wer of the
subject to control them, rather than an experience in their power to
master the subject. The industrial school emphasizes the fact that the
administration and disposition of wealth production is no concern of
those versed in the technique of fabrication.
Many educators appreciate the lack of content provided by industrial
school systems as, with weak emphasis, they undertake to embroider the
system with history and aesthetics of textiles or other raw material
which the workers handle, or introduce the story of past processes.
As this furbishing of impoverished industry fails dismally to add
content, it succeeds in emphasizing the actual poverty that exists.
Dr. Stanley Hall makes the suggestion that books on the leading trades
should be written to stimulate the interest and intelligence of the
young who are engaged in industry or preparing to become the wage
earners of the trades. In speaking of "the urgent necessity now of
books on the leading trades addressed to the young," he says;[A] "The
leather industry, particularly boot and shoe manufacture, is perhaps
the most highly specialised of all in the sense that an operator
may work a lifetime in any one of the between three and four score
processes through which a shoe passes and know little of all the rest.
Now the _Shoe Book_ should describe hides and leathers, tanning,--old
and new methods, with a little of the natural history of the animals,
describe the process of taking them, of curing and shipping, each
stage in the factory, designating those processes that require skill
and those that do not, and so on to packing, labeling and shipping,
with descriptions showing the principles of the chief machines and
labor-saving devices, at any rate so far as they are not trade
secrets; it should include a glance at markets, prices, effects of
business advance, depression and strikes, perhaps something about
the hygiene of the foot, about bootblacks and what is done for them,
history of the festivals and organizations from St. Crispin and the
guilds down, tariffs, syndicates, societies, statistics, social
conditions in shoe towns, nationality of operatives,--all these
could be concisely set forth to show the dimensions, the centers of
interest, the social and commercial relations of the business, etc.
What is not yet realized is that all these things could and should be
put down in print and picture, almost as if it were to be issued as a
text-book or a series
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