portant part in New York. The state, however, usually holds an annual teachers' institute in every school commissioner district. The schools are closed during institute week, and attendance is compulsory but compensated. The sections, elementary and advanced, are led by institute conductors and instructors, whom the State Education Department regularly employs. In the opinion of Dr. Draper, the arrangement serves its purpose as well as any system in rural districts that are without regular supervision by professional superintendents.

The state affects non-urban high schools in other ways than thru conditions of state aid, thru supervision, and thru encouragement and suggestion. The annual reports of the New York State Education Department are distributed to all schools belonging to the University of the State of New York; and the reports and other printed material of the Massachusetts Board of Education are sent to every town. New York State licenses secondary teachers. The Massachusetts State Board of Education has no compulsory authority over the certification of teachers, but school committees may accept normal school diplomas and the teachers' certificates granted by the state board. Both states do something in the way of training secondary teachers. The New York Commissioner of Education is the final judicial authority in school matters. The state educational officials of Massachusetts have no legal power to decide appeals or to settle disputes between school officials; but the secretary or agents are often asked to arbitrate in school questions. The Board of Education examines union superintendents and thus affects high schools indirectly. Finally, the board is the professional adviser of the legislature-important, since central control is largely legislative.

No definite statement as to which state excels in its nonurban high schools can be made simply on the basis of the relation of the state to rural secondary education. Points of strength and weakness can, however, be indicated. The Regents' examinations tend to brace up inferior secondary schools; and under the system the graduate of an obscure high school is on a par with the graduate of a large city high school when

he seeks admission to a distant college. On the other hand, much of the work is reduced to mere preparation for examinations, which are generally regarded as pernicious when used as the chief test of ability and achievement. New York has a close and effective control over all grades of public and private secondary schools; but there is considerable opposition in some quarters to the extreme centralization of the New York educational system. The Massachusetts system is much the more democratic and much closer to the people. This responsiveness to the public pulse has many advantages; but it may be an element of weakness in a community with little wealth and with low educational ideals. Massachusetts holds all fouryear high schools up to a certain standard, but seems to furnish no guarantee for the efficiency of other secondary schools.

Secondary education in New York and Massachusetts has much of significance for other states. The practise of consolidating two or more districts or towns that are individually too weak to support a high school is to be commended. In some states the state superintendent and board of education are little more than collectors of statistics and dispensers of money. In Massachusetts and New York the state educational authorities have a powerful influence for good upon all nonurban high schools. They not only hold backward communities up to definite required standards, but lead the way in educational progress.

YREKA, CAL.

ALDEN H. ABBOTT

IV

PRACTICAL EDUCATION FOR INDUSTRIAL WORKERS

Education adapted to meet the daily needs of the industrial worker is coming to be as important as the education of the child.

We should bear in mind that the average length of a boy's school life until recently was only about four years, and that was before he was 12 years of age. Then again we are not sure that he received this amount of education, as no systematic method was adopted till recently to keep the boy at school. Consequently these boys who are now the industrial workers have received little, if any, more education than that obtained during these four years.

With the development of the industries, which has been very rapid, have appeared new demands for more men, each with larger ideas, greater capacity, and more training. At one time the shop and mill was a training school for workers, but it is no longer so. The old apprenticeship system is dead, and under the specialized condition of modern industries, a worker knows but one part of the numerous industrial operations. He works day by day at the same kind of work and under precisely the same condition,-the operation and the machine usually requiring little thought and ingenuity. The average worker knows nothing about the machine itself or the operations that precede and follow his own, and very little about the raw materials that are used. Under such routine work and circumstances the industrial worker loses the habit of thinking, since no demand is made on him for thought. As a result of having had no systematic demand for his earlier education, by the time the worker enters manhood, or is ready to be promoted to a higher position, he is likely to forget what schooling he has had before the age of 12 or 14, and is apt to

be intellectually less efficient than when he left school. Hence, it is not surprizing that the average industrial worker in this country has neither the power to advance industrially, nor to compete with the workers of Great Britain and the Continent. European countries are far in advance of America along the lines of industrial training. Every European industrial city of any size has a technical school which the operative may attend and receive technical instruction and shop practise in his trade. The result is that the most successful workers, foremen, and overseers of our industries are foreign-born men, educated in these schools; while the American-born workers are obliged to remain in the lowest-paid positions.

Recent investigations show that the average German mechanic is the best trained workman in the world, not because he is more intelligent, but because an important part of his schooling prepares him specifically for his trade. An employer of labor and student of industrial life in America recently declared before the National Education Association that already 50 per cent. of America's skilled mechanics are born and trained in foreign countries. Later investigations show that 98 per cent. of the foremen, bosses, etc., in the manufactories of New York State were educated across the water.

The heart of Germany's system of industrial education is the continuation school, and this is not an outside movement grafted to the school system in an overzealous endeavor to educate the masses, as some educators would have us believe, but has a direct connection with the common school on one hand, and with industrial activities on the other.

Germany's continuation schools are chiefly of two types: those fitting for the requirements of commercial life, and those directly planned to meet the needs of shops, the factories, the local industries, and the trades. The industrial and commercial schools differ from our industrial and commercial schools in that their course in metal and wood shop practise, textile work, etc., can not be taken alone. There must be added. for nearly or quite one-half the course technical processes, practises, and mathematics of that branch. Similarly the business processes, including such subjects as production, markets,

distribution, consumption of the product, price fluctuations, etc., to all their commercial courses. The object of all this is to develop industrial and commercial intelligence rather than create merely mechanical skill.

In Massachusetts while more than 80 per cent. of the boys 15 years of age have dropt out of school entirely, and are receiving no instruction in the theory or practise of their trade, in Germany the practical schooling of boys 14 to 16 years of age practically begins and often continues two, three, or more years, and their attendance at particular kinds of industrial schools suited to the occupations they have selected, is rigidly required. In Berlin, the model city of Germany in matters of education, 55 per cent. of the boys between 14 and 18 attend such schools. Yet in America, with all its magnificent systems of public schools, only one-third of one per cent. of all the boys and young men between 15 and 24 years of age are receiving any definite instruction in the sciences and arts which bear directly on their occupations.

There is accordingly a large demand growing out of everyday needs for educational opportunities not afforded by our existing public school system,-a demand made by those deficient in early education who are desirous of making up this deficiency, and by those who seek to supplement their acquired skill with technical training that will lead to advancement and increased earning power.

There is no question that the most ambitious workers in every industry will take advantage thru evening or day study of every opportunity for securing a practical education. The success of the classes of the Y. M. C. A., the textile schools, and the correspondence schools bear witness to this statement. In the city of Lawrence, before the industrial school opened, over 140 workers traveled 18 miles to attend. an evening textile school; going directly from the mill and deferring their evening meal till they returned home at midnight. In the same city over 2,000 workers are enrolled in the correspondence school; paying from forty dollars to one hundred dollars for a course. The following statement shows how unsuccessful and difficult instruction by correspondence is: The