young people with an opportunity to plan; they are true reflections of factory existence as they eliminate all the adventure of industry, the opportunity for experiment and discovery; they do not satisfy the high impulse of young people to be of use, to be a part of the world of work.  The spirit of the schools is preparation for something to come; the spirit of the children is in the present, and the present pressing impulse of adolescence is to share adult responsibilities.

The impulse of youth to take its place in adult life is exploited by industry and repressed or perverted by a system of education which fits the children into a system of industry without giving them the insight and power to effect adjustments.  The actual job in a trade has satisfying features which the school lacks.  It pays wages.  That fact for eager children is estimated beyond its purchasing power.  For them it is an acknowledgment, a very real one, that they have been admitted, are wanted in the big world where they are impelled by their psychic needs, to enter.  It places them more nearly on an equality with the older members of their family and entitles them to consideration which was not given them as dependent children.  They learn shortly of how little account they are to the boss employer but they are establishing all the time a new basis of contact and a new place in their personal relations; they are establishing it because they have economic value in the world outside of home as well as in it.

The industrial schools and the old type of schools are both adult schemes of getting children ready for adult life, not by experiencing it, but by doing certain things well so that they can be entrusted to do later on, what adults in their wisdom have decided that they are to do.  But they fail to prepare children for the future as they fail to supply the children’s present urgent needs.  They use the period for ulterior purposes; purposes ulterior to the period of growth with which they are dealing.  As they use this period for another time than its own, in effect they exploit it.  Without consciousness of the fact so far as the children are concerned, the schools exploit this period of growth as effectively as the employers reap the profits of child labor.  Employers as beneficiaries have more reason than the schools for diverting youth from its own purposes, as they are under the necessity of a price system which is competitive.  The schools as well as industry use up the placticity of youth; they kill off the eagerness of children to explore and plan, and cast it aside for more consequential ends.