It has been understood generally in America that Germany’s preparation and classification of her future workers and their placement in industry, was more responsible than any other policy for Germany’s place in the world market.  British and American manufacturers before the war urged the emulation of German methods of education and a reorganization of school systems more in conformity with the German.  The demand of the manufacturers for reorganization came at a time when intelligent educators in America were recognizing that some reorganization was necessary to bring the school experience of children into relation with their environment and with the actualities of life.  The industrial education movement in this country was based on the German, and the German idea was the dominating one.  The movement here has shown little-imagination as it adopted a system foreign to America, instead of initiating schemes which represented the aspirations of a free people.

Herman Schneider, of the University of Cincinnati, has made one of the most intelligent contributions in the adaptation of the German scheme of education.  He divides trades into two classes, which he calls energizing and enervating.  In those which are energizing there is an element of individual expression and opportunity for self-direction.  The enervating trades are wholly automatic, and induce a lethargic state of mind and body.  His comment on the situation is:  “We are rapidly dividing mankind into a staff of mental workers and an army of purely physical workers.  The physical workers are becoming more and more lethargic.  The work itself is not character building; on the contrary, it is repressive and when self-expression comes, it is hardly energizing mentally.  The real menace lies in the fact that in a self-governing industrial community the minds of the majority are in danger of becoming less capable of sound and serious thought because of lack of continuous constructive exercise in earning a livelihood.”

Professor Schneider undertakes to enrich this barren soil by alternating the time of pupils between the shop or store and the school, thus cooerdinating the worker’s experience, with the assistance of schoolmasters who go into the shops and follow the processes the pupils are engaged in and who see that the experience of the week in the shop is amplified and supplemented in the school.  The arrangement also provides that the pupils shall be taken through the various shop processes in the course of apprenticeship.  The experience while it lasts may have educational value for the pupil.  But in spite of what it may or may not hold, for the general run of pupils it leads up a blind alley because the apprenticeship does not fulfill the promise which apprenticeship supposedly holds out.  That is, the pupil, when he becomes a worker, will be thrown back into some factory groove where his experience as an apprentice cannot be used, where he is closed off from the chance