The History of Education Part 81

Wherever the term "vocational education" is used in this _Report_, it will mean, unless otherwise explained, that form of education whose controlling purpose is to give training of a secondary grade to persons over fourteen years of age, for increased efficiency in useful employment in the trades and industries, in agriculture, in commerce and commercial pursuits, and in callings based upon a knowledge of home economics. The occupations included under these are almost endless in number and variety.

THE NEED FOR VOCATIONAL EDUCATION. Used in this sense vocational education is an application of technical knowledge, worked out in the higher schools, to the ordinary vocations of a modern industrial world. As such it is a product of the Industrial Revolution and the breakdown of the age- old system of apprenticeship training, [13] and represents another of the important recent extensions of educational advantages to the ma.s.ses of the people who labor with their hands to earn their daily bread.

Besides further democratizing education by extending its advantages to those who work in the shop and the office and on the farm, vocational education tends to correct many of the evils of modern industrial life. It puts the worker in possession of a great body of scientific knowledge relating to his work which shops and offices cannot give, and it keeps him, for several years after he becomes a wage earner and at a very impressionable period of his life, under the directing care of the school.

It thus tends "to counteract the specialization and routine of the workshop, which wears out his body before nature has completed its development in form and power, blunts the intelligence which the school had tried to awaken, shrivels up his heart and imagination, and destroys his spirit of work."

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION IN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES. For almost half a century the leading nations of western Europe, in an effort to readjust their age-old apprenticeship system of training to modern conditions of manufacture, and to develop new national prestige and strength, have given careful attention to the education of such of their children as were destined for the vocations of the industrial world. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and France have been leaders, with Germany most prominent of all. [14] No small part of the great progress made by that country in securing world-wide trade, [15] before the World War, was due to the extensive and thorough system of vocational education worked out for German youths (R. 371). In commercial education, too, the Germans, up to 1914, led the world. Even more, they were the only great national group which had done much to develop commercial training. Next to Germany probably came the United States. The marked economic progress of Switzerland during the past quarter-century has likewise been due in large part to that type of education which would enable her, by skillful artisanship, to make the most of her very limited resources France has profited greatly, during the past half-century also, from vocational education along the lines of agriculture and industrial art. In Denmark, agricultural education has remade the nation (R. 370), since the days of its humiliation and spoliation at the hands of Prussia. England, though keenly sensitive to German trade compet.i.tion, made only very moderate efforts in the direction of vocational education until Germany plunged the world in war in an effort more quickly to dominate commercially. Now, in the Fisher Education Act of 1918 (p. 649), England has $t last laid foundations for a great national system of vocational education. j.a.pan, also, recently laid large plans for a national system of vocational training.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 233. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TRADES IN MODERN INDUSTRY Under the old conditions of apprenticeship a boy learned all the processes and became a tailor. To-day, in a thoroughly organized clothing factory, thirty-nine different persons perform different specialized operations in the manufacture of a coat.]

In the United States but little attention was given to educating young people for the vocations of life until about 1905-10, though modern manufacturing conditions had before this largely destroyed the old apprenticeship type of training. Endowed with enormous natural resources; not being pressed for the means of subsistence by a rapidly expanding population on a limited land area; able to draw on Europe for both cheap manual labor and technically educated workers; largely isolated and self- sufficient as a nation; lacking a merchant marine; not being thrown into severe compet.i.tion for international trade; and able to sell its products [16] to nations anxious to buy them and willing to come for them in their own ships; the people of the United States did not, up to recently, feel any particular need for anything other than a good common-school education or a general high-school education for their workers. The commercial course in the high school, the manual-training schools and courses, and some instruction in drawing and creative art were felt to be about all that it was necessary to provide.

THE NATIONAL COMMISSION ON VOCATIONAL EDUCATION. Largely since 1910, due in part to expanding world commerce and increasing compet.i.tion in world trade; in part to a national realization that the battles of the