in the adaptation of the German scheme
of education. He divides trades into two classes, which he calls
energizing and enervating. In those which are energizing there is an
element of individual expression and opportunity for self-direction.
The enervating trades are wholly automatic, and induce a lethargic
state of mind and body. His comment on the situation is: "We are
rapidly dividing mankind into a staff of mental workers and an army of
purely physical workers. The physical workers are becoming more and
more lethargic. The work itself is not character building; on the
contrary, it is repressive and when self-expression comes, it is
hardly energizing mentally. The real menace lies in the fact that in a
self-governing industrial community the minds of the majority are in
danger of becoming less capable of sound and serious thought because
of lack of continuous constructive exercise in earning a livelihood."

Professor Schneider undertakes to enrich this barren soil by
alternating the time of pupils between the shop or store and the
school, thus cooerdinating the worker's experience, with the assistance
of schoolmasters who go into the shops and follow the processes the
pupils are engaged in and who see that the experience of the week in
the shop is amplified and supplemented in the school. The arrangement
also provides that the pupils shall be taken through the various shop
processes in the course of apprenticeship. The experience while it
lasts may have educational value for the pupil. But in spite of what
it may or may not hold, for the general run of pupils it leads up a
blind alley because the apprenticeship does not fulfill the promise
which apprenticeship supposedly holds out. That is, the pupil, when he
becomes a worker, will be thrown back into some factory groove where
his experience as an apprentice cannot be used, where he is closed
off from the chance to develop and use the knowledge or training he
received. If, as Dean Schneider asserts, "we are rapidly dividing
mankind into a staff of mental workers and an army of purely physical
workers," and if "we cannot reverse our present economic order of
things," then any apprenticeship, even this brave effort of his, is a
pseudo-apprenticeship and even in the most energizing of the trades
leads the pupil nowhere in particular. Even the skilled trade of
locomotive engineering, which Dean Schneider classes as the most
highly energized of trades, does not escape. A