I have tried to follow up the evolution of our present industrial society on several parallel lines:  how industry itself has developed, how immigration affects the labor problem as regards the woman worker, and the relation of women to the vocations in the modern world.  Let us now glance at our educational systems and see how they fit in to the needs of the workers, especially of the working-women.  For our present purpose I will not touch on education as we find it in our most backward states, but rather as it is in the most advanced, since it is from improvement in these that we may expect to produce the best results for the whole nation.

Free and compulsory public education was established to supply literary and cultural training at a time when children still enjoyed opportunities of learning in the home, and later in small shops something of the trades they were to practice when grown-up.  I know of a master plumber, who twenty years ago, as a child of eleven, made friends with the blacksmith and the tinsmith in the little village where he lived, and taught himself the elements of his trade at the blacksmith’s anvil and with the tinsmith’s tools.  At fourteen that boy knew practically a great deal about the properties of metals, could handle simple tools deftly, and was well prepared to learn his trade readily when the time came.

As the most intelligent city parents cannot as individuals furnish their children with similar chances today, we must look to the public schools, which all citizens alike support, to take up the matter, and supply methodically and deliberately, that training of the eye and hand, and later that instruction in wage-earning occupations which in former days, as in the case quoted, the child obtained incidentally, as it were, in the mere course of growing up.

On the literary side, it is true, schools are improving all the time.  History is now taught by lantern slides, showing the people’s lives, instead of by a list of dates in a catechism.  Geography is illustrated in the garden plot of the school playground.  But in responding to the new claims which a new age and a changed world are making upon them, schools and teachers are only beginning to wake up.  The manual training gradually being introduced is a hopeful beginning, but nothing more.  The most valuable and important work of this kind is reserved for the upper grades of the grammar schools and for certain high schools, and the children who are able to make use of it are for the most part the offspring of comfortably off parents, enjoying all sorts of educational privileges already.  Education, publicly provided, free and compulsory, therefore presumably universal, was established primarily for the benefit of the workers’ children, yet of all children it is they who are at this moment receiving the least benefit from it.  Many circumstances combine to produce this unfortunate result.  The chief direct cause is poverty in the home.  So