The chief effort of all educational reforms is to bring about a readjustment of existing scholastic institutions and methods so that they shall respond to changes in general social and intellectual conditions. The school, like other human institutions, acquires inertia and tends to go on doing things that have once got started, irrespective of present demands. There are many topics and methods in existing education which date back to social conditions which are passing away. They are perpetuated because of tradition and custom. Especially is it true of our institutions of learning that their controlling ideals and ideas were fixed when industrial methods differed radically from those of the present. They grew up when the place of industry in life was much less important than it is now when practically all political and social affairs are bound up with economic questions. They were formed when there was no positive connection between science and the operations of production and distribution of goods; while at the present, manufacturing, railways, electric transportation, and all the agencies of daily life, represent just so much applied science. Economic changes have brought about a closer interdependence among men and strengthened the ideal of mutual service. These political, intellectual, and moral changes make questions connected with industrial education the most important problem of present-day public education in America.

The fact that the Greek word from which our word “school” is derived meant leisure suggests the nature of the change which has taken place. It is true at all times that education means relief from the pressure of having to make a living. The young have to be supported more or less by others while they are being instructed. They must be saved from the impact of the struggle for material existence. Opposition to child labor goes hand in hand with the effort to extend the facilities of public schools to all the wards of the nation. There must be free time for schooling, and pupils must not come to their studies physically worn out. Moreover, the use of imagination, thought and emotion in education demands minds which are free from harassing questions of self-support. There must be an atmosphere of leisure if there is to be a truly liberal or free education.

Such things are as true now as when schools were named after the idea of leisure. But there was once assumed a permanent division between a leisure class and a laboring class. Education, beyond at least the mere rudiments, was intended only for the former. Its subject-matter and its methods were designed for those who were sufficiently well off so that they did not have to work for a living. The stigma attached to working with the hands was especially strong. In aristocratic and feudal countries such work was done by slaves or serfs, and the sense of social inferiority attached to these classes naturally led to contempt for the pursuits in which they were engaged. Training for them was a servile sort of education, while liberal education was an education for a free man, and a free man was a member of the upper classes, one who did not have to engage in labor for his own support or that of others. The antagonism to industry which was generated extended itself to all activities requiring use of the hands. A “gentleman” would not use his hands or train them to skill, save for sport or war. To employ the hands was to do useful work for others, while to render personal service to others was a badge of a dependent social and political status.

Strange as it may seem, the very notions of knowledge and of mind were influenced by this aristocratic order of society. The less the body in general, and the hands and the senses in particular, were employed, the higher the grade of intellectual activity. True thought resulting in true knowledge was to be carried on wholly within the mind without the body taking any part at all. Hence studies which could be carried on with a minimum of physical action were alone the studies belonging to a liberal education. First in order came such things as philosophy, theology, mathematics, logic, etc., which were purely mental. Next in rank came literature and language, with grammar, rhetoric, etc. The pursuit of even what we call the fine arts was relegated to a lower grade, because success in painting, sculpture, architecture, etc., required technical and manual training. Music alone was exempt from condemnation, partly because vocal music did not require the training of the hands, and partly because music was used for devotional purposes. Otherwise education should train men to appreciate art, not to produce it.

These ideas and ideals persisted in educational theory and practice long after the political and industrial conditions which generated them had begun to give way. Practically all the conceptions associated with culture and cultural education were created when the immense superiority of a leisure class over all working classes was a matter of course. Refinement, polish, esthetic taste, knowledge of classic literatures, acquaintance with foreign languages and with branches of sciences which could be studied by purely “mental” means, and which were not put to practical uses, were the marks of culture, just as they were the marks of leisure time and superior wealth. The learned professions—divinity, law, and, to a less extent, medicine—were admitted upon suffrance to the sphere of higher education, for the manual element in the service rendered to others was not so great as in industrial pursuits. But professional education was looked upon with disparagement in contrast with a liberal education just because its aim was rendering service to others. And for a long time medicine in particular occupied a mediocre and dubious position just because it required personal attention to the bodily needs of others.

Opposition to the introduction into higher education of the natural sciences was due not only to the conservative dread of change on the part of established institutions, but also to the fact that these sciences emphasized the use of the senses (which are physical organs), of physical apparatus, and of manual skill required in its manipulation. Even the representatives of mathematical science joined those of literary studies in assuming that the natural sciences must be less cultural than sciences like geometry, algebra, and calculus, which could be pursued in a more purely mental way. Even when the progress of social changes forced more and more useful studies into the curriculum, the idea of a graded rank in the cultural value of studies persisted. Occupations like banking and commerce involved less manual activity and less direct personal service to others than housekeeping, manufacturing, and farming, consequently the studies which prepared for them were at least more “genteel” than studies having to do with the latter. Even at the present time many people associate mental activity with physical acquiescence.

