546 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



of the undesirability of a wide separation of hand work from head 

 work, aided hj the call of manufacturers for young men possessing 

 trained hands and eyes. The need of such training was not urgent 

 previous to the wide-spread development of the factory system. Tread- 

 ing on the heels of the manual-training movements came physical 

 training, night and vacation schools, training for citizenship, nature 

 study, school gardening, the study of agricultural science, and the 

 special school for the truant and the " incorrigible." Not all of these 

 additions to the work of the school are to be found in any one system, 

 but each has been somewhere recognized as a desirable feature of the 

 educational program. In general, it may be affirmed, that as a people 

 pass from a semi-primitive agricultural stage with isolated, nearly 

 independent families, to the more complex industrial life involving 

 mutual interdependence and specialization of occupation; the im- 

 portance of the education gained within the school increases relatively 

 to that acquired outside. 



What is the significance of these changes to society? It seems in- 

 disputable that the importance of the school relative to that of the 

 home in the education of youth, has increased and is still increasing. 

 This fact grows naturally out of the changed functions and environ- 

 ment of the home of the present as compared with that of immediately 

 preceding generations. Home training is highly individualistic ; school 

 training is not. The state educates the young in order to advance the 

 welfare of society, in order to form the good citizen — the efficient pro- 

 ducer and consumer. The desired result is the elevation of the 

 standard of living of society — a social benefit. The mass can, however, 

 be elevated only by acting upon each individual composing it. The 

 school becomes society's agent for the promotion of its collective wel- 

 fare; its purpose is chiefly directive. As society is recruited from the 

 young, it is necessary that the incoming generations be worthy suc- 

 cessors of the outgoing. The attention should be fixed upon those 

 institutions which train the growing child, and not so much upon those 

 corrective and repressive institutions which are needed because the 

 early training and direction of their inmates were not what they should 

 have been. Too much money is spent upon the diseased tree, but not 

 enough on the growing twig. The functions of the school should in- 

 clude the intellectual, physical, industrial and moral training of the 

 young, and of the older persons as well; the greater the efficiency and 

 effectiveness of the school, the less the need for corrective and repres- 

 sive institutions. 1 



The cure for many industrial and social ills is to be found in the 

 proper use of increased leisure which improved industrial methods 

 make possible, and which the modern ideal of democracy proclaims to 



1 See article by the writer in Education, October, 1903. 



