And so we established a pre-vocational school where the young people are taught farming, carpentry, cement construction, blacksmithing, gas engine building and dozens of other fundamental trades that nourish our industrial life, a life that draws no nutriment from Greek or Latin. I am not opposed to literature and the classics. I make no war on the dead languages. The war that killed them did the business. Why should I come along and cut off their feet, when some one else has been there and cut off their heads? But as an educator I promote the industrial trades, because they educated and promoted me. I have done well in life, and if you ask me how I did it, I'm telling you. Industry first and literature afterward. And if you wish to see that kind of school in action, you can see it at Mooseheart, Illinois. There is a school with more than a thousand students, boys and girls of various ages, ranging from one month to eighteen years. Some of the students were born there, the mother having been admitted with her youngsters soon after the loss of the father. Each lad will get an introduction to a dozen trades, and when he selects the one that fits him best, he will specialize in that and graduate at eighteen, prepared for life. This education is the gift of more than half a million foster fathers. The Moose are mostly working men, and so they equip their wards for industrial life, and then place them on the job. A boy that knows how to build concrete houses will not have to sleep in haystacks. If every high-school boy in America was a carpenter and cement builder how long would the housing shortage last? “The birds of the air have their nests,” says the Bible. And we know why they have them. Every bird knows how to build its nest. Nature teaches them their trade. But men must learn their trades in school. I visited a college once and saw how Greek was taught. They showed me a clay model of ancient Athens and pointed out the house that each philosopher and poet lived in thousands of years ago. “Where are the houses,” I asked the graduates, “that you are going to live in to-morrow?” “Heaven only knows,” they said. “We'll have to take our chances in the general scarcity; our fate is on the knees of the gods.” The luck of the Mooseheart boy is not on the knees of the gods; it is in his own hands. I visited the Latin department and heard of Rome's ancient grandeur. “The Romans,” they told me, “were not philosophers, but builders. They built concrete roads to the ends of the earth. But their soldiers brought back malarial fever from Africa. It destroyed the builders and their secret perished with them. Eighty years ago concrete was rediscovered.” I asked the students: “Do you know how to make concrete?” “I'll say we don't,” they answered. And that's how much good their Latin education had done them.