A Chicago manufacturer tells a story of twin boys, whom he befriended and meant to give a start in life.  He sent them both to the Athenaeum for several winters as a preparatory business training, and then took them into his office, where they speedily became known as the bright one and the stupid one.  The stupid one was finally dismissed after repeated trials, when to the surprise of the entire establishment, he quickly betook himself into the shops, where he became a wide-awake and valuable workman.  His chagrined benefactor, in telling the story, admits that he himself had fallen a victim to his own business training and his early notion of rising in life.  In reality he had merely followed the lead of most benevolent people who help poor boys.  They test the success of their efforts by the number whom they have taken out of factory work into some other and “higher occupation.”

Quite in line with this commercial ideal are the night schools and institutions of learning most accessible to working people.  First among them is the business college which teaches largely the mechanism of type-writing and book-keeping, and lays all stress upon commerce and methods of distribution.  Commodities are treated as exports and imports, or solely in regard to their commercial value, and not, of course, in relation to their historic development or the manufacturing processes to which they have been subjected.  These schools do not in the least minister to the needs of the actual factory employee, who is in the shop and not in the office.  We assume that all men are searching for “puddings and power,” to use Carlyle’s phrase, and furnish only the schools which help them to those ends.

The business college man, or even the man who goes through an academic course in order to prepare for a profession, comes to look on learning too much as an investment from which he will later reap the benefits in earning money.  He does not connect learning with industrial pursuits, nor does he in the least lighten or illuminate those pursuits for those of his friends who have not risen in life.  “It is as though nets were laid at the entrance to education, in which those who by some means or other escape from the masses bowed down by labor, are inevitably caught and held from substantial service to their fellows.”  The academic teaching which is accessible to workingmen through University Extension lectures and classes at settlements, is usually bookish and remote, and concerning subjects completely divorced from their actual experiences.  The men come to think of learning as something to be added to the end of a hard day’s work, and to be gained at the cost of toilsome mental exertion.  There are, of course, exceptions, but many men who persist in attending classes and lectures year after year find themselves possessed of a mass of inert knowledge which nothing in their experience fuses into availability or realization.