Education for efficiency; a discussion of certain phases of the problem of universal education, with special reference to academic ideals and methods

Preface To Revised Edition

Since the publication of Education for Efficiency some five years ago many of its ideals and purposes have been more than realized. Probably nothing better expresses the present state of mind of most educators than the following series of propositions published in a recent report of the Illinois Educational Commision :

I. That the high school completes the formal education for most of its students, and this fact rather than the preparation for college should dominate its policy.

II. That the high school curriculum should, therefore, distinctly recognize the vocational needs of the pupil, defining vocation broadly enough to cover all the useful activities, ranging from industry for the masses to hterature, business, and art for the few.

III. That at least one-fourth of the student's time in high school should be devoted to this vocational work, and three-fourths to non- vocational, upon the ground that the student, in order to make a useful member of society, should, for a portion of his time each day after reaching the high school age, become possessed of a deep sense of vocational consciousness demanding special training looking to his own activities, but that at the same time, in order to be most effective and rational, he should also devote the major portion of his time to what other men have thought and said and done, or are preparing to do, and to the facts of nature.

IV. That the instruction in vocational courses of high schools should be as useful for practical purposes as is that in the same subjects in schools devoted exclusively to technical training. In no other way can the higher phases of public education hold their own against the competition of the trade school and prevent its supplanting to an undue extent a broader system for the education of the young.

V. That therefore the typical high school should introduce into curriculum at the present time at least six vocational courses corresponding to the six broad avenues leading into the chief activities of civihzed man ; namely :

iii iv PREFACE

1. A course leading to the speaking and writing professions with language, literature, and history as its main subjects.

2. A course leading to the scientific professions, especially medicine and surgery, and devoting its chief attention to biology, physics, and chemistry, studies dealing with life and the conditions of life.

3. A course leading to the profession of farming with special reference to the domesticated animals and plants, and to the soil as the sustainer of hfe, supported by the physical sciences and by the principles of accounting.

4. A course preparing for useful and artistic construction in the building trades and in most lines of manufacture. Here, manual training, mathematics, physics, and art should hold the leading place.

5. A course leading to the calHngs of the business world, with commercial geography, economics, industrial history, commercial arithmetic, commercial law, book-keeping, stenography, and typewriting as its most prominent features.

6. A course dealing with the application of science and of art to the affairs of the well-ordered home. Here sewing, cooking, food values, marketing, serving, nursing, sanitation, textiles, home decoration, and the laws of physical, moral, and mental development in childhood are the special studies.

The proposed high school course in agriculture published in the first edition of this book has now been replaced by the more modern course in the report above quoted. While many different outlines of study have been successfully taught, this perhaps serves well to illustrate the present practice, except that in many instances teachers prefer to introduce animal studies during the first year.

In addition to the formal vocational courses offered in the high schools, a good many of these schools are beginning to offer also short courses^, part-time courses, night schools, et cetera, thus fully occupying a field that has been so extensively advocated for the trade school. This, of course, is the only way in which sparsely settled districts, like country communities, can have anything like well-ordered schools.

University of Illinois, June, 1914.

Contents

PAGB

Introduction i

Part I Chapter

II. Industrial Education with Special Reference to

THE High School 37

III. Industrial Education a Phase of the Problem of

- Universal Education 60

IV. The Educative Value of Labor .... 78 V. The Culture Aim in Education .... 90

VI. Unity in Education 100

Part II

VII. Agriculture in the High Schools .... 124 VIII. Agriculture in the Elementary Schools . . 138 IX. Agriculture in the Normal Schools . . .146 X. The Development of American Agriculture —

What it is and What it Means . . . .149 XI. The Meaning of Agriculture . . , . .176

INTRODUCTION THE RISE OF INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION

It was a great thing when the common man first lifted up his head and said, "I, too, will be educated."

We have entered upon an era of universal education, which means the education of all sorts of people for all sorts of purposes. From now on therefore education must serve not only the exceptional five per cent but the ninety-five per cent of common men as well ; it must not only fit for the so-called learned professions but it must also train for common things, else it is not universal, — a new fact that involves, I imagine, a somewhat radical revision of our philosophy of education, with a corresponding broadening of ideals as to the purposes, the materials, and the methods of instruction.

