Social ethics; Social sciences; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
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
never need to go into industrial life at all, but that all of his sons
would become bankers and merchants?
Certain it is that no sufficient study has been made of the child who
enters into industrial life early and stays there permanently, to give
him some offset to its monotony and dulness, some historic significance
of the part he is taking in the life of the community.
It is at last on behalf of the average workingmen that our increasing
democracy impels us to make a new demand upon the educator. As the
political expression of democracy has claimed for the workingman the
free right of citizenship, so a code of social ethics is now insisting
that he shall be a conscious member of society, having some notion of
his social and industrial value.
The early ideal of a city that it was a market-place in which to
exchange produce, and a mere trading-post for merchants, apparently
still survives in our minds and is constantly reflected in our schools.
We have either failed to realize that cities have become great centres
of production and manufacture in which a huge population is engaged, or
we have lacked sufficient presence of mind to adjust ourselves to the
change. We admire much more the men who accumulate riches, and who
gather to themselves the results of industry, than the men who actually
carry forward industrial processes; and, as has been pointed out, our
schools still prepare children almost exclusively for commercial and
professional life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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