susceptibility,
plasticity, eagerness, pervaded by the instinct to try and plan in
many different directions."[A]

[Footnote A: Stanley Hall--Education Problems, pp. 544-545.]

Children of this adolescent time would respond more readily to school
instruction, related to the adult activities which held their
interest and connected in some way with their own conception of their
functioning in the adult world. Courses of study in processes of
industry and practice in the technique of those processes would have
actual bearing on the environment of which they were eager to be a
part.

But instruction in mechanical processes and practice in technique of
manufacture are the husks of industry when divorced from the planning,
the management, the examination of problems, the determination of the
value of goods in their use and in their place in the market, the
division of labor throughout an enterprise, the relation of all
persons involved to each other and to the product. The schools with
their industrial education courses do not undertake to supply their
young people with an opportunity to plan; they are true reflections of
factory existence as they eliminate all the adventure of industry, the
opportunity for experiment and discovery; they do not satisfy the high
impulse of young people to be of use, to be a part of the world of
work. The spirit of the schools is preparation for something to come;
the spirit of the children is in the present, and the present pressing
impulse of adolescence is to share adult responsibilities.

The impulse of youth to take its place in adult life is exploited by
industry and repressed or perverted by a system of education which
fits the children into a system of industry without giving them the
insight and power to effect adjustments. The actual job in a trade has
satisfying features which the school lacks. It pays wages. That fact
for eager children is estimated beyond its purchasing power. For
them it is an acknowledgment, a very real one, that they have been
admitted, are wanted in the big world where they are impelled by their
psychic needs, to enter. It places them more nearly on an equality
with the older members of their family and entitles them to
consideration which was not given them as dependent children. They
learn shortly of how little account they are to the boss employer but
they are establishing all the time a new basis of contact and a new
place in their personal relations;