The first breach in this order of ideas occurred in elementary education. Along with the spread of democratic ideas which took place in the eighteenth century, there developed the idea that education was a need and right of the masses as well as a privilege of the upper classes. In reading Rousseau and Pestalozzi, an American student, who is used to the democratic idea of universal education, is not likely to notice that their conception of the educational development of all as a social necessity is even more revolutionary than the particular methods which they urged. But such was the case. Even so enlightened a liberal as John Locke wrote his educational essay with reference to the education of a gentleman, and assumed that the training of the laboring classes should be of a radically different kind. The idea that all the powers of all members of society are capable of development and that society owed it to itself and to its constituent members to see that the latter received this development, was the first great intellectual token of the democratic revolution which was occurring. It is noteworthy that Rousseau was Swiss by birth, that democratic political ideas were rife in France when he wrote, and that Pestalozzi was not only Swiss by birth but did his work in that republican country.

While the development of public elementary schools for the masses inevitably puts emphasis upon the usefulness of studies as a reason for education, the growth of the public curriculum and methods was profoundly affected by the surviving ideals of leisure class education. Elementary education, just because it was an education for the masses, was regarded as a kind of necessary political and economic concession rather than as a serious educative enterprise. A strict line was drawn between it, with its useful studies, and the higher education of the few conducted for genuinely cultural purposes. Reading, writing, arithmetic, the three R’s, were to be taught because of their utility. They were needed to make individuals capable of self-support, of “getting on” better, and so capable of rendering better economic service under changed commercial conditions. It was assumed that the greater number of pupils would leave school as soon as they had mastered the practical use of these tools.

No better evidence could be found that primary education is still regarded with respect to the larger number of pupils, as a practical social necessity, not as an intrinsic educative measure, than the fact that the greater number of pupils leave school about the fifth grade—that is, when they have acquired rudimentary skill in reading, writing and figuring. The opposition of influential members of the community to the introduction of any studies, save perhaps geography and history, beyond the three R’s, the tendency to regard other things as “frills and fads,” is evidence of the way in which purely elementary schooling is regarded. A fuller and wider culture in literature, science and the arts may be allowed in the case of those better off, but the masses are not to be educatively developed so much as trained in the use of tools needed to make them effective workers. Elementary instruction to a larger extent than we usually admit, is a substitute, under the changed circumstances of production and distribution of goods, for the older apprenticeship system. The latter was never treated as educational in a fundamental sense; the former is only partially conducted as a thoroughly educational enterprise.

In part the older ideals of a predominantly literary and “intellectual” education invaded and captured the new elementary schools. For the smaller number of pupils who might go on to a higher and cultural education, the three R’s were the tools of learning, the only really indispensable tools of acquiring knowledge. They are all of them concerned with language, that is, with symbols of facts and ideas, a fact which throws a flood of light upon the prevailing ideas of learning and knowledge. Knowledge consists of the ready-made material which others have found out, and mastery of language is the means of access to this fund. To learn is to appropriate something from this ready-made store, not to find out something for one’s self. Educational reformers may go on attacking pouring-in methods of teaching and passive reception methods of learning; but as long as these ideas of the nature of knowledge are current, they make little headway. The separation of the activity of the mind from the activity of the senses in direct observation and from the activity of the hand in construction and manipulation, makes the material of studies academic and remote, and compels the passive acquisition of information imparted by textbook and teacher.

In the United States there was for a long time a natural division of labor between the book-learning of the schools and the more direct and vital learning of out-of-school life. It is impossible to exaggerate the amount of mental and moral training secured by our forefathers in the course of the ordinary pursuits of life. They were engaged in subduing a new country. Industry was at a premium, and instead of being of a routine nature, pioneer conditions required initiative, ingenuity, and pluck. For the most part men were working for themselves; or, if for others, with a prospect of soon becoming masters of their own affairs. While the citizens of old-world monarchies had no responsibility for the conduct of government, our forefathers were engaged in the experiment of conducting their own government. They had the incentive of a participation in the conduct of civic and public affairs which came directly home to them. Production had not yet been concentrated in factories in congested centers, but was distributed through villages. Markets were local rather than remote. Manufacturing was still literally hand-making, with the use of local water-power; it was not carried on by big machines to which the employed “hands” were mechanical adjuncts. The occupations of daily life engaged the imagination and enforced knowledge of natural materials and processes.

Children as they grew up either engaged in or were in intimate contact with spinning, weaving, bleaching, dyeing, and the making of clothes; with lumbering, and leather, saw-mills, and carpentry; with working of metals and making of candles. They not only saw the grain planted and reaped, but were familiar with the village grist-mill and the preparation of flour and of foodstuffs for cattle. These things were close to them, the processes were all open to inspection. They knew where things came from and how they were made or where they went to, and they knew these things by personal observation. They had the discipline that came from sharing in useful activities.

