Читать книгу Wage Earning and Education - R. R. Lutz - Страница 13

For many years past the public has given respectful attention to the arguments of the champions of industrial education. There has been general assent to the proposition that the schools should train for and not away from the industrial age in which we live. We have come to think of the carpenter shop, the machine shop, the forge shop, and the cooking room as necessary and desirable adjuncts of the modern school and to our minds these shops have typified industrial education. All of these have come to be almost synonymous with progressive thought and action in public education. Very generally it has been felt that the problems of industrial education were to be solved through the wider extension of these shop facilities in our public schools.

When these familiar generalizations are submitted to careful analysis their whole structure begins to totter. In Cleveland about 3,700 boys leave school each year and go to work. They represent various stages of advancement from the 4th grade of the elementary school to the 4th year of the high school. They are scattered through more than 100 school buildings. The problem of industrial education is to give these boys with their differing ages, their widely varied school preparation, and their scattered geographical distribution, the best possible preparation for taking their places in the work-a-day world. They represent every grade of intelligence, every stratum of social and economic life, and it is extremely difficult to bring them together for instructional purposes. They are scattered in little groups through more than a thousand classrooms.