No work in subject matter is educational which does
not in intention or in fact give the person involved the ability to
participate in the administration of industry, or the ability to judge
the extent of his mastery over the subject. Industrial educational
schemes, even the best of them, leave the pupils helpless before
their subject. As they furnish them with a certain dexterity and
acquaintance with processes and a supply of subject matter necessarily
more or less isolated, the pupils gain a sense of the power of the
subject to control them, rather than an experience in their power to
master the subject. The industrial school emphasizes the fact that the
administration and disposition of wealth production is no concern of
those versed in the technique of fabrication.
Many educators appreciate the lack of content provided by industrial
school systems as, with weak emphasis, they undertake to embroider the
system with history and aesthetics of textiles or other raw material
which the workers handle, or introduce the story of past processes.
As this furbishing of impoverished industry fails dismally to add
content, it succeeds in emphasizing the actual poverty that exists.
Dr. Stanley Hall makes the suggestion that books on the leading trades
should be written to stimulate the interest and intelligence of the
young who are engaged in industry or preparing to become the wage
earners of the trades. In speaking of "the urgent necessity now of
books on the leading trades addressed to the young," he says;[A] "The
leather industry, particularly boot and shoe manufacture, is perhaps
the most highly specialised of all in the sense that an operator
may work a lifetime in any one of the between three and four score
processes through which a shoe passes and know little of all the rest.
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