Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/84

80 responsibility of men and women. With that end in view, the school days and weeks should be on a business basis, with long hours (diversified, of course, with a proper alternation of mental and physical activity), strict accountability on the part of the pupils, and an organization based, as nearly as possible, upon the best business and factory models. So long as youth of seventeen and eighteen do not take their high-school work seriously, they will not take business seriously. And it is this lack of seriousness, this failure to realize that success in business can come only from strict attention to business, which lies at the root of most, if not all, of the complaints made by business men against the products of American schools. Those employers find many, if not most, of the boys and girls who come for employment, unfitted for and, if I may use the word, unfittable into, the complex demands of modern business life. Remembering the story-books, they think it is because these aspirants can not write and cipher and spell. But they are fast finding out that the causes of the trouble, in most instances, are weak bodies, or untrained senses, or sluggish minds, or lack of purpose, or general immaturity, or ignorance of how to work with others, or an all round irresponsibility, or a combination of from two to seven of these common human defects. Secondary schools can not, of course, make silk purses out of sows' ears; but they can make it their chief business to deliver to the business world boys and girls whose bodies, senses and minds have had so much organized training as heaven has permitted them to receive; who have passed out of the state of "kids" into that of men and women; who have a conception of and experience in cooperation and team-play; who know what loyalty means; and who have taken school work so seriously that they are prepared to look upon the earning of one's daily bread as something other than a listless game.

Modern business demands these things. Experience has shown that a rightly ordered secondary school system can produce them. That all schools do not is the fault partly of the teachers, partly of the employers, partly of the community in general, mainly of the parents. The fathers and mothers, and the rest of the community, must be educated to give moral and financial support to this effective type of education. But the only persons who can educate them are the schoolmasters; and they must do it in a roundabout way by gradually introducing this rational, real education into the higher and lower schools. The results will be so immediate, and in many cases so startling, as to make even the overworked business man take notice. And when he begins to realize that the school is really trying to meet his needs; when he begins to see that the millions poured into the public schools are producing efficient young men and young women, he will cease growling over his school taxes, and will turn some of the fortunes that he now gives or bequeaths to colleges into the far too lean treasuries of the higher and lower schools.