The helplessness of the average American teacher when the subject of technical education is mentioned was shown amusingly a few years ago when one of the several superintendents who have general charge of the New York city schools devised a system of teaching from what he called object lessons. He prepared a manual and a set of charts and the Board of Education in compliment to him purchased a great many and placed them in the class-rooms. But it was almost impossible to have them used unless the superintendent himself took the work in hand. The teachers didn’t understand it. They said they couldn’t get the hang of it. The truth was they had never had any education of the same kind themselves and the matter was as foreign to their intelligence as Hebrew or Sanscrit would have been. But, mark the difference; when news of this system penetrated the wilds of the rowdy West, demands and orders for the material to work with came East rapidly, and I was told that a single State in the new West made more use of this system than all the Eastern and Middle States combined. The West knows what it wants; the teachers are closer to the children than in the East. This may be one of the blessings, or perhaps penalties, of life in a new country, but, whatever it may be, the results seem to justify a wish that all of us could be transplanted to a new country, for at least a little while, from the older centres of our American civilization. General Walker, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says: “The introduction of shopwork into the public system of education cannot fail to have a most beneficial influence in promoting a respect for labor and in overcoming the false and pernicious passion of our young people for crowding themselves into overdone and underpaid departments where they may escape manual exertion.” Col. Auchmuty, the philanthropic founder of New York’s great “Trades School,” says: “What scientific schools are to the engineer and architect--what the law school and the medical school are to the lawyer and the physician, or what the business college is to the clerk--trade schools must be to the future mechanics.” President Butler, late of Columbia College’s faculty, now president of the Industrial Association’s great model school, says: “Manual training does not claim admittance as a favor; it demands it as a right. The future course of study will not be a Procrustean structure--absolutely and unqualifiedly alike for all localities and for all schools; but it will have in it a principle, and that principle will be founded on a scientific basis--the highest duty of the educator will be its application to his own particular needs and demands.” Is the experience of practical educators like these to be cast aside in favor of the antiquated theories of teaching now in vogue?