INDUSTRIAL WORKERS. Education and Training of. Industrial education is that form of education, whether given in a school, a factory or elsewhere, the controlling pur pose of which is to train for wage-earning, or to advance the power of wage-earning in the trades and industries. It must be considered from the standpoint' of education as well as of industry. Education is the fitting of the individual to take his place and do his part in the life of his community and his time. Industrial education is, then, the fitting of those who are in industry effectively to serve and to achieve in and through their field of activity. There are 9,000,000 in the fac tories of the United States, supporting directly and indirectly including themselves upward of 30,000,000 people. They are working in 275,791 factories. Their educational and economic de velopment are of utmost consequence from whatever standpoint it is viewed. The joy of life, if not its purpose, is service, self-expres sion, achievement. The daily task may be easy or difficult. If it is simple, that is no reason for allowing the worker to do it poorly. If he can be taught to do it with proficiency in a week or a month, not to say a year, without loss of wages meantime, he has as great right and need of this brief training as a professional man to the 10 or 12 years of additional training which the public rejoices to give him without charge after the period at which the working boy leaves school.
Great as have been the faults of Germany, she so thoroughly developed the industrial in telligence of her -workers as to surprise the world. Sixty-five per cent of the men in the topmost places in her industries, in both the managerial and technical fields, came from the ranks of her working boys, who quit the regu lar schools at from 12 to 14 years of age, but by industrial education, which interpreted their daily tasks and made clear the ways of ad vancement, in apprenticeship and continuation schools (wherein education is ((continued') after leaving the common schools), these boys, as men, surpassed most of the graduates of her higher technical institutions in the attainment of high industrial positions.
Joy in work comes from mastery of work. We like to do what we can do well. We dis like to do what we fail to understand or do poorly. The dislike of work of many who labor is due in great measure to the state's neglect educationally in not teaching the mastery and the dignity of labor. ((The latest gospel in this world is, know thy work and do it. All true work is sacred: and in all true work, were it but true hand labor, there is something divine' (Carlisle). It is the inherent right of every person to be taught to express himself ef fectively and happily in some field of the world's work, small or large, and by mastery therein to serve himself and society to best advantage. Never taught one thing only that he may rest with that, but so that through the mastery of one thing and the learning of another, he may rise to the limit of his abilities. However much a nation develops its natural resources, it is economicalty blind if it fails fully to develop its human values. which are the one natural resource which gives value to all others, and the only one that increases with use. The economic value of the human efficiencies of the working people of the United States is esti mated at more than $200,000,000,000, or five times the value of all other natural resources combined. The spiritual values, the happiness and self-respect, that come of developed effi ciency are incalculable. It is for these and other considerations that each community in the United States spends upon public education about one-third of all its tax receipts, making a national total of about $650,000,000 annually, aside from an investment of more than a billion dollars in school plants, and both items rapidly increasing. But all this is apparently with the college as the aim, although only 3 per cent of the people take the college course. About $5,000 of public funds are spent upon anyone who fits himself for a profession, but scarcely a dollar especially to fit in his occupation any one of the 96 per cent of the people outside the profes sions.