Almost every large city has two or three polytechnic institutions founded by rich men, anxious to help “poor boys.”  These have been captured by conventional educators for the purpose of fitting young men for the colleges and universities.  They have compromised by merely adding to the usual academic course manual work, applied mathematics, mechanical drawing and engineering.  Two schools in Chicago, plainly founded for the sons of workingmen, afford an illustration of this tendency and result.  On the other hand, so far as schools of this type have been captured by commercialism, they turn out trained engineers, professional chemists, and electricians.  They are polytechnics of a high order, but do not even pretend to admit the workingman with his meagre intellectual equipment.  They graduate machine builders, but not educated machine tenders.  Even the textile schools are largely seized by young men who expect to be superintendents of factories, designers, or manufacturers themselves, and the textile worker who actually “holds the thread” is seldom seen in them; indeed, in one of the largest schools women are not allowed, in spite of the fact that spinning and weaving have traditionally been woman’s work, and that thousands of women are at present employed in the textile mills.

It is much easier to go over the old paths of education with “manual training” thrown in, as it were; it is much simpler to appeal to the old ambitions of “getting on in life,” or of “preparing for a profession,” or “for a commercial career,” than to work out new methods on democratic lines.  These schools gradually drop back into the conventional courses, modified in some slight degree, while the adaptation to workingmen’s needs is never made, nor, indeed, vigorously attempted.  In the meantime, the manufacturers continually protest that engineers, especially trained for devising machines, are not satisfactory.  Three generations of workers have invented, but we are told that invention no longer goes on in the workshop, even when it is artificially stimulated by the offer of prizes, and that the inventions of the last quarter of the nineteenth century have by no means fulfilled the promise of the earlier three-quarters.

Every foreman in a large factory has had experience with two classes of men:  first with those who become rigid and tolerate no change in their work, partly because they make more money “working by the piece,” when they stick to that work which they have learned to do rapidly, and partly because the entire muscular and nervous system has become by daily use adapted to particular motions and resents change.  Secondly, there are the men who float in and out of the factory, in a constantly changing stream.  They “quit work” for the slightest reason or none at all, and never become skilled at anything.  Some of them are men of low intelligence, but many of them are merely too nervous and restless, too impatient, too easily “driven to drink,” to be of any use in a modern factory.  They are the men for whom the demanded adaptation is impossible.