THE AIMS OF THE NATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE PROMOTION OF INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION.*

HENRY S. PRITCHETT,

President Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and sometime President of the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education.

The underlying purpose which gave birth to this association which calls itself The National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, is the thought that we are no longer fitting our youths for their opportunities in the way in which they must be fitted. In this day every nation must make of each citizen an effective, economic unit, and then must bring these units into efficient organization. We in America are today not doing this. We are behind, and as an old Methodist belief holds that the first step to improvement is a conviction of sin, so the first purpose of this Society is to make it clear to the American people that the facts show that we are behind; that we are not preparing our men and our women as they must be prepared to be effective, economic units. * * * * Part of the mission of this Society is to bring to the attention of our national life, of our people, this realization of our shortcomings.

The second purpose which led to the inauguration of the Society was to bring together the various persons in our citizen body, who are most directly interested in this problem; first those who have to do directly with industrial callings, next the great manufacturers who depend on skill in these trades, and the schoolmasters who are to train the boys and the girls, and lastly, the great American public itself, which after all, in all such questions is as directly concerned as any other party, but which is the one the most often left unconsulted.

* Extracts from address delivered at first Annual Meeting, Chicago, Jan., 1908.

This Society believes that this problem, vital as it is, is to be worked out by co-operation; that it is to be dealt with in a spirit of industrial peace, not in a spirit of industrial war. It is equally to the interest of the workingman, of the manufacturer, of the teacher, of the citizen, that the boys and the girls may find an open door to opportunity by which they may fit themselves to be effective men and women in the industrial life of our nation. Just why men settle their questions by strife rather than by arbitration, lies deep in the fundamental qualities of human nature. We have come out of the state of warfare which perhaps lasted for hundreds of thousands of years. Until very recently it was the principal business of all men to fight, and so recently have we emerged from that condition that we are prone today to settle all our questions by a resort to physical force. * * * * We have a natural, inherent, fundamental instinct for fighting. This Society stands, on the contrary, for the idea that the question of industrial education, one which touches our social problems, our economic interests, and our educational interests, is to be solved in accordance with the rights of all citizens; it appeals to interests which are larger than the selfish considerations which arise out of personal profit; it stands for a solution of the problem by co-operation, by consultation, and by study of the common rights of all classes.

During this, the first year of our work, our attention has been focused on the first of the two purposes named, that of calling the attention of the public to the conditions which exist today in our own country. We have been largely occupied in trying to emphasize the fact that these conditions must be dealt with, in trying to make it clear to those who are interested that here, confronting us, are problems which must be solved; and that the interests of all citizens of our country are to be served by dealing with them as directly, as efficiently, and as quickly as possible.

A second part of our work during the year has been that which has dealt with the publication of information. Much of this is information concerning the work of education in industrial lines in foreign countries, particularly in the work which is being done in France, in certain places in England, and above all in Germany.

Whenever an American speaker tells the story of German education and points to the success of the German technical school or the German industrial school, he is generally careful to follow up the remark by the statement, but "of course we cannot transfer the German school to America. The conditions are wholly different. All that we can do is to note what these people have done and to solve this problem in our own way." There is a certain amount of truth in this statement. No man who knows the conditions would desire to transfer a German university to America. Yet there is another side to this expression which in my judgment is very misleading. Some things we may transfer directly from one nation to another. The successful nations today are the Japs and the Germans, because they are good borrowers. They know a good thing when they see it, and if one cannot produce a good thing the next best thing is to borrow it and use it.

In the environs of Berlin there is an enormous institution, covering many acres, the National Testing Laboratory. It is an institution to which any engineer, any manufacturing firm, any commercial firm or any one in industry or industrial life may go with a difficult problem. The experts in that establishment will take up this problem and study it. First of all they place before the seeker, the whole literature of the world on the subject. This itself is a most important service for it is true that most mechanical problems have been solved somewhere else, if one but knows where to put one's finger on them.

Thus one of the great advantages of this institution to the manufacturers, engineers and inventors of Prussia is that it puts into their hands the literature of the world on any subject in which they are interested. The result is that any manufacturing firm may come to this testing laboratory with its problem and have it attacked by the best experts the world knows; these experts starting with all the knowledge there is to be had about this subject. A paper manufacturer told me in this connection the following story: "Some months ago," said he, "we began to buy our wood from a new region, but the formula by which we had made our wood pulp no longer worked. The process we had used proved a failure and our business seemed to be about to go to the wall. We took our problem to the testing

laboratory. Two of our own men were set to work on it and two men from the laboratory. In six months, they changed our business from a losing one to the most profitable we ever had." It does not take a very great intelligence to see that you can set down that kind of an institution without any modification, outside of Chicago, and have it to do a lot of good.

I was much struck with the remark of a very intelligent Japanese some time ago. He was being twitted by the fact that his nation was a nation of borrowers. The Jap said, “Yes, that is true; we are borrowers, but we first borrow, then assimilate, and then we improve on the original." We Americans have always prided ourselves upon being men who could approach a subject without any bias; upon being men who did not care whether a thing was German, or French, or English, if it worked, but we have not shown ourselves so in the last twenty years. One of the aims therefore of this Society is to show to the people who are interested in industrial education, that some things have already been worked out; that we need not go over all the hard steps, through all the elementary processes, through all the problems that have already been solved. in all the other parts of the world in order to get to the place to which we desire to go.

And now a word as to the future work of this Society. It is not enough to say that we are going to co-operate. It is not enough merely to point out what foreign nations are doing. There must be also constructive work. We must have definite, practical trade schools; schools that are going to train these boys and these girls into definite, skilled workers. Just which of the various types of schools this Society will be able to recommend we hope may be made clear within the next year. It is the hope that within the next year or two this Society by a committee of its men most familiar with the subject, will be able to recommend to a municipality or to a city a model type of trade school; the kind of school that it, in its judgment, believes would be equal to the industry which that particular city or that particular community may well promote. It hopes to be able to show how to deal directly, practically, specifically, with the problems of a given region, of a given city, and of a given state.

Secondly, it is the expectation that within the next year there may be brought out of this Society a committee similar to that famous committee of ten, of which President Eliot was a member, which some years ago dealt in so successful a way with certain standards of college and secondary education. This committee it is hoped will tell us how these continuation schools, these schools for industrial training, should articulate themselves with the great public school system of our country and of our various states, because after all this study by which a boy or girl is to be started into a trade, in which skill shall be one of the great agents for the moral and intellectual uplifting, must in some way be intelligently, practically and efficiently articulated with our public school system.

To this practical work our Society looks forward. It is a work which in its consummation may hope to see a series of commonwealths in which any boy or any girl may find an open door to a skilled occupation, in which each may find not only greatest efficiency, but also, as President Eliot has well said, greatest usefulness and greatest happiness.

This great problem of industrial education is after all only one part of that larger problem of education which has to do with national fitness, with national respect for law and order, national discipline, and national efficiency in government. It is all a part of the problem which today is set before democracy, and democracy is yet on trial.

We have not made of the government of our cities, we have not made of the conduct of our schools, we have not made of certain callings any such showing as has been made, under what we call a beaurocratic government, in Germany. This problem of industrial education is but one division of that greater problem which is before democracy itself, and on the successful solution of which hangs the question whether democracy is to succeed. or die. One cannot help but ask one's self the questions, "Can we do it?" "Will we do it?" "Will we be equal to it as a people, as a nation, as a confederation of states?"

For myself I believe we will. Not so much from what we have done in certain ways, because there is nothing in the government of our cities at this time to make us believe we are going to govern them very well next year or the year after, there