METHODS IN INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION. 203 



elements of certain handicraft industries. Overlooking the extreme 

 diversity of type that exists among such schools, we have been apt 

 mentally to throw them all together, and to refer to the supposed sys- 

 tem on which they proceed as " the Continental system," in contradis- 

 tinction to our British system of training, as we are pleased to term 

 our obsolescent institution of apprenticeship proper. Nothing could 

 be more misleading than this classification. It arises from lack of in- 

 formation as to the nature and work of such schools. It is not sur- 

 prising, when such ignorance prevails, that the fallacy has in conse- 

 quence been widely spread that the long undisputed superiority of 

 British-made goods was due to the superiority of the British system. 

 On the contrary, that superiority, which arose out of quite other eco- 

 nomic causes, was the very thing which stirred up the Germans, Swiss, 

 Belgians, and French to devise schemes for training workmen more 

 efficiently and intelligently than was done in England, since only by 

 such means could they hope to compete with her industries. Let the 

 significant fact, that a very large proportion of the foremen of work- 

 shops in our skilled industries are Germans or Belgians, attest the result 

 of a higher technical training. Besides the innumerable Gewerh-schulen 

 and Beal-schulen of Germany, where a general preparatory scientific 

 and technical education is given, that empire can now produce a long 

 array of trade-schools, sometimes organized as polytechnic schools, and 

 sometimes devoted to particular trades, such as weaving, dyeing, or 

 carpentry. In Switzerland such schools also abound ; and in the com- 

 mercial centers of Belgium they exhibit an extensive and healthy de- 

 velopment. In France there are the technical schools of Douai, Cha- 

 lons, and Aix, the iScole la Martini^re of Lyons, the Horological School 

 of Besan9on, the Apprenticeship School of Havre, where workers in 

 wood and iron are trained, and twenty others, including five or six in 

 or near Paris. The technical schools of Paris present, indeed, so much 

 diversity in their several organizations and results that it would be ex- 

 tremely difficult, even by going over a much wider area, to find so 

 many difi^erent yet thoroughly characteristic types. To understand 

 how completely different are the systems of organization by which it 

 has been sought to solve this great problem, it would be necessary to 

 pass from the Polytechnicum of Zurich the Technical University, }'>ar 

 excellence to the Horological School of Besan5on, and from the 

 iLunst-gewerhschulen of Munich and Nuremberg to the unrivaled 

 Pedagogic School of Moscow, and even then the list of types would 

 be less complete than that which is afforded by the schools of Paris. In 

 that great capital, in addition to the Ecole des Arts et Metiers, the 

 Ecole des Mines, and the cole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, 

 whose portals open only to an older and better educated class of stu- 

 dents, and the great schools of modern type, such as the Ecole Turgot, 

 the College Chaptal, and the Ecole Commerciale in the Avenue Tru- 

 daine, which qualify their pupils for commercial and mercantile careers, 



