NOTES ON INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION IN RURAL 



COMMUNITIES 



By C. H. ROBISON 

 State Normal School, Montclair, N. J. 



In Spite of the title of the "Committee on Industrial Education 

 for Rural Communities," which reported to the National Edu- 

 cational Association in July, 1905, there is still a strong attempt 

 on the part of many persons, interested primarily in the city 

 phase of the subject to appropriate the term "industrial educa- 

 tion" for training along the lines of those vocations peculiar to 

 city life. This smacks so strongly of the Wall Street use of the 

 teim "industrials" that it deserves to call out a protest. Since 

 agriculture is our greatest single industry, it seems no more than 

 fair to insist on tne use of the term "industrial" as the more 

 generic, covering this as well as other forms of education pertain- 

 ing to the more or less manual but no less dignified vocations. 

 It is a pity that the genius of our language does not easily permit 

 of the coining of terms as useful in our present situation as would 

 be the words "urbindustrial" and "agrindustrial" or "rurin- 

 dustrial." 



The term industrial is often used as a synonym for manual 

 training in its original sense, simply because it seems a more up- 

 to-date term and has an imposing sound. This is somewhat 

 like the fad for using the term "physiography" as synonymous 

 with the older and more inclusive "physical geography," of 

 which it is really but one department, though the most im- 

 portant one. Another case in point is the use of the word 

 "educational" in place of the tabooed "pedagogy." 



It has been pointed out that there is this fundamental dif- 

 ference between industrial education in the city and in the 

 country. In the city the danger arising from specialized in- 

 dustrial conditions is that the workman will become narrowed, 

 held down to but a single process in his employment. Manual 

 training has sought, or has aimed to seek in the past, common 

 elements in the various trades that would give a boy a start to- 

 wards skill in any one of them. But now it is coming to counter- 

 act this narrowness and to broaden the employe's outlook on 

 general industrial fields. 



21 



