The History Of Education by Ellwood P. Cubberley (epub e reader .txt) 📖

through the years of the past, would have increased the wage-earning capacity of each of these persons to the extent of only ten cents a day, this would have made an increase of wages for the group of $2,500,000 a day, or $750,000,000 a year, with all that this would mean to the wealth and life of the nation.

 

This is a very moderate estimate, and the facts would probably show a difference between the earning power of the vocationally trained and the vocationally untrained of at least twenty-five cents a day. This would indicate a waste of wages, through lack of training, amounting to $6,250,000 every day, or $1,875,000,000 for the year.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 234. SCHOOL ATTENDANCE OF AMERICAN CHILDREN, FOURTEEN

TO TWENTY YEARS or AGE

Based on an estimate made by the United States Bureau of Education in 1907

(Bulletin No. 1, p. 29), and based on conditions then existing, but probably still approximately true. In evening schools all classes were counted—public, private, Y.M.C.A., Y.W.C.A., etc. Public and private day schools, both elementary and secondary, also were counted.]

 

The Commission estimated that a million new young people were required annually by our industries, and that it would need three years of vocational education, beyond the elementary-school age, to prepare them for efficient service. This would require that three million young people of elementary-school age be continually enrolled in schools offering some form of vocational training. This was approximately three times the number of young people then enrolled in all public and private high schools in the United States, and following any kind of a course of study. In addition, the untrained adult workers then in farming and industry also needed some form of adult or extension education to enable them to do more effective work. The Commission further pointed out that there were in the United States, in 1910, 7,220,298 young people between the ages of fourteen and eighteen years, only 1,032,461 of whom were enrolled in a high school of any type, public or private, day or evening (Fig. 234), and few of those enrolled were pursuing studies of a technical type.

 

AMERICAN BEGINNINGS; MEANING OF THE WORK. In 1917 the American Congress made the beginnings of what is destined to develop rapidly into a truly national system of vocational education for the boys and girls of secondary-school age in the United States. This new addition to the systems of public instruction now provided is one which in time will bring returns out of all proportion to its costs. Without it the national prosperity and happiness would be at stake, and the position the United States has attained in the markets of the world could not possibly be maintained (R. 372).

 

This new American legislation is based on the best continental European experience, and is somewhat typical of recent national legislation for similar objects elsewhere. It is to include vocational training for agriculture, the trades and industries, commerce, and home economics. [19]

A certain portion of the money appropriated annually by the national government is to be used for making or co�perating in studies and investigations as to needs and courses in agriculture, home economics, trades, industries, and commerce. The courses must be given in the public schools; must be for those over fourteen years of age and of less than college grade; and must be primarily intended for those who are preparing to enter or who have entered (part-time classes) a trade or a useful industrial pursuit.

 

As nation after nation becomes industrialized, as all except the smallest and poorest nations are bound to become in time, vocational education for its workers in the field, shop, and office will be found to be another state necessity. Only the State can adequately provide this, for only the State can finance or properly organize and integrate the work of so large and so important an undertaking. Though costly, this new extension of state educational effort will be found to be a wise business investment for every industrial and commercial nation. Considered nationally, the workers of any nation not provided with vocational education will find themselves unable to compete with the workers of other nations which do provide such specialized training.

 

IV. SOCIOLOGICAL

 

A NEW ESTIMATE AS TO THE VALUE OF CHILD LIFE. As we saw in chapter XVIII, which described the opportunities for and the kind of schooling developed up to the middle of the eighteenth century, but little of what may be called formal education had been provided up to then for the great mass of children, even in the most progressive nations. We also noted the extreme brutality of the school. Such was the history of childhood, so far as it may be said to have had a history at all, up to the rise of the great humanitarian movement early in the nineteenth century. [20] Neglect, abuse, mutilation, excessive labor, heavy punishments, and often virtual slavery awaited children everywhere up to recent times. The sufferings of childhood at home were added to by others in the school (p. 455) for such as frequented these institutions.

 

After the coming of mills and manufacturing the lot of children became, for a time, worse than before. The demand for cheap labor led to the apprenticing of children to the factories to tend machines, instead of to a master to learn a trade, and there they became virtual slaves and their treatment was most inhuman. [21] Conditions were worse in England than elsewhere, not because the English were more brutal than the French or the Germans, but because the Industrial Revolution began earlier in England and before the rise of humanitarian influences. England was a manufacturing nation decades before France, and longer still before Germany. By the time Germany had changed from an agricultural to a manufacturing nation (after 1871), the new humanitarianism and new economic conditions had placed a new value on child life and child welfare.

