The enervating trades are wholly automatic, and induce a lethargic
state of mind and body. His comment on the situation is: "We are
rapidly dividing mankind into a staff of mental workers and an army of
purely physical workers. The physical workers are becoming more and
more lethargic. The work itself is not character building; on the
contrary, it is repressive and when self-expression comes, it is
hardly energizing mentally. The real menace lies in the fact that in a
self-governing industrial community the minds of the majority are in
danger of becoming less capable of sound and serious thought because
of lack of continuous constructive exercise in earning a livelihood."
Professor Schneider undertakes to enrich this barren soil by
alternating the time of pupils between the shop or store and the
school, thus cooerdinating the worker's experience, with the assistance
of schoolmasters who go into the shops and follow the processes the
pupils are engaged in and who see that the experience of the week in
the shop is amplified and supplemented in the school. The arrangement
also provides that the pupils shall be taken through the various shop
processes in the course of apprenticeship. The experience while it
lasts may have educational value for the pupil. But in spite of what
it may or may not hold, for the general run of pupils it leads up a
blind alley because the apprenticeship does not fulfill the promise
which apprenticeship supposedly holds out.
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