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There are other and special reasons why the best of industrial education experiments in America have not met with greater hospitality.  The average American parent still believes that a boy “rises” in the industrial world, not as they once thought through his ability as a workman.  The men of their acquaintance who have been successful, have attained wealth and position, not as a rule through their mastery of technique or their skill in a trade; they have not come by their promotion merely on account of good workmanship, but through influence.  It might be that they had had their “chance” through a relative or successful business man, or it might be that they “got next” to a politician, who required no other qualification than “smartness.”  A boy in a telegraph or a lawyer’s office has a better opportunity to reach influence than a boy in a workshop.  The scholastic requirement for such advancement as these vocations contemplate, is provided for in the established school program of the lower grades.  A certain display of a few historical and literary facts beside a facility in reading, writing, and arithmetic are the qualifications which average parents believe are the necessary ones for their children’s advancement.  And, taking the situation in general as it is, they are right, and will be as long as the whole social system discounts productive effort and rewards exploitation of productive enterprise.

Obviously false from an educational point of view as these school standards are, they are true to the facts, to the actual situation which the parents have to face.  The wave of popular opposition to a reorganization of the schools for a preparation of the children for factory life expresses the original conception of popular education among sovereign people.  The common school system exists, it is still assumed, to fit the children to rule their own lives; to give them an equipment which will protect them from a servitude to others.  Its ability to do this had not been questioned a generation ago and, theoretical as its original intention is to-day, its traditional purpose to develop the power of each child to govern his destiny, holds over.  If training children to read, write and count, training them in facts relating to history and language, did not, as it had been hoped, lay the world at the feet of the children, training them in factory processes, parents felt competent to declare, laid the children at the feet of exploiters.  That is where in any case, in the light of common experience, they might expect them to land.  To reorganize the schools with that possibility in mind was for the parents a surrender of their gambling chance.