None of the advocates view the equipment of workers for
industry in terms radically different from the terms in which they
are viewed by business men; they offer them technique and matter of
insignificance and indirection; they make no suggestion or move
to open up the adventure of industry for the worker's actual
participation in it; they accept the organization of industry which
excludes their participation as an unalterable fact; even unalterable
as an experience in the prevocational schemes of education.
[Footnote A: Stanley Hall--Educational Problems, p. 632.]
National, state and local campaigns have been carried on in America
during the last fifteen years for the protection of childhood and
youth. They have been on the whole successful in their purpose to
get children out of factories and stores and into schools. It was
an embarrassment to the pioneers in the campaign to find that the
children were against them; that they preferred factory or commercial
life to the schools. The evidence of this preference was their
wholesale exodus from schools when they reached an age where they were
acceptable to employers or where they were not prevented by law. Back
of the exodus, universal as it is, there is an urge of elemental
force. A common accounting for it, the nearest at hand, is that
parents of working class children are penurious; or that they are too
ignorant to understand the deteriorating effect of factory life on
children; or that they are too hard pressed in their physical needs to
consider the best interest of the children.
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