Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/436

432 research, as a teaching institution, and as a champion and evangel of high ideals.

Inasmuch as a major portion of the time of a considerable fraction of the human race has been long engaged in earning a livelihood by means of those industrial pursuits for which the school is now beginning to formulate a specific course of preparation it is not remarkable that this kind of education is now engaging public thought, but rather remarkable that it should have been so long neglected.

The organization of a national system of education adequate to prepare for industry involves the many-sided problem of providing for the needs of each of the main classes of persons found in industrial society. Such a system must provide for the workmen who compose the rank and file of the mechanical or operative departments of a business, and it also must give the scientific and technical training required by the managers and superintendents of those departments. It must include training for the office force which composes the executive branch of that part of a business which has to do with the financial and commercial policy, and finally it must provide an adequate education for those who determine and superintend the execution of this policy.

We may therefore divide the school equipment, which has been provided specifically to prepare young persons for commercial and industrial pursuits, according as it relates to one or another of the above classes, distinguishing: (1) Trade and manual training; (2) professional and technical education; (3) training for office work, and (4) higher commercial education.

Trade and Manual Training aims to produce the skilled artisan; and this it endeavors to do by giving the youth, in addition to his general elementary education, a further mental equipment, involving the knowledge of the qualities of materials and the methods of manipulating tools, machinery and materials to attain desired results. It also aims to give him a knowledge of the proportions necessary to secure strength or beauty, and the capacity to see the possibilities of materials and of his art. There is necessarily an important physical element involved in this kind of training. Not only must the mind be receptive, but the eye must be taught to see things as they are; not only must the imagination be awakened, but the hand must be skilled to execute the conceptions of the mind.

The subjects usually taught in manual training schools are free hand and mechanical drawing, clay modeling, carving, sewing, cooking, carpentry and forging. These subjects are appropriate for students between the fifth and eighth grades. They are chiefly taught in the public schools, being found in 1899 in the schools of 170 American cities. At the same period, however, there were 125 private schools teaching manual training.

In previous industrial periods a supply of skilled artisans, though