While there was too much taxing toil, there was also stimulus to imagination and training of independent judgment along with the personal knowledge of materials and processes. Under such conditions, the schools could hardly have done better than devote themselves to books, and to teaching a command of the use of books, especially since, in most communities, books, while a rarity and a luxury, were the sole means of access to the great world beyond the village surroundings.

But conditions changed and school materials and methods did not change to keep pace. Population shifted to urban centers. Production became a mass affair, carried on in big factories, instead of a household affair. Growth of steam and electric transportation brought about production for distant markets, even for a world market. Industry was no longer a local or neighborhood concern. Manufacturing was split up into a very great variety of separate processes through the economies incident upon extreme division of labor. Even the working-men in a particular line of industry rarely have any chance to become acquainted with the entire course of production, while outsiders see practically nothing but either the raw material on one hand or the finished product on the other. Machines depend in their action upon complicated facts and principles of nature which are not recognized by the worker unless he has had special intellectual training. The machine worker, unlike the older hand worker, is following blindly the intelligence of others instead of his own knowledge of materials, tools, and processes. With the passing of pioneer conditions passed also the days when almost every individual looked forward to being at some time in control of a business of his own. Great masses of men have no other expectation than to be permanently hired for pay to work for others. Inequalities of wealth have multiplied, so that demand for the labor of children has become a pressing menace to the serious education of great numbers. On the other hand, children in wealthy families have lost the moral and practical discipline that once came from sharing in the round of home duties. For a large number there is little alternative, especially in larger cities, between irksome child labor and demoralizing child idleness. Inquiries conducted by competent authorities show that in the great centers of population opportunities for play are so inadequate that free time is not even spent in wholesome recreations by a majority of children.

These statements do not begin, of course, to cover the contrasts between present social conditions and those to which our earlier school facilities were adapted. They suggest, however, some of the obvious changes with which education must reckon if it is to maintain a vital connection with contemporary social life, so as to give the kind of instruction needed to make efficient and self-respecting members of the community. The sketch would be even more incomplete, however, if it failed to note that along with these changes there has been an immense cheapening of printed material and an immense increase in the facilities for its distribution. Libraries abound, books are many and cheap, magazines and newspapers are everywhere. Consequently the schools do not any longer bear the peculiar relation to books and book knowledge which they once did. While out of school conditions have lost many of the educative features they once possessed, they have gained immensely in the provision they make for reading matter and for stimulating interest in reading. It is no longer necessary or desirable that the schools should devote themselves so exclusively to this phase of instruction. But it is more necessary than it used to be that the schools shall develop such interest in the pupils as will induce them to read material that is intellectually worth while.

While merely learning the use of language symbols and of acquiring habits of reading is less important than it used to be, the question of the use to which the power and habits shall be put is much more important. To learn to use reading matter means that schools shall arouse in pupils problems and interests that lead students both in school and after they leave school to seek that subject-matter of history, science, biography, and literature which is inherently valuable, and not to waste themselves upon the trash which is so abundantly provided. It is absolutely impossible to secure this result when schools devote themselves to the formal sides of language instead of to developing deep and vital interest in subject-matter. Educational theorists and school authorities who attempt to remedy the deplorable reading habits with which many youth leave school by means of a greater amount of direct attention to language studies and literatures, are engaged in a futile task. Enlargement of intellectual horizon, and awakening to the multitude of interesting problems presented by contemporary conditions, are the surest guarantees for good use of time with books and magazines. When books are made an end in themselves, only a small and highly specialized class will devote themselves to really serviceable books. When there is a lively sense of the interest of social affairs, all who possess the sense will turn as naturally to the books which foster that interest as to the other things of which they feel a need.

