Grant County herald. [volume] (Lancaster, Wis.) 1850-1968, 1886-05-06
For THE HERALD.
Shall Mechanical Training be Given in

productive branches of industry, and
that, by occupying his earlier years and
giving him distaste for manual labor,
to some extent actually units him for
occupations which the vast majority of
men must follow, has not failed to raise
up many advocates of great change
in the system of education in our
schools. They want education in our
schools to be made practical" A
well-known writer in the Forum says:
LACK of manual training is the curse
of our time. 1t breeds tramps. Let
the afternoon sessions of our public
schools be devoted to teaching children
the rudiments of a trade" The
Chicago Tribune says edtorially:
The educated man cannot produce what he
wants because he has not been taught in that
direction. His brain has been educated and his
intelligence enlarged but his eye and his hand
have not been taught at all. He has been edu-
Gated to think, to read, to imagine but not to do
The great majority OF college graduates on the
day after graduation stand idly and vacantly on
the threshold of the world not knowing which
way to turn. For what little they can do there
is no demand. They drift about seeking places
as clerks for Eiddlemen only to find those places
crowded and hundreds of applicants waiting for
every vacancy. lis 1t any wonder then, that our
system OF modern education, which teaches the
intellect alone and leaves the hand in Ignorance
the working, executing organ untutored-should
produce unhappiness and discontentg Until
some radical change is made this evil win not
only continue but it will increase as new labor
methods are devised and improved machinery il
invented. The remedy for this evil does not lie
In the sharpening OF the brain but in the teach
ing OF the hand When the strong, sklllful hand
goes with the sharp brain and educated intelli-
gence individual happiness and social content
ment VIII be correspondingly increased
1t seems to me that the trouble lies
in greatly misconceiving the object, APP
plication and scope of that scholastic
education to give which public schools
and private colleges are instituted. To
be sure, to the inventor in the mechanic
arts much of the education of the
schools is prime necessity. but once
he has marked out the way to the hand
worker who follows, scholastic educa-
ton, even in its rudiments, is not a
necessity to the latter--it is at best
convenience and to great extent
mere luxury. Reading, writing and
arithmetic are considered indispensable
to all, and especially to business
men," and the first Is considered a nec-
essary steppingstone to the last But
we have all known men who were sue
cessful in their business and accumu-
lated considerable property, skiIlful
workers and shrewd bargainers, but who
never learned to read, with all that this
implies, and who have yet learned and
daily apply all the principles of arith-
metic necessary to their business. But
granting that tolerable knowledge of
these three branches is necessary to
the ordinary handworker. the higher
branches are not. If one is TO be a
civil engineer, surveyor. architect or
teacher, knowledge of the higher
mathematics is necessity; knowledge
of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, history and
rhetoric may be necessity to the col
lege professor, the clergyman or the
statesman, but TO the handworker IN
any department, such knowledge is as
exclusively luxury as are gold watch
es and Brussels carpets The man who
has spent some of the best years of his
life and all the money he could get to
obtain college education, expecting
to make his future living by manual
labor, is in exactly the same situation,
as far as advantages for making that
living are concerned, rs if he had spent
all that money and all those years in
opera tickets and European sight
seeing.
But in republic the workers are not
merely so many strivers for their daily
bread. They are citizens, sovereign
citizens. In that capacity they must be
to some extent, whether for good or ill.
statesmen; and to perform this duty
even toerably needs knowledge. in
formation and sharpened intelligence.
1t is on this ground alone that the state
rightfully assumes the education of it's
future citizens not that they may ac-
cumulate more property, but that they
may be better citizens The problem
is not how TO produce more wealth, but
how more equitably to distribute il;
how not to produce scores of million
aires and millions of paupers palaces
crowded with luxury and wealth, and
novels bare with poverty and want
surfeited idlcrs in silks and furs and
starving sewingwomen shivering in
rags. And this great, deep problem,
which is pressing for solution harder
each year as our population increases
and the free bounties of nature in our
country are being all appropriated, can
be solved only by the education of the
whole people to high grade of inteli-
gence, for the educated and fortunate
few are not going to solve it and give
the benefit of the solution to the many.
Philanthropists have lamentcd that
our system of our school education had
a tendency to impart a contempt for
manual labor and those who perform it
and an exaggerated respect for the
"learned professions and the men
who occupy them, and incidentally for
all men who do not depend upon
manual labor for living. But this
view seems to me to be superficial
1t is not education Gin the ordinary
sense of the term) which teaches that
manual labor is degrading, and en-
Payments which do not require manu-
al labor (or no employment at alb are
honorable. 1t is not education but ed
Gators and society in general who teach
this evil doctrine. Among the many
other evils which Americans have in
herited from rObber-ruled and class
ridden Europe-evils from which the
Declaration of Independence and the
Revolution did not free us-is the vic
ious idea which permeates all society
Tin spite of the cheap clap-trap of pub
lie speakers and writers about "the
dignity of labor') first, that a gen
tleman" is a person who lives well