Mr. Charles P. Cary, state superintendent of education, insisted that these children should spend half their time in self-improvement; but Mr. Miles would take nothing less than their whole time. He wanted them to learn but one thing—the exact thing they were going to do the rest of their lives; anything else was “overeducating” them. Talking with Mr. Cary in April, 1921, Mr. Miles admitted that what he wanted of the part-time schools was to train strike-breakers. “I was talking with one of our great manufacturers,” he said, “and he told me that by putting in the plant system of training he had made twenty thousand dollars in one year. Now if that were paid for by the city and state”—and then suddenly Mr. Miles realized that Mr. Cary was not a man to appreciate this line of argument; he said abruptly: “It’s a remarkably fine day, is it not?” We went to war with Germany, thinking to abolish the German system of autocracy. But here was a high-salaried agent of our biggest business organization, representing many billions of dollars of invested capital, devoting his energies to establishing the complete Prussian system in the American schools! In Germany of the old regime, this system comprised two distinct types of schools; first, the people’s schools, and secondly, the gymnasia for the privileged classes. The children of the poor dropped out at the age of fourteen years; ninety per cent of them took to part time study and part work, fitting themselves to do what their fathers were doing. Those who were destined for the gymnasia pulled out at the third year, and began on foreign languages. A boy who finished the people’s school had to go back and take up foreign languages in order to get into the gymnasia, and very few ever achieved the feat. This is class education, and it is what the National Association of Manufacturers has been working for all over the United States. Margaret Haley told me of a legislative hearing at Springfield, Illinois, at which they produced Superintendent Cooley of Chicago, who gave an elaborate lecture on the European system of vocational training, which he pretended to know. Mr. Frederick Roman had gone to Germany, with credentials from the governor of North Carolina, and had spent two years making an independent study. Superintendent Cooley didn’t know about this, and was taken by surprise when Mr. Roman walked in upon this legislative hearing, and showed that Cooley had misrepresented both the law and the facts of the European system. The vocational training which the Chicago superintendent of schools was recommending for the state of Illinois was worse than anything in Prussia!