Fifty-seven years ago Professor Jonathan B. Turner wrote : ^

*'A11 civilized society is, necessarily, divided into two distinct cooperative, not antagonistic, classes : a small class, whose proper business it is to teach the true principles of religion, law, medicine, science, art, and literature ; and a much larger class who are engaged in some form of labor, in agriculture, commerce, and the arts. For the sake of convenience, we will designate the former the Professional, and the latter the Industrial, class, not implying that each may not be equally industrious, the one in their intellectual, the other in their industrial, pursuits. Probably in no case would society ever need more than five men out of

1 From "A Plan for an Industrial University," United States Patent Office Report, 1852.

I one hundred in the professional class, leaving ninety-five in every hundred in the industrial ; and, so long as so many of our ordinary teachers and public men are taken from the industrial class, as there are at present, and probably will be for generations to come, we do not really need over one professional man for every hundred, leaving ninety-nine in the industrial class.

"The vast difference, in the practical means, of an appropriate liberal education, suited to their wants and their destiny, which these two classes enjoy, and ever have enjoyed the world over, must have arrested the attention of every thinking man. True, the same general abstract science exists in the world for both classes alike, but the means of bringing this abstract truth into effectual contact with the daily business and pursuits of the one class does exist, while in the other case it does not exist and never can till it is new created.

" The one class have schools, seminaries, colleges, universities, apparatus, professors, and multitudinous appliances for educating and training them for months and years, for the peculiar profession which is to be the business of their life ; and they have already created, each class for its own use, a vast and voluminous literature, that would wellnigh sink a whole navy of ships.

" But where are the universities, the apparatus, the professors, and the literature, specifically adapted to any one of the industrial classes ? Echo answers, Where ? In other words, society has become, long since, wise enough to know that its teachers need to be educated, but it has not become wise enough to know that its workers need education just as much. . . .

"It is said that farmers and mechanics do not and will not read, but I say, give them the literature and the education suited to their wants, and see if it does not reform and improve them as it has reformed and improved their professional brethren. The agricultural classes have no congenial literature."

In these few words Professor Turner outlined both the need for education and the character of the education suited to the natural needs of industrial people. They were written in the early days of the campaign that led up to the Land Grant Act of 1862, by which every state has come to have at least one college wherein are taught the subjects that

INTRODUCTION 3

especially pertain to industrial life, but " without excluding other scientific and classical studies."

This was the first far-reaching step in this country toward an adequate system of education for industrial people as such. Hitherto, to be sure, the colleges had been open to young men from the industrial ranks, but the courses were adapted to the special needs of Professor Turner's five per cent and were silent upon those of the ninety-five.

If, therefore, an ambitious young man from the industrial masses perchance entered college to better his condition, the inevitable consequence was that he deserted the ninety-five and joined the five per cent, whereby the industrial masses remained uneducated and the industries undeveloped and tending downward as the result of universal education, because educational influences were such as to abstract from the industries the most ambitious and the most capable.

This draft was felt hardest upon the farm, when the great commercial activity following the Civil War drew by thousands the best blood out of the country into the city ; off the land and into the office ; away from independence into dependent positions with small salary.

The Land Grant Act was the first step in the correcting of these evil tendencies, in that agricultural and mechanical instruction of some sort was provided in every state in the Union. It was followed twenty-five years later (1887) by the Hatch Act, founding at every agricultural college an Experiment Station for the investigation of problems peculiarly agricultural and for the publication of the results.

Thus came to be built up, on the agricultural side at least, the literature of which Professor Turner so clearly saw the need. This also strengthened the instruction in the college, and agricultural as well as engineering colleges in these land-grant institutions were soon filled with students. Thus industrial education became established in this country, and first of all on college levels. It yet remains to be established for the real masses, and the most important educational question to-day is how to inaugurate an adequate scheme of industrial education of secondary grade and below in order to be within the reach of at least the greater part of Turner's ninety-five per cent. This question has not yet been settled, and it is the conviction of the writer that as yet we have not evolved a philosophy of education adequate to the task of meeting the logical demands of a real system of universal education.

Gradually, but slowly, men have learned by experience that schooling, if it be of a suitable kind, does not necessarily educate away from industry, and further, that the kind of education which fits for industry not only returns educated men to industrial life but also and inevitably develops the industries to a level that is unattainable except through education.