These are some of the reasons for saying that the general problem of readjustment of education to meet present conditions is most acute at the angle of industry. The various details may be summed up in three general moral principles. First, never before was it as important as it is now that each individual should be capable of self-respecting, self-supporting, intelligent work—that each should make a living for himself and those dependent upon his efforts, and should make it with an intelligent recognition of what he is doing and an intelligent interest in doing his work well. Secondly, never before did the work of one individual affect the welfare of others on such a wide scale as at present. Modern conditions of production and exchange of commodities have made the whole world one to a degree never approximated before. A war to-day may close banks and paralyze trade in places thousands of miles away from the scene of action. This is only a coarse and sensational manifestation of an interdependence which is quietly and persistently operating in the activity of every farmer, manufacturer, laborer, and merchant, in every part of the civilized globe. Consequently there is a demand which never existed before that all the items of school instruction shall be seen and appreciated in their bearing upon the network of social activities which bind people together. When men lived in small groups which had little to do with each other, the harm done by an education which pursued exclusively intellectual and theoretic aims was comparatively slight. Knowledge might be isolated because men were isolated. But to-day the accumulation of information, just as information, apart from its social bearings, is worse than futile. Acquisition of modes of skill apart from realization of the social uses to which they may be put is fairly criminal. In the third place, industrial methods and processes depend to-day upon knowledge of facts and laws of natural and social science in a much greater degree than ever before. Our railways and steamboats, traction cars, telegraphs, and telephones, factories and farms, even our ordinary household appliances, depend for their existence upon intricate mathematical, physical, chemical, and biological insight. They depend for their best ultimate use upon an understanding of the facts and relationships of social life. Unless the mass of workers are to be blind cogs and pinions in the apparatus they employ, they must have some understanding of the physical and social facts behind and ahead of the material and appliances with which they are dealing.

Thus put, the problem may seem to be so vast and complicated as to be impossible of solution. But we must remember that we are dealing with a problem of readjustment, not of original creation. It will take a long time to complete the readjustment which will be brought about gradually. The main thing now is to get started, and to start in the right direction. Hence the great importance of the various experimental steps which have already been taken. And we must also remember that the essential thing to be brought about through the change is not amassing more information, but the formation of certain attitudes and interests, ways of looking at things and dealing with them. If accomplishment of the educational readjustment meant that pupils must become aware of the whole scope of scientific and social material involved in the occupations of daily life, the problem would be absolutely impossible of solution. But in reality accomplishing the reform means less attention than under present conditions to mere bulk of knowledge.

What is wanted is that pupils shall form the habit of connecting the limited information they acquire with the activities of life, and gain ability to connect a limited sphere of human activity with the scientific principles upon which its successful conduct depends. The attitudes and interests thus formed will then take care of themselves. If we take arithmetic or geography themselves as subjects isolated from social activities and uses, then the aim of instruction must be to cover the whole ground. Any failure to do so will mark a defect in learning. But not so if what we, as educators, are concerned with is that pupils shall realize the connection of what they learn about number, or about the earth’s surface, with vital social activities. The question ceases to be a matter simply of quantity and becomes one of motive and purpose. The problem is not the impossible one of acquainting the pupil with all the social uses to which knowledge of number is put, but of teaching him in such a way that each step which he takes in advance in his knowledge of number shall be connected with some situation of human need and activity, so that he shall see the bearing and application of what is learnt. Any child who enters upon the study of number already has experiences which involve number. Let his instruction in arithmetic link itself to these everyday social activities in which he already shares, and, as far as it goes, the problem of socializing instruction is solved.

The industrial phase of the situation comes in, of course, in the fact that these social experiences have their industrial aspect. This does not mean that his number work shall be crassly utilitarian, or that all the problems shall be in terms of money and pecuniary gain or loss. On the contrary, it means that the pecuniary side shall be relegated to its proportionate place, and emphasis put upon the place occupied by knowledge of weight, form, size, measure, numerical quantity, as well as money, in the carrying on of the activities of life. The purpose of the readjustment of education to existing social conditions is not to substitute the acquiring of money or of bread and butter for the acquiring of information as an educational aim. It is to supply men and women who as they go forth, from school shall be intelligent in the pursuit of the activities in which they engage. That a part of that intelligence will, however, have to do with the place which bread and butter actually occupy in the lives of people to-day, is a necessity. Those who fail to recognize this fact are still imbued, consciously or unconsciously, with the intellectual prejudices of an aristocratic state. But the primary and fundamental problem is not to prepare individuals to work at particular callings, but to be vitally and sincerely interested in the calling upon which they must enter if they are not to be social parasites, and to be informed as to the social and scientific bearings of that calling. The aim is not to prepare bread-winners. But since men and women are normally engaged in bread-winning vocations, they need to be intelligent in the conduct of households, the care of children, the management of farms and shops, and in the political conduct of a democracy where industry is the prime factor.

The problem of educational readjustment thus has to steer between the extremes of an inherited bookish education and a narrow, so-called practical, education. It is comparatively easy to clamor for a retention of traditional materials and methods on the ground that they alone are liberal and cultural. It is comparatively easy to urge the addition of narrow vocational training for those who, so it is assumed, are to be the drawers of water and the hewers of wood in the existing economic rÉgime, leaving intact the present bookish type of education for those fortunate enough not to have to engage in manual labor in the home, shop, or farm. But since the real question is one of reorganization of all education to meet the changed conditions of life—scientific, social, political—accompanying the revolution in industry, the experiments which have been made with this wider end in view are especially deserving of sympathetic recognition and intelligent examination.