PRACTICAL EDUCATION. 715 



laid down that will include all trades. What the exemplary 

 systems I have quoted prove is, that it is indispensable for com- 

 ])lete vocational efficiency that the vocational school should repro- 

 duce all the practical and theoretical conditions necessary in the 

 trades it teaches, and that every trade requires such vocational 

 school ; that is, to develop facilities for the acquisition of practical 

 experience in the schools themselves. To achieve this end the 

 proposed school must have the atmosphere of a workshop rather 

 than of a school. In the length of day. shop surroundings, dis- 

 pos.a\ of products, the training of teachers, and the maintenance 

 <;>f discipline, shop and office standards rather than school stand- 

 ards must prevail, and approach, gradually, those of productive 

 industry. Herein lies one difficulty ; teachers must abandon a 

 A-arietv of traditions common to the schoolmaster and inherent to 

 the administration of the ordinary school ; a new series of educa- 

 tional values is required, because the practical work already out- 

 lined involves teaching methods and an administration fundamen- 

 tally different from that found in most existing schools, especially 

 in connection with the training of youth between the ages of four- 

 teen and eighteen. The next administrative difficulty is that of 

 providing, under public school conditions, for a wide range of 

 trades with their expensive equipment ; the probability is that this 

 can be dealt with by grouping similar trades together with the 

 compilation of a common syllabus of work, through which, with 

 a sufficient variety of alternative projects or operations, the 

 future worker can obtain a sufficiently practical and fundamental 

 training, and without sacrificing trade methods. The next diffi- 

 culty is with regard to the disposal of products, since the idea 

 of the trades school involves the idea that the output should have 

 a commercial value. It is vocationally uneconomical for pupils 

 to be confined to unproductive exercises, and their efforts could 

 be greatly stimulated if the things made could be sold, partly to 

 the profit of the school, and partly to the profit of the pupil- 

 worker. The advantages of the school, however, must not be 

 used to the detriment of outside producers. Here the practice 

 of similar institutions elsewhere may be useful. The trades 

 schools of Holland hold bi-annual, sometimes triennial, lotteries 

 for the disposal of the made articles. The Munich schools are 

 not allowed to sell anything produced in their workshops. The 

 articles made belong to the person or body supplying the 

 material ; if the school supplies the material, the school is the 

 owner, and if an employer provides stuff', he is the owner — and 

 so on. As the syllabus of the course of instruction has been 

 prepared by trades committees for each workshop, and as these 

 are adhered to, there is no abuse as might exist if a small em- 

 ployer supplied a quantity of material in order to obtain certain 

 articles " on the cheap." In any event, it would seem that the 

 total output of such schools must be small relatively to the 

 market, and provided sales are conducted in such a way as not 

 to disturb prevailing prices, there should be small danger in this 



