=Drill to Avert Economic Tragedies.=--In view also of the danger of
economic tragedies that affect the family,--dangers of unemployment of
the father by reason of bad times beyond his control, of his
disablement by industrial accident, of his too-early impairment of
strength by reason of industrial misuse of his powers in ways he can
not prevent,--it may be that education for every boy should include,
while he is still under the legal wage-earning age, efficient drill in
the simpler arts of agriculture. He who can get from the land the raw
material for family comfort is alone, it would seem, able to meet all
industrial catastrophes without alarm. In this country, at least, such
a man, whatever his failure or misfortune in professional, in
clerical, or in manual labor, may make good his father-office in basic
essentials of family support. All that has been said about the need of
mixing vocational training with preparation for home-making in the
case of girls may be said with almost as much, force about the need of
giving the average man an economic refuge in case of vocational
disaster in the ability to work the land to meet essential family
need. This is beginning to be understood as never before. The newest
education of all, as has been said, is intent upon providing for girls
and boys alike this training for economic safety in some expert use of
land for self-support as well as for retranslation of older work
interests. In these "schools of tomorrow" the boys as well as the
girls, while still very young, are being trained to cook and to do
necessary things for household comfort. This is not subversive of
inherited divisions of labor in the home. This teaching only adds to
the economic security of both sexes and may make the men of the future
able to exist comfortably without so much personal service from their
womenfolk, and, above all, may make the home a more perfectly
cooeperative centre of our social order.
=A Graduated Scale of Virtues.=--In the French _Categories_ of "Moral
and Civil Instructions," first outlined in 1882 and perfected and
applied in 1900, the children of the Public Schools of that country
have their attention called first to the duties related to "Home and
Family," going on from that topic to "Companionship, The School,
Social Life, Animal Life, Self-respect, Work, Leisure and Pleasure,
Nature, Art, Citizenship and Nationality," and ending with a study of
the "Past and Future." The latter topic indicates an intent to give in
some fashion the idea of human progress and something of its
outstanding points of interest and value. Other moral codes aim at
some sublimation of history and literature as a finish to courses in
ethical instruction. It is for the student of social progress to
insist that such study of the past, linked to the study of the present
and to some hopeful outline of the future, be not used merely as a
capstone but shall be woven in, as warp and woof of all education, as
it touches every side of life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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