No. 7. t>E.PARTM:ENT OP AGRICULTURE, 593 



That some comprehensive scheme of financing industrial educa- 

 tion is necessai'}- can hardly be doubted by those acquainted with 

 those communities most backward from an industrial standpoint as 

 in the South and West, and in thinly settled districts as in mountain- 

 ous regions. 



Even Pennsylvania would receive an impulse of vast importance 

 from a measure of this kind. Such action on the part of the Fed- 

 eral Governmennt would be of untold benefit to the country people 

 of this state. Her manufactures also would gain a new impetus 

 from thus inaugurating throughout her high school system mechanic 

 arts' education. Education in home economics thus made possible 

 to every girl in the state would still further exalt home-making and 

 motherhood in the Keystone State. 



Taking round numbers from the Twelfth Census, Pennsylvania 

 stands among the states second in manufactures only to New York. 

 In agriculture she stands eighth. She had 928,000 workers in 

 mechanical industries and 341,000 in agriculture, practically three to 

 one. In trade and transportation she had 454,000 workers; in pro- 

 fessional service 103,000, and in domestic and personal service, 556,- 

 000. Of her 6,302,000 people there were of school age 2,031,000, or 

 practically one in every three, half of which number 1,084,000 were 

 in school. 



The figures are not available to show the school expenditure for 

 the five classes respectively. It is conservative to estimate that the 

 103,000 i)rofessional workers have had school facilities from public 

 funds and from private endowments equal 'to those provided to sev- 

 eral times as manj- workers in the industries. Educators are right- 

 fully urging that more money be supplied to equip the colleges and 

 universities which devote their energies mainly to educating people 

 for the professions. Indirectly by training teachers for the lower 

 schools these higher institutions of learning have a very large in- 

 fluence in educating the workers. Colleges and universities have 

 had their great day of promotion, and they have reached a point 

 where their very substantial equipment and liberal support are as- 

 sured. The professional class is about 5 per cent, of the whole num- 

 ber of workers. In education they appear as a privileged class. 

 They should not be given less, but more; but the great movement 

 now needed is to give of the world's rapidly accumulating store of 

 technical knowledge to the workers and to add to this knowledge 

 skill. There is now no line of Avork for which a technique is not 

 being rapidly developed. In agriculture, in the mechancial indusr 

 tries, and in home economics the body of accumulating scientific 

 artisan, and art knowledge is being reduced to pedagogical form. 

 Studies in this great triumvirate of practical affairs (mechanic arts, 

 agriculture and domesitic economy) are forcing in beside the three 

 R's' and the resulting sextette will so broaden out the knowledge, 

 the industrial skill, and the productive and home-making efficiency 

 of the v.iiole people that every class will have a richer world to 

 live in. 



Pennsylvania has about one-fourth of her industrial workers en- 

 gaged in agricultural pursuits with three-fourths in manufacturing 

 and mechanical pursuits and in transportation. If Pennsylvania 



38—7—1906. 



