ht have accused us
not only of wasting, but of misusing and of trampling under foot the
first tender instincts and impulses which are the source of all charm
and beauty and art, because we fail to realize that by premature
factory work, for which the youth is unprepared, society perpetually
extinguishes that variety and promise, that bloom of life, which is
the unique possession of the young. He might have told us that our
cities would continue to be traditionally cramped and dreary until we
comprehend that youth alone has the power to bring to reality the
vision of the "Coming City of Mankind, full of life, full of the
spirit of creation."

A few educational experiments are carried on in Cincinnati, in Boston
and in Chicago, in which the leaders of education and industry unite
in a common aim and purpose. A few more are carried on by trade
unionists, who in at least two of the trades are anxious to give to
their apprentices and journeymen the wider culture afforded by the
"capitalistic trade schools" which they suspect of preparing
strike-breakers; still a few other schools have been founded by public
spirited citizens to whom the situation has become unendurable, and
one or two more such experiments are attached to the public school
system itself. All of these schools are still blundering in method and
unsatisfactory in their results, but a certain trade school for
girls, in New York, which is preparing young girls of fourteen for the
sewing trade, already so overcrowded and subdivided that there remains
very little education for the worker, is conquering this difficult
industrial situation by equipping each apprentice with "the informing
mind." If a child goes into a sewing factory with a knowledge of the
work she is doing in relation to the finished product; if she is
informed concerning the material she is manipulating and the processes
to which it is subjected; if she understands the design she is
elaborating in its historic relation to art and decoration, her daily
life is lifted from drudgery to one of self-conscious activity, and
her pleasure and intelligence is registered in her product.

I remember a little colored girl in this New York school who was
drawing for the pattern she was about to embroider, a carefully
elaborated acanthus leaf. Upon my inquiry as to the design, she
replied: "It is what the Egyptians used to put on everything, because
they saw it so much growing in the Nile; and then the Greeks c