The promoters of industrial education, with some success, have made it clear to the community generally that parents were giving heavy odds in their gamble, but these promoters would have made this more obvious to parents if they could have shown that the assets accruing from the new school curriculum increased more materially than has the wage earning capacity of their children.  The results for individual children are not sufficiently striking to advertise the departure, and if they were, the departure would not warrant the endorsement of the community on the ground of the higher wage, as wages are fixed by competition.  They are advanced by a general increase in productivity.  But the increase that occurs through more efficient methods in productive enterprise is not a real increase; it does not relatively affect the social or economic position of the wage earner.

In the last analysis, the wage return is not an educator’s criterion, in spite of the pragmatic recommendation of the Cleveland Survey.  The Survey’s recommendation for a reorganization of the school system is based on the belief that the school is, or should be, an integral expression or reflection of the life of the community; that to function vitally it must be contemporaneous with that life, as are all serviceable institutions.  As a school reflects the life of a community it enriches the experience of the children and endows them with the knowledge and power to deal with environment.  When a school system disregards, as our established system does, the entire reorganization of the industrial world, it stultifies growth and cultivates at the same time an artificial concept of life, a false sense of values.  The German system of industrial education has recognized the reorganization of the industrial world, but this recognition has meant the sacrifice of individual life and development; it has come to mean in short the prostitution of a people and the creation of a Frankenstein.

None of our industrial educational systems or vocational guidance experiments disclose the full content of the industrial life nor do they give the children the knowledge or power to deal with it.  The general dissatisfaction with these school movements is that they neither prostitute the schools in the interest of the employers nor endow the children with power to meet their own problems.  The training in technique which they supply has a bearing on the every day life around them which stories of Longfellow’s life have not.  But that technique, divorced as it is from its purpose, its use or final disposition, is as valueless as a crutch for a man without arms.  An elaboration of technology through instruction in the general principles of physical science, industrial and political history and the aesthetics of industry only emphasizes the absence of the really significant factors.  The conspicuously absent factors in all industrial educational schemes are those which give men the ability to control industry.  No work