Mr. Wilson makes no compromise with existing conditions; concedes not one point to the second-rate standards that we supinely accept; faces the question of cost, that basic difficulty which most theoretical educators waive aside, and which the public never dreams of trying to meet and overcome.  Here are some of his proposals.

The New Education [he writes] will include training and experience in domestic science, cookery and home-making; agriculture and horticulture; pure and applied science, and mechanical and commercial activities with actual production, distribution and exchange of commodities.  Such training for three to six millions of both sexes from the age of twelve to twenty-one years will require land, tools, buildings of various types, machinery, factory sites by rail and water, timber, water and power sources.

As all civilization is built upon the back of labor, and as all culture and leisure rests upon labor, and is not possible otherwise, so all cultural and liberal education, as generally understood, shall be sequent to the productive and vocational.  The higher intellectual education should grow out of and be earned by productive vocational training.

Hence our schools should be surrounded by lands of the best quality obtainable, plots of 10, 50, 100 and more acres.  These lands should be the scene of labor that would be actually productive and not mere play....  In such a school the moral elements of labor should be primary, viz.:  joy to the producer, through industry and art; perfect honesty in quality of material and character of workmanship; social cooeperation, mutualism, and fellowship among the workers or students; and last, but not least, justice—­that is, the full product of labor being secured to the producer.

He plans to make the schools largely self-supporting, partly through land endowments easier to obtain under the system of taxation of land values that is possibly near at hand in the Golden State, for which primarily the writer is planning.  The other source of income would be from the well-directed labor of the students themselves, particularly the older ones.  He quotes Professor Frank Lawrence Glynn, of the Vocational School at Albany, New York, as having found that the average youth can, not by working outside of school hours, but in the actual process of getting his own education, earn two dollars a week and upward.  Elsewhere, Mr. Wilson shows that the beginnings of such schools are to be found in operation today, in some of the best reform institutions of the country.

For all who desire university training, this would open the door.  They would literally “work their way” through college.  One university’ president argues for some such means of helping students:  “We need not so much an increase of beneficiary funds as an increase of the opportunities for students to earn their living.”  This is partly to enable them to pay; for their courses and thereby acquire an education, but chiefly because through supporting themselves they gain self-confidence and therefore the power of initiative.[A]