80 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



responsibility of men and women. With that end in view, the school 

 days and weeks should be on a business basis, with long hours (diversi- 

 fied, of course, with a proper alternation of mental and physical activ- 

 ity), strict accountability on the part of the pupils, and an organiza- 

 tion based, as nearly as possible, upon the best business and factory 

 models. So long as youth of seventeen and eighteen do not take their 

 high-school work seriously, they will not take business seriously. And 

 it is this lack of seriousness, this failure to realize that success in busi- 

 ness can come only from strict attention to business, which lies at the 

 root of most, if not all, of the complaints made by business men against 

 the products of American schools. Those employers find many, if not 

 most, of the boys and girls who come for employment, unfitted for and, 

 if I may use the word, unfittable into, the complex demands of modern 

 business life. Remembering the story-books, they think it is because 

 these aspirants can not write and cipher and spell. But they are fast 

 finding out that the causes of the trouble, in most instances, are weak 

 bodies, or untrained senses, or sluggish minds, or lack of purpose, or 

 general immaturity, or ignorance of how to work with others, or an all- 

 round irresponsibility, or a combination of from two to seven of these 

 common human defects. Secondary schools can not, of course, make 

 silk purses out of sows' ears; but they can make it their chief business 

 to deliver to the business world boys and girls whose bodies, senses and 

 minds have had so much organized training as heaven has permitted 

 them to receive; who have passed out of the state of "kids" into that 

 of men and women; who have a conception of and experience in co- 

 operation and team-play ; who know what loyalty means ; and who have 

 taken school work so seriously that they are prepared to look upon the 

 earning of one's daily bread as something other than a listless game. 



Modern business demands these things. Experience has shown that 

 a rightly ordered secondary school system can produce them. That all 

 schools do not is the fault partly of the teachers, partly of the employ- 

 ers, partly of the community in general, mainly of the parents. The 

 fathers and mothers, and the rest of the community, must be educated 

 to give moral and financial support to this effective type of education. 

 But the only persons who can educate them are the schoolmasters ; and 

 tliey must do it in a roundabout way by gradually introducing this ra- 

 tional, real education into the higher and lower schools. The results 

 will be so immediate, and in many cases so startling, as to make even the 

 overworked business man take notice. And when he begins to realize 

 that the school is really trying to meet his needs; when he begins to 

 see that the millions poured into the public schools are producing effi- 

 cient young men and young women, he will cease growling over his 

 school taxes, and will turn some of the fortunes that he now gives or 

 bequeaths to colleges into the far too lean treasuries of the higher and 

 lower schools. 