 

Since about 1850 an entirely new estimate has come to be placed on the importance of national attention to child welfare, though the beginnings of the change date back much earlier. As we have seen (p. 325), England early began to care for the children of its poor. In the Poor-Relief and Apprenticeship Law of 1601 (R. 174) England organized into law the growing practice of a century (p. 326) and laid the basis for much future work of importance. In this legislation, as we have seen, the foundations of the Massachusetts school law of 1642 were laid. In the Virginia laws of 1643

and 1646 (R. 200 a) and the Massachusetts law of 1660, providing for the apprenticeship of orphans and homeless children, the beginnings of child-welfare work in the American Colonies were made.

 

Many of the Catholic religious orders in Europe had for long cared for and brought up poor and neglected children, and in 1729 the first private orphanage in the new world was established by the Ursulines (p. 346) in New Orleans. The first public orphanage in America was established in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1790; the first in England at Birmingham, in 1817, and in 1824 the New York House of Refuge was founded. The latter was the forerunner of the juvenile reformatory institutions established later by practically all of the American States. These have developed chiefly since 1850. To-day most of the American States and governments in many other lands also provide state homes for orphan and neglected children, where they are clothed, fed, cared for, educated, and trained for some useful employment.

 

CHILD-LABOR LEGISLATION. One of the best evidences of the new nineteenth-century humanitarianism is to be found in the large amount of child-labor legislation which arose, largely after 1850, and which has been particularly prominent since 1900.

 

Under the earlier agricultural conditions and the restricted demand for education for ordinary life needs, child labor was not especially harmful, as most of it was out of doors and under reasonably good health conditions. With the coming of the factory system, the rise of cities and the city congestion of population, and other evils connected with the Industrial Revolution, the whole situation was changed. Humanitarians now began to demand legislation to restrict the evils that had arisen. This demand arose earliest in England, and resulted in the earliest legislation there.

 

The year 1802 is important in the history of child-welfare work for the enactment, by the English Parliament, of the first law to regulate the employment of children in factories. This was known as the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act (R. 373). This Act, though largely ineffectual at the time, ordered important reforms which aroused public opinion and which later bore important fruit. By it the employment of workhouse orphans was limited; it forbade the labor of children under twelve, for more than twelve hours a day; provided that night labor of children should be discontinued, after 1804; ordered that the children so employed must be taught reading and writing and ciphering, be instructed in religion one hour a week, be taken to church every Sunday, and be given one new suit of clothes a year; ordered separate sleeping apartments for the two sexes, and not over two children to a bed; and provided for the registration and inspection of factories. This law represents the beginnings of modern child-labor legislation. It was 1843 before any further child-labor legislation of importance was enacted, and 1878 before a comprehensive child-labor bill was finally passed. In the United States the first laws regulating the employment of children and providing for their school attendance were enacted by Rhode Island in 1840, and Massachusetts in 1842. Factory legislation in other countries has been a product of more recent forces and times.

 

To-day important child-labor legislation has been enacted by all progressive nations, and the leading world nations have taken advanced ground on the question. All recent thinking is opposed to children engaging in productive labor. With the rise of organized labor, and the extension of the suffrage to the laboring man, he has joined the humanitarians in opposition to his children being permitted to labor. From an economic point of view also, all recent studies have shown the unprofitableness of child labor and the large money-value, under present industrial conditions, of a good education. As a result of much agitation and the spread of popular education, it has at last come to be a generally accepted principle (R. 374) that it is better for children and better for society that they should remain in school until they are at least fourteen years of age, and be specially trained for some useful type of work. Shown to be economically unprofitable, and for long morally indefensible, child labor is now rapidly being superseded by suitable education and the vocational training and guidance of youth in all progressive nations.

 

COMPULSORY SCHOOL-ATTENDANCE LEGISLATION. The natural corollary of the taxation of the wealth of the State to educate the children of the State, and the prohibition of children to labor, is the compulsion of children to attend school that they may receive the instruction and training which the State has deemed it wise to tax its citizens to provide.

 

Except in the German States, compulsory education is a relatively recent idea, though in its origins it is a child of the Protestant Reformation theory as to education for salvation. Luther and his followers had stood for the education of all, supported by (R. 156) and enforced by (R. 158) the State. This idea of the education of all to read the Bible took deep root, as we have seen, with both Lutherans and Calvinists. In 1619 the little Duchy of Weimar made the school attendance of all children, six to twelve years of age, compulsory, and the same idea was instituted in Gotha by Duke Ernest (p. 317), in 1642; the same year that the Massachusetts