and iron chiefly, and mostly ignoring other materials; the part of the
course treating of the former, wooden in its teachings and distinctly
tending to make joiners, carpenters, and cabinet-makers; that of the
latter, iron in its rigidity and an excellent school for smiths,
mechanics, and machinists. These courses are not liberal because they
hardly touch science, which is rapidly becoming the real basis of
every industry. Almost nothing that can be called scientific knowledge
is required or even much favored, save some geometrical and mechanical
drawing and its implicates. These schools instinctively fear and
repudiate plain and direct utility, or suspect its educational value
or repute in the community because of this strong bias toward a few
trades. This tendency also they even fear, less often because
unfortunately trade-unions in this country sometimes jealously suspect
it and might vote down supplies, than because the teachers in these
schools were generally trained in older scholastic and even classic
methods and matter. Industry is everywhere and always for the sake of
the product, and to cut loose from this as if it were a contamination
is a fatal mistake. To focus on process only, with no reference to the
object made, is here an almost tragic case of the sacrifice of content
to form, which in all history has been the chief stigma of
degeneration in education. Man is a tool-using animal; but tools are
always only a means to an end, the latter prompting even their
invention. Hence a course in tool manipulation only, with persistent
refusal to consider the product lest features of trade-schools be
introduced, has made most of our manual-training high schools ghastly,
hollow, artificial institutions. Instead of making in the lower grades
certain toys which are masterpieces of mechanical simplification, as
tops and kites, and introducing such processes as glass-making and
photography, and in higher grades making simple scientific apparatus
more generic than machines, to open the great principles of the