It was far-sighted educated men like Turner in the West and McAlHster, Gregg, Cameron, and Morrill in the East that first saw and pointed out the need of industrial education. For a long time the people were apathetic or resistant. They desired education; indeed they demanded it, but it was for the purpose of ** rising above " the ordinary walks of life. They chiefly desired education not as a source of personal gratification or of added efficiency in service, but that they " would not have to work so hard as their fathers did," and for a generation or more education was regarded as the avenue out of industry and into an " easy place " ; out of humble life into elegance and prominence.

Accordingly, the first attempts at industrial education,

INTRODUCTION 5

even when endowed by federal support, were met by anything but promising results. The only people who supported the agricultural colleges were the few who really desired their sons to be educated, but had learned by observation that the old-line college courses educated away from the farm.

From the first, the attempt to teach industrial courses was attended by peculiar difficulties. As Turner had remarked, there was no literature. There was lacking, therefore, both material and method, and it would take a book simply to record the academic blunders and the professional shortsightedness that characterized the first quarter of a century of this attempt. Teachers were as lacking as was appropriate literature, and these have had to be developed by the slow evolution of internal processes, because we have beheld the unparalleled prospect of a generation of self-made teachers evolving with their own experience both the matter and the methods of an entirely new educational field.

Quite naturally the first attempts at teaching were little more than an effort to train in handicraft, developing the art side of industries in imitation of the obsolete apprentice system, and it has taken a generation of experience to teach us that what is needed in industrial education is not so much the art as the science of the craft ; not so much the practice as the principle, w^hich only is educative, and on which only the industry and the man can be developed together.

Harassing and full of delay as all these troubles have been, we have gradually learned two fundamental facts, viz. first, that the industrial man is the better for being suitably educated; and second, that industry develops with that sort of education of industrial people which retains them among the industries and does not drive or lead them out. Agriculture, like engineering, is rapidly becoming more difficult, and in many of its phases has already passed beyond the compass of the uneducated.

We are gradually learning, too, that it does not pay to try to hold individuals either within or without the bonds of industrial life, but that it is the best public policy to leave nature alone in this respect and let the individual decide his own destiny after a fair opportunity for choice of occupation.

With a feeling of confidence established at these points, the demand for industrial education as such is strongly felt and is now becoming surprisingly general, so general as to amount to a demand that must be reckoned with, and that at once. This demand takes one or the other of two forms : either that industrial schools shall be more generally established, or else that industrial courses shall be added to the curricula of existing schools. Which one of these two demands to recognize is the most difficult of all questions for educators to solve, because in its solution we must look, not so much to the present situation as to future conditions and the ultimate consequences of the plan that finally shall be adopted.

With the rise of industrial education new meaning has been given to industry and new dignity to that kind of labor which is a necessary part of a logical plan looking to the accomplishment of definite ends, all of which adds to the significance of this form of education and still further augments the demand, until our whole scheme of education is on the point of revision.

Some good people, conservative to a fault, look upon these educational innovations with extreme disapproval, marking, as they believe, the passing of old-time high

INTRODUCTION 7

standards of the educated man. Others, noting the immediate and direct value of technical instruction, are ready to jettison the ship and cast overboard as useless junk not only every ancient language because it is "dead," but any and every other subject that does not clearly and directly contribute to utilitarian ends, on the ground that it is not practical. As the one side pursues its educational ideals, oblivious that men are beings of flesh and blood to be fed, clothed, and housed, so the other forgets that the chief end of man is not merely to meet his physical necessities. Both sides are likely to consider only the present good of the individual and overlook the ultimate effect of an educational system upon the community as a whole.

Where, now, between these two extremes shall we find the golden mean, by observing which we shall have a new philosophy of education adequate to minister to all the needs of man ? What is the fountain at which all may drink freely, to the advantage not only of the individual but of the race ? To answer this question safely will require the keenest insight into present conditions and the most prophetic vision as to future consequences of whatever policy shall be adopted.

The following pages are offered as some slight contribution to the thought that must be bestowed upon the matter before the problem of universal education shall be so solved as to serve fairly and safely both the five and the ninety-five per cent.

PART I

Chapter I Education For Efficiency »

It is dangerous to attempt to educate a live boy with no reference to the vocational.

