80 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



formed his daily tasks as perfunctorily and with as little intelligence 

 as the most machine-like of factory operatives. 



For the second reason, the number of persons gaining a livelihood 

 by agricultural pursuits is not likely at any time in the future to be 

 more than a third of the whole population — if this proportion is 

 maintained — and any technical training for this class should be 

 furnished by technical, not public schools. 



We cannot justify our invasion of the schools it seems to me, unless 

 we squarely face the fact that we demand from the schools some 

 things our fathers did not demand, and, further, in feeling about 

 for the instruments whereby these things may be achieved, we 

 have come upon the school garden. 



1st. The older education aimed to fill the pupils' heads with 

 authoritative facts. Our ideal is the awakening of the latent 

 faculties of the child. 



2d. The so-called learned professions were the goal of the course 

 of study, though, of course, many fell by the wayside. The mediae- 

 val tradition of learning being a matter of monks, was transplanted 

 to our shores and appeared in Puritan guise as education, even 

 popular education being a preparation for the ministry. 



The modern idea is that the public school, the elementary school, 

 at least, shall fit for citizenship, not for a vocation, but shall so 

 develop habits of doing, habits of thinking, that any vocation to 

 which the gifts of the pupil justify his aspiration may be worthily 

 filled, and further, as some educator has pointed out, that he may 

 be fitted to survive in a world of ever-changing conditions. 



3d. The schools of the past could concern themselves with 

 "book-learning" solely, safe in the consciousness that the pupils 

 were being trained in all kinds of manual arts, were learning many 

 kinds of useful knowledge in the home, in the fields, in the workshop. 

 Save for the knowledge country children acquire on the farm, all 

 this training has passed from the ken of school children. The 

 various movements for the introduction of training in the manual 

 arts into the schools have been inspired by a discernment of this 

 lack in the life of the modern child. Indeed, most emphatic and 

 unsentimental is the testimony from some sources. Those who 

 defend the employment of children in factories and workshops 

 declare that the child needs industrial experience to fit him for his 



