cur progress as faith ever was, and we who stand for this matter of industrial education ground our hope mainly on the faith in our common countrymen, their good sense, their persistence, their energy and their uprightness. For myself I cannot but believe that out of it shall come in the end an efficiency which shall attend not only to those things which are material and which are temporal, but also an efficiency which shall take hold of those things which are spiritual and which are eternal.

THE APPRENTICESHIP SYSTEM AS A MEANS OF PROMOTING INDUSTRIAL EFFICIENCY.

CARROLL D. WRIGHT,

President of Clark College, Worcester, Mass.

The propagandism for industrial education now occupying to such large extent the thought of the people is likely to obscure the advantages of the apprenticeship system. This is quite natural, because that system as it occupies the public mind does not play a very great part in industrial training.

When the system is mentioned we are apt to think of the old apprenticeship system which grew up during the middle ages, and played a very important part in the organization and conduct of guilds for several centuries, and it is to the credit of the apprenticeship system then developed that it really produced workmen in various branches possessing the highest skill.

The old guild fostered the apprenticeship system, for it was difficult for anyone to become a member of a guild who had not passed through all the stages of development, and while the guild itself became unjust and arbitrary and gradually declined, the apprenticeship system lived. The laws and the customs of western Europe especially required that any person desiring to exercise certain branches of skilled labor. must serve an apprenticeship, and during the continuance of the apprenticeship the labor of the apprentice belonged to the master; but when the apprentice became a workman and received the wages of a trained journeyman he was expected to reimburse himself for the years spent in learning his trade.

The industrial revolution which took place in the latter part of the eighteenth century resulting in the introduction of labor-saving machinery, was the beginning of the decline of the apprenticeship system. From that time to this the need of apprentices has not been felt in such powerful degree as

before the revolution, but with the modern development of industry we are beginning to see the absolute necessity of securing skilled workmen in all branches of labor, and this necessity has brought to the attention of the public the desire for industrial education.

The facts are strong enough, it seems to me, to induce any state to secure by appropriation and authorization public industrial instruction. The schools have been devoted almost entirely until within a few years to cultural methods. Now the demand is that vocational studies shall be introduced and that separate, independent industrial schools shall be organized for the purpose of instructing young persons in various trades.

The old apprenticeship system did not comprehend this idea, nor do the advocates of industrial education now appreciate the virtues and advantages that may be gained through some adherence to the old system. That system, as it was, has gone by. It is needless to argue that the apprenticeship system answers the whole demand for industrial education. It does not. It is also quite as needless to argue that the industrial school furnishes everything in the way of vocational equipment that can be gained by a thorough apprenticeship system. What is needed is an enlightened, co-ordinated system that shall secure all that can be gained from the apprenticeship system and all that can be gained from modern. schools for trades and industrial education generally.

Here is the problem. It is generally conceded by educators who are interested in industrial education that the industrial school "per se" does not and cannot result in turning out full-fledged skilled mechanics ready to take up a trade.

It is also recognized that the apprenticeship system, on the whole, possesses many features that are unjust and uneconomic and contains some features that may be called immoral. That is, the ethical side of the apprenticeship system. of the olden time is not a satisfactory one, for it taught the apprentice to soldier in his work. He soon found that he was doing quite as good work as the journeyman ahead of him but must be tied to an apprentice's wages for a term of years.

This was an immorality in itself and helped to demoralize the apprentice. He became, when he graduated, a man who would slight his work because he had been unjustly treated economically. This tended to make a bad workman as well as a man given to loafing.

The modern idea is to perfect him in the theory and, to a large extent, the practice of his trade in the shortest possible time commensurate with efficiency and adequate skill. If he could serve as an apprentice for such time as might be absolutely required to perfect himself as a journeyman, that system might be applauded.

As has been said, we need now the benefits of the two systems, but I think if we look the field over broadly and carefully we shall find that many employers in great industries are recognizing not only the difficulties of the old system, but some of the difficulties of the new, while recognizing also the advantages of both. They are establishing their own apprenticeship schools, where a man is not only taught all that he would be taught in an independent industrial institution, but where he is given the equipment he would have acquired under the old apprenticeship system, with the faults and objections of the old system entirely eliminated. Many instances of this combined system could be stated to show that the apprenticeship system under 'modern management, with modern ideas recognizing the necessity for theoretical education, has produced the most efficient and best skilled workmen.

Some time ago at a hearing on the subject of industrial education I asked the manager of a great works engaged in the production of machinery if his apprentices knew anything whatever of the physics of his work, whether they could make a calculation relative to the power applied by lifferent diameters of driving wheels or of the different sizes of cog-wheels, and he answered very promptly that they knew nothing whatever of such methods. The apprenticeship system pure and simple would not teach them, but the industrial school properly equipped would have taught the men all such things. The thoroughly skilled mechanic ought to understand not only the physics of his work, the science and mathematics,

but something of the art itself. He would then be able, as an apprentice in one of our great modern manufacturing establishments, to secure from his apprenticeship system and from the industrial school the very best possible equipment that would lead to the greatest efficiency. This is the need of the day and the work that is progressing.

The propagandism that is being carried to all parts of the country will sooner or later, and the sooner the better, produce a unified, co-ordinated system of apprenticeship work and industrial education that will give the United States the standing it needs and must have to keep and preserve its industrial supremacy.