If educators could go upon a voyage of discovery into that army of boys and girls who enter industry each year, what values might they not discover; what treasures might they not conserve and develop if they would direct the play instinct into the art impulse and utilize that power of variation which industry so sadly needs.  No force will be sufficiently powerful and widespread to redeem industry from its mechanism and materialism save the freed power in every single individual.

In order to do this, however, we must go back a little over the educational road to a training of the child’s imagination, as well as to his careful equipment with a technique.  A little child makes a very tottering house of cardboard and calls it a castle.  The important feature there lies in the fact that he has expressed a castle, and it is not for his teacher to draw undue attention to the fact that the corners are not well put together, but rather to listen to and to direct the story which centers about this effort at creative expression.  A little later, however, it is clearly the business of the teacher to call attention to the quality of the dovetailing in which the boy at the manual training bench is engaged, for there is no value in dovetailing a box unless it is accurately done.  At one point the child’s imagination is to be emphasized, and at another point his technique is important—­and he will need both in the industrial life ahead of him.

There is no doubt that there is a third period, when the boy is not interested in the making of a castle, or a box, or anything else, unless it appears to him to bear a direct relation to the future; unless it has something to do with earning a living.  At this later moment he is chiefly anxious to play the part of a man and to take his place in the world.  The fact that a boy at fourteen wants to go out and earn his living makes that the moment when he should be educated with reference to that interest, and the records of many high schools show that if he is not thus educated, he bluntly refuses to be educated at all.  The forces pulling him to “work” are not only the overmastering desire to earn money and be a man, but, if the family purse is small and empty, include also his family loyalty and affection, and over against them, we at present place nothing but a vague belief on the part of his family and himself that education is a desirable thing and may eventually help him “on in the world.”  It is of course difficult to adapt education to this need; it means that education must be planned so seriously and definitely for those two years between fourteen and sixteen that it will be actual trade training so far as it goes, with attention given to the condition under which money will be actually paid for industrial skill; but at the same time, that the implications, the connections, the relations to the industrial world, will be made clear.  A man who makes, year after year, but one small wheel in a modern watch factory,