When a school system
disregards, as our established system does, the entire reorganization
of the industrial world, it stultifies growth and cultivates at the
same time an artificial concept of life, a false sense of values.
The German system of industrial education has recognized the
reorganization of the industrial world, but this recognition has meant
the sacrifice of individual life and development; it has come to
mean in short the prostitution of a people and the creation of a
Frankenstein.
None of our industrial educational systems or vocational guidance
experiments disclose the full content of the industrial life nor do
they give the children the knowledge or power to deal with it. The
general dissatisfaction with these school movements is that they
neither prostitute the schools in the interest of the employers nor
endow the children with power to meet their own problems. The training
in technique which they supply has a bearing on the every day life
around them which stories of Longfellow's life have not. But that
technique, divorced as it is from its purpose, its use or final
disposition, is as valueless as a crutch for a man without arms.
An elaboration of technology through instruction in the general
principles of physical science, industrial and political history and
the aesthetics of industry only emphasizes the absence of the
really significant factors. The conspicuously absent factors in all
industrial educational schemes are those which give men the ability to
control industry.
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