The most romantic account of shoe making will do nothing to bridge the gulf between capital and labor as Dr. Hall seems so confidently to believe it should.  The problem is not so simple or so easily disposed of.  As Dr. Hall himself says:  “As long as workmen are regarded as parts of the machinery to be dumped on the scrap heap as soon as younger and stronger hands can be found, the very point of view needful for the correct solution of vocational education, is wanting."[A] Dr. Hall recognizes some evils which are inherent in the present scheme of industry and which are antagonistic to growth, but neither he nor any of the advocates of the German methods of industrial education make provisions in their educational schemes for eliminating the aspect which contemplates the dumping of workers on scrap heaps.  None of the advocates view the equipment of workers for industry in terms radically different from the terms in which they are viewed by business men; they offer them technique and matter of insignificance and indirection; they make no suggestion or move to open up the adventure of industry for the worker’s actual participation in it; they accept the organization of industry which excludes their participation as an unalterable fact; even unalterable as an experience in the prevocational schemes of education.

[Footnote A:  Stanley Hall—­Educational Problems, p. 632.]

National, state and local campaigns have been carried on in America during the last fifteen years for the protection of childhood and youth.  They have been on the whole successful in their purpose to get children out of factories and stores and into schools.  It was an embarrassment to the pioneers in the campaign to find that the children were against them; that they preferred factory or commercial life to the schools.  The evidence of this preference was their wholesale exodus from schools when they reached an age where they were acceptable to employers or where they were not prevented by law.  Back of the exodus, universal as it is, there is an urge of elemental force.  A common accounting for it, the nearest at hand, is that parents of working class children are penurious; or that they are too ignorant to understand the deteriorating effect of factory life on children; or that they are too hard pressed in their physical needs to consider the best interest of the children.  This reason given for the failure of the schools to supply children with matter of interest or significance to them, explained only why children did not want to stay in school; it did not explain their eagerness to enter industry.  None of the reasons accounted for the zest of the children for wage earning occupation.