The first general principle to be recognized is this : That industrial education cannot be considered by itself alone any more than industrial people can live alone. It is at best but part of a general scheme of education that aims at a higher efficiency of all classes of people, and it is in this light that industrial education should be studied and its problems solved.

The most significant educational fact to-day is that men of all classes have come to look upon education as a thing that will better their condition ; and they mean by that, first of all, something to make their labor more effective and more profitable ; and second, they mean something that will enable them to live fuller lives. They have no very clear idea of the methods for bringing it all about, nor have they any very good means of impressing their views and desires upon us at educational conventions ; but to better their condition through education is the abiding faith and purpose of all men everywhere, and they will persist until it is realized.

The ruling passion of the race to-day is for education ; and colleges and schools of all sorts, both public and private,

iThis chapter covers the general line of thought developed by the author in an address at the dedication of the new agricultural building at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, May zZ, 1909.

II day classes and night classes, winter and summer, are filled to overflowing. The only educational institution that is being deserted is the old-time district school, and that is faihng only where it is unable to satisfy the new demands, and where this occurs its lineal successor is the public high school, which is everywhere becoming the favorite agency of modern education of the masses in America.

The training of the young for the duties of life is no longer left to the charity of the church nor to private endowment, however munificent. We do not ask a man to pay the expense of his own education, and we no longer require the parent to pay for the schooling of his child. We have come to recognize that in the last analysis the child belongs to the community, and public welfare requires that he be educated. So we have the policy of universal education well established among us and the largest item of public as well as of private expense is for schools.

Now this is not sentiment, it is business ; it is not charity, it is statesmanship. We propose to maintain all sorts of education for all sorts of people, and to keep them in school as long as we can — so far have we gone already in this worship of the idol of our day and time.

Yes, truly the ruling passion of the race is for education. Individuals would amass wealth ; individuals would exert influence and power ; individuals would live lives of luxury and ease, but the common purpose of the masses of men from all the walks of life is a set determination to acquire knowledge. Daughters of washerwomen graduate from the high school, and ditchers' sons go to college — not by ones and twos, but literally by hundreds and thousands, and if the ruling passion fails in individual cases, we have a law that puts the child into school, willy-7iilly, on the ground that to this extent, at least, he is public property.

Now what is to be the consequence of all this ? What will the daughter of the washerwoman do after she has graduated from the high school ? Will she take her mother's place at the tub ? What think you ? If not, how will the washing be done ? and was her schooling a blessing or a curse to the community ? — because the tub must stay ; and if she does take her place at the tub, was her schooling a blessing or a curse to her ? Will the ditcher's son inherit the father's spade ? and if not, how will ditches be dug if all men are to be educated ? How will the world's work get done if education takes men and women out of useful and needful occupations and makes them over vi\\.o pseiido ladies and gentlemen of leisure ? How, too, will their own bills be paid except they labor as men have always labored ? It is idle to say that a portion of the race should be left ignorant that they may perform the undesirable though necessary labor. The "portion" objects, and what are we going to do about it? Now these are disagreeable questions, and we would rather not be forced to answer them ; but they are fundamental, and will soon begin to answer themselves in some fashion under our system of education, which is rapidly becoming universal.

We are now engaged in the most stupendous educational, social, and economic experiment the world has ever undertaken — the experiment of universal education ; and whether in the end universal education shall prove a blessing or a curse to us will depend entirely upon our skill in handling the issues it has raised for our solution. We have entered too far upon this experiment ever to retire from it, even if we desired to do so, which we do not ; and if the outcome is to be safety and not anarchy, and if it is all to result in further development of the race and not in retrogression, then a few fundamentals must soon be clearly recognized and brought into and made a part of our educational ideals, policies, and methods.

Firsts if we are to have universal education, it must contain a large element of the vocational, because all the needful activities must be maintained in the educated state as heretofore. The race cannot progress any more in the future than in the past except by the expenditure of large amounts of human energy. This being so, education cannot be looked upon as an avenue to a life of ease, or as a means of giving one man an advantage over another, whereby he may exist upon the fruit of that other's labor and the sweat of that other's brow. It might do for a few ; it cannot do for the mass, whose efficiency must be increased and not decreased by education ; because in the last analysis education is a public as well as a personal matter, and the interests of the state require that the ratio of individual efficiency in all lines shall be constantly increased.

