I have tried to follow up the evolution of our present industrial
society on several parallel lines: how industry itself has developed,
how immigration affects the labor problem as regards the woman worker,
and the relation of women to the vocations in the modern world. Let us
now glance at our educational systems and see how they fit in to the
needs of the workers, especially of the working-women. For our present
purpose I will not touch on education as we find it in our most
backward states, but rather as it is in the most advanced, since it
is from improvement in these that we may expect to produce the best
results for the whole nation.
Free and compulsory public education was established to supply
literary and cultural training at a time when children still enjoyed
opportunities of learning in the home, and later in small shops
something of the trades they were to practice when grown-up. I know
of a master plumber, who twenty years ago, as a child of eleven, made
friends with the blacksmith and the tinsmith in the little village
where he lived, and taught himself the elements of his trade at the
blacksmith's anvil and with the tinsmith's tools.
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