of them were not educational. They saw that they were commercial, that they were teaching commercial geography, commercial arithmetic, commercial penmanship, commercial bookkeeping, and the like, and that as a result they were turning out a race of clerks with ideas little above those of trade and bargains, who could be had by the thousand in any of our great cities for from five to ten dollars a week—perhaps I ought to say from three dollars a week upward. Meager as is the ideal of life presented by industrialism, it was a great step forward as compared with the commercialism which it is meant to supplant. Viewed from the human standpoint, it is a step forward just in proportion as the thoroughgoing artisan, with his strong, lithe body, his quick eye, his skillful hand, his somewhat independent habit of mind, is better than the thoroughgoing clerk, with his endowment of all that is commonplace and subservient. But the men who introduced manual training into America saw that these commercial young people from the high schools had not deliberately chosen so mean a plan of life, but had rather been forced into it by the absence of any better plan. I do not mean to go into the vexed question of free will and necessity, but I think as students of education that we can not shut our eyes to the fact that the young person we are considering, now midway in his teens, is still the victim of his own inexperience, and is very far from free, and that the older half of society has very obvious duties to this same young person, not only in creating generous ideals of life, but not less in inaugurating a social régime which will open the way to their realization. It is quite useless to allow, or perhaps I ought to say force, boys and girls to grow up in the atmosphere of a low social ideal, and then blame them for it. It is quite useless to consent to a social order which presses sadly upon the majority of men, and then despise humanity for not making way against the inevitable.

And the Centennial Exhibition opened the eyes of the nation to another fact. It showed us that despite our boasted Yankee ingenuity, American workmen were far less skillful than their European and particularly their Continental brethren, and the fact had to be accounted for. It was seen that in America manual labor was looked down upon, that the social as well as the educational pressure