the United States quite similar to the polytechnic schools in Europe, and the agricultural and mechanical colleges in the several states which have accepted the aid of the land grant made by Congress for that purpose have done much to advance the movement for education in the industrial pursuits and professions. But technical courses in these schools are designed for professional purposes and for professional men alone. They are admirable, and they train a set of masters of industry that are absolutely necessary to a country that has such extended systems of railroads, such immense steel bridges spanning the streams, such tunnels to bore, such sky-scrapers to rear, such power-houses to construct, such pipe lines to run from oil fields to the seaboard, such ships to build, such mills and furnaces and factories to be managed. These schools train the leaders, but not the artisans. They are a most interesting feature in our educational system, and they are helping to solve the industrial problem.

Many who favor manual and technical instruction are not ready to urge the establishment of apprentice or trade schools at the expense of the state. They hold that the state should go no farther than to furnish a general industrial training, and this on an educational basis; that for anything further private beneficence should furnish the ways and means. Not so thought England, when she organized her art and industrial schools; not so thought France, Germany, and Switzerland, when they established their apprentice schools and their trade schools; not so thought the hundreds of European municipalities which revived their deteriorated local industries and created new ones by the establishment of trade schools.

The education of a people must have unity as well as logical continuity. Technical education should not be separated from general education. Intelligence and skill must not be put asunder. Education is a means to an end, and only as a means to an end does it pertain to the state.

Whatever education is necessary for the general welfare it lies within the province of the state to provide. This is the broad proposition on which public education rests, and no question can be raised as to the right of the state to teach any branch of knowledge which will promote the general welfare. No logical line can be drawn at any given point which limits or restricts the inherent right of the state. The right to establish higher institutions of training, to give opportunity to the ambitious student in one hundred who wishes to fit himself for a learned profession, is not questioned; neither can the right of any state or city to organize special schools, or to promote important industries, be disputed on any logical grounds. The extent to which the state or municipality should carry its education is determined entirely by its own. needs (or its own judgment of its peculiar needs) and its own ability, financially and otherwise, to provide for those needs. Whether a city

shall provide laboratories and shops, and instruction in the arts and trades, or whether it shall do without this industrial feature of modern education, is for the city to determine, just as it determines the question of paving, sewerage, and street lighting.

Let the state see to it that the right kind of education is provided for its great army of workers; let the state suppress idleness as it does ignorance; let it provide trade schools rather than workhouses and prisons, and this country will make such advances in the arts and sciences, such strides toward a higher order of material prosperity, as some of us have never dreamed of.

EDUCATION FOR THE TRADES IN AMERICA-WHAT CAN TECHNICAL HIGH SCHOOLS DO FOR IT?

CHARLES F. WARNER, PRINCIPAL OF MECHANIC ARTS HIGH SCHOOL, SPRINGFIELD, MASS.

The question of education for the trades is only a part of the larger question of technical education, which includes every kind of teaching that may have a direct and practical influence upon the varied industrial life of our times. Such a question cannot properly relate to all grades of schools from the primary up; but it may concern the secondary schools, and possibly the upper grades of the grammar schools, as well as the colleges of technology and of commerce. Broad and general principles should control the earlier education with little or no reference to special callings; but so soon as the youth comes to the point in his career when, considering his own capacities and the conditions which surround him, he ought to face the question of fitting himself for the best form of selfsupport and service to the community that he is capable of attaining, then education may properly take on more or less of the characteristics of special training. This principle has long been recognized, and for the comparative few, who have unfortunately been called the favored class, schools have been provided, both at public and at private expense, whose chief function has been to furnish their students with the intellectual equipment needed for further study in colleges or professional schools. That much of the teaching in these schools is of a general nature intended to assist in the all-around development of the man or woman, rather than to begin the creation of the specialist-cannot be denied; but the ultimate object of American colleges, whether classical, scientific, or technical, and consequently the ultimate function of the preparatory schools, tho rarely admitted in either case, has, nevertheless, been in large measure to give their students that information and training which should enable them to earn their way in some form of business or professional life. This tendency of American schools toward practical

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aims and methods has been assisted by the rapid and successful development of the elective system, which has caused the so-called broader features both of collegiate and of popular education to assume even less relative importance, yielding to the growing demand for that instruction which may be quickly turned to practical account.

That there is a distinct and just demand for a continuation and extension of the reform already begun, which is to bring the work of American schools more closely in touch with the life of the times, cannot be doubted. The remarkable growth of higher technical schools, the success of the manual-training movement, the prosperity of private commercial schools and correspondence schools for mechanics and other workers- not to speak of the occasional trade school-furnish sufficient evidence that all, or nearly all, of the various forms which practical education has thus far assumed have come in answer to a natural and extensive demand. But that all these schools fully realize all that is sometimes claimed for them cannot for one moment be maintained. We must recognize their value, but at the same time acknowledge the incompleteness of the answer which they furnish to the general industrial needs of our time.

