recreation must become more exciting and stimulating. The hopelessness
of adding evening classes and social entertainments as a mere frill to a
day filled with monotonous and deadening drudgery constantly becomes
more apparent to those who are endeavoring to bring a fuller life to the
industrial members of the community, and who are looking forward to a
time when work shall cease to be senseless drudgery with no
self-expression on the part of the worker. It sometimes seems that the
public schools should contribute much more than they do to the
consummation of this time. If the army of school children who enter the
factories every year possessed thoroughly vitalized faculties, they
might do much to lighten this incubus of dull factory work which presses
so heavily upon so large a number of our fellow-citizens. Has our
commercialism been so strong that our schools have become insensibly
commercialized, whereas we supposed that our industrial life was
receiving the broadening and illuminating effects of the schools? The
training of these children, so far as it has been vocational at all, has
been in the direction of clerical work. It is possible that the
business men, whom we in America so tremendously admire, have really
been dictating the curriculum of our public schools, in spite of the
conventions of educators and the suggestions of university professors.
The business man, of course, has not said, "I will have the public
schools train office boys and clerks so that I may have them easily and
cheaply," but he has sometimes said, "Teach the children to write
legibly and to figure accurately and quickly; to acquire habits of
punctuality and order; to be prompt to obey; and you will fit them to
make their way in the world as I have made mine." Has the workingman
been silent as to what he desires for his children, and allowed the
business man to decide for him there, as he has allowed the politician
to manage his municipal affairs, or has the workingman so far shared our
universal optimism that he has really believed that his children would