Second^ within the limits of needful activities one occupation is as important as another, and a system of universal education must enrich them all, or the end will be disastrous. We need to change our views concerning what have been regarded as menial employments. In the millennium no woman will make her living over the washtub, nor will she sing the song of the shirt day and night forever ; but neither will education and elevation free her, or any one else, from a fair share of the drudgery of life, because the needful things must still be done. Nor must we fail to remind ourselves that not all the labor of the world is at the washtub, or at the bottom of the ditch, because success in any calling is the price of unremitting and exhausting toil, against which education is no insurance whatever. It can only promise that faithful labor shall have its adequate and sure reward. And that is enough, for no man has a right to ask that he be freed from labor on this earth ; he can only pray to be relieved from the burden of aimless and fruitless drudgery — which is the blessed assurance of education.

While education is no relief from labor, or even drudgery, it ought, however, to lessen the totality of drudgery by the further utilization of mechanical energy and the more economic and intelligent direction of human effort. Education will never fully justify itself until this shall have been accomplished and the human machine be liberated from the last form of slavery — the drudgery that is born of ignorance.

No man, then, educated or uneducated, has a right to be useless. Most men will continue to earn and ought to earn, in one way or another, the funds to pay their bills, and in this natural way will the world's work get done in the future as in the past. The education of all men, therefore, is, or should be, in a broad sense vocational, and the so-called learned professions are but other names for developed industries. In this broad sense every useful activity is included, from farming to music and painting, poetry and sculpture ; from engineering to medicine and law, philosophy and theology ; as wide and as varied as the activities and capacities of the human race — so wide and so varied must our education be if it is to be universal and be safe.

Measured by this standard, farming has the same claims upon education as have language and literature, but no more ; for both are useful, or may be, though in different ways. Which is more useful we cannot tell any more than we can tell whether food or religion is the more essential to human life j or whether art or industry contributes most l6 EDUCATION FOR EFFICIENCY

to its fullest development. We only know that all things within the range of human capacity are useful, and that education may, if it will, enrich them all.

Now this demand is right, for, unless universal education can be so administered as not greatly to disturb the relations of needful activities, it will prove in the end a curse instead of a blessing, and it is the business of educators now soberly to consider the consequences of headlong policies, however promising in direct results, if they do not reckon with the inevitable outcome.

Third, in the working out of these plans such policies and methods must be observed as shall prevent social cleavage along vocational Hues. Unless we can do this, democracy will, in the end, fail. We cannot go on with one half of the people educated and the other half ignorant, any more than we could live with one half free and the other half slave. No more can we live with one half educated to one set of ideals and the other half to another. If we attempt it, we shall have, in due time, not civilization — but a tug of war between highly educated but mutually destructive human energies. The only safety for us now is in the education of all classes to common ideals of individual efficiency and public service along needful lines and with common standards of citizenship. To this end the individual must have training, both vocational and humanistic, and it is better if he does not know just when or how he is getting either the one or the other.

Fourth, remembering that what is one man's vocation is another's avocation, and that what is technical and professional to one is humanistic to another ; remembering that all study is educational and that utility does not lessen its value ; remembering, too, that much of our education comes from association and that the best of it comes in no other way — remembering all these and many other considerations well known to the thinking man, we must agree that in a system of universal edzication the best results will always follow when as many subjects as possible and as m^any vocations as may be are taught together in the same school, under the same management and to the same body of m,en. In no other way can a perfectly homogeneous population be secured. In no other way can universal efficiency be so closely combined with good citizenship. In no other way can activity and learning be so intimately united. In no other way can morals and good government be so safely intrusted to a free people.

As I see it, the greatest hindrance to the natural evolution of a single system of schools adapted to the education of all classes of our people is academic tradition which needs substantial modification in a number of important particulars.

The truth is, there is no such thing as a " general education," except one that fits for nothing in particular, leaving the possessor stranded without occupation or other field for the exercise of his trained activities. In so far as this type of general education exists among us, the quicker we abolish it the better. For example, it has been fashionable to speak of the courses in the arts and sciences as "general," "non-technical," or "liberal," using the terms synonymously, and as opposed to the technical or professional.