The higher technical schools as such have reached a high degree of excellence in this country. They compare favorably with the best in any other country; but their main function is to train men for the engineering professions who shall intelligently direct the application of natural forces to industrial and economic problems, securing the greatest possible efficiency by taking full advantage of every new discovery and invention. The graduates of these schools are well equipped in science, both pure and applied, and qualified to investigate new problems; but their proper work is to plan, advise, and direct. Generally speaking, their education stands in the way of their serving manufacturing corporations as foremen and managers, positions which many of them would be glad to secure, because of unwillingless at their age and with all their knowledge to begin at the bottom of the business and acquire, patiently, the necessary details. They have been educated away from the rank and file of the great army of industrial workers. Shop foremen say that they prefer to teach boys, who realize that they have much to learn and are willing to take the time for it.

I have said that the graduates of these schools of engineering fill a comparatively limited, tho important, place in the industrial world. But, notwithstanding this fact, there seems to be a tendency in technical schools of a lower grade to aspire to the higher rank, forgetting that they were organized upon a more general educational basis and with the avowed purpose of serving industrial needs in the broader sense. As examples, one may recall a certain school in Chicago, one in northern New York, one in Maryland, and one in California. This tendency, it seems to me, is to be lamented. The great need of our time is more

technical education of a secondary type; there is quite enough of the collegiate grade. We must lay the foundations broad, as well as deep, if, as educators, we are to meet fully the responsibility laid upon us of contributing our share toward developing and maintaining the industrial supremacy of the nation. To do this we must work thru the people's schools- the public high schools in which manual training is emphasized. Here is where a good part at least of the great work for industrial education must be done.

If we examine into the causes which have operated most powerfully to bring the manual-training movement to its present state of development, we shall find, I think, much to justify the proposal to teach trades in the technical high schools. We flatter ourselves sometimes, I suspect, that the educational argument for manual training is a complete answer to those prejudices which have so long held up the traditional training in the so-called liberal studies as educationally superior to the results of technical instruction, and that it has at the same time fully satisfied those who have been clamoring for the practical school. While I am in hearty accord with the theory of manual training as an educational principle, and would pay all due honor to its many noble advocates whose influence has surely been great, I cannot ignore the fact that the practical argument has had greater weight than the educational with the average citizen and with his boy. Manual-training schools have come to stay, because there is a demand for that form of education which shall connect itself with productive industries and with the employments which the youths of our land are by force of circumstances bound to follow. They are one result of the development of our civilization, and are as inevitable as other results of the operation of natural laws. It is our duty to appreciate their full mission and see that they fulfill it.

arts.

A clear recognition of the demand for the practical in education would relieve us of the supposed necessity of proving that manual training is as intellectual, as ennobling, as uplifting as training in the liberal Since we have this form of education well established, let its general educational basis be admitted, while we give our attention to making it more effective in those directions in which its peculiar value seems to lie. In doing this we shall not by any means set aside educational principles. We may look upon educational manual training as a necessary intermediate step in the growth of modern educational philosophy and practice; but we have not, it seems to me, rightly conceived the true destiny of the practical movement in education, if we are content with introducing manual-training departments into the traditional high school, or, indeed, with organizing the independent manual-training high school so-called, if such schools do not somewhere in their curricula give greater emphasis than has yet been given, generally speaking, to technical education.

The time-honored argument that this or that study is to be pursued, not because it has any practical value, but simply for the mental discipline it affords, is not now generally regarded as sound; but it must be admitted that we do not better it much by substituting for the discipline of books the discipline of a few mechanical exercises which, in themselves, have very little practical connection with the industrial world. This criticism is in full accord with modern educational theory. It is coming more and more to be recognized among educational experts that educational values should not be estimated altogether according to the training which a certain study affords while it is being pursued, but rather by the consideration of whether that study or that exercise is likely to be continued in practical life. It seems strange that so little attention has been paid hitherto to a question of so great importance. If the school is to fit for life, why should it not teach the youth what life demands in maturer years? There has always been a stereotyped answer to this question, namely, that it is the function of the school to furnish broad and general discipline, leaving the more practical lessons to the experience of actual life. But if the youth may begin with the actual experiences of life in school, so to speak, and thereby gain, not merely equal, but better, disciplinary advantages, it seems to me that the old ideas of educational values will need to be amended, if not altogether abandoned.'

I suppose we may take it for granted that the dogma of pure mental discipline has been well-nigh demolished. This is one great point gained. No modern teacher considers that a study is of great value if it furnishes strong mental discipline in school regardless of all other questions. Such a study may, indeed, be very valuable as a means of discipline during school life, but if it is to be entirely dropped at the end of the school period, and especially if the peculiar mental processes which it furnishes are not to be carried on in after-life, no matter how valuable it may be in itself as a study, it loses greatly in educational value when compared with another study which is equally valuable as a school exercise, and at the same time likely to be carried into practice when the school days are over. Now, while it will not be questioned that the introduction of the manual-training element has enlarged the educational output of our schools, it is equally clear that there is a real danger that the manual-exercise element as such may be open to the same criticism of comparatively inferior educational value as is now being generally admitted to be true of the old doctrines of mental discipline.

But these educational considerations, however valuable, are not the only ones to be kept in view. The real motive power behind the whole

I See paper on "Some New Aspects of Educational Thought," by SUPERINTENDENT THOMAS M. BALLIET, Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1899.