When the speaker emphasized these points of unlikeness, he was at the same time, and in the same breath, pointing out the direction in which industry must be transformed.  Training in the whole occupation must precede the exercise of the specialty.  Furthermore, as all professional training has its cultural side, as well as its strictly professional side, so the cultural training of the worker must ever keep step with his vocational training.

The motto of the school should be, “We are for all,” for it is what teachers and the community are forever forgetting.  Think of the innumerable foundations in the countries of the old world, intended for poor boys, which have been gradually appropriated by the rich.  Of others again, supposed to be for both boys and girls, from which the girls have long been excluded.  The splendid technical schools of this country, nominally open to all boys, at least, are by their very terms closed to the poor boy, however gifted.  To give to him that hath is the tendency against which we must ever guard in planning and administering systems of public education.  With many, perhaps most, educational institutions, as they grow older, more and more do they incline to improve the standards of their work, technically speaking, but to bestow their benefits upon comparatively fewer and fewer recipients.

I would not be understood to deprecate original research, or the training of expert professional workers in any field, still less as undervaluing thoroughness in any department of teaching.  But I plead for a sense of proportion, that as long as the world is either so poor or its wealth and opportunities so unequally distributed, a certain minimum of vocational training shall be insured to all.

We recognize the need for thorough training in the case of the coming original investigator, and the expert professional, and they form the minority.  We do not recognize the at least equally pressing need for the thorough training of the whole working population, and these make up the vast majority.  In so far as the pre-vocational work in primary schools, the manual work and technical training in high schools, the short courses, the extension lectures and the correspondence instruction of universities are meeting this urgent popular need, just so far are they raising all work to a professional standard, just so far are they bringing down to the whole nation the gifts of culture and expert training that have hitherto been the privilege of the few.

I have often noticed college professors, in turning over the leaves of a university calendar or syllabus of lectures, pass lightly over the pages recounting the provision made for short courses, summer schools, extension or correspondence work, and linger lovingly over the fuller and more satisfactory program outlined for the teacher or the professional worker.  The latter is only apparently the more interesting.  Take Wisconsin’s College of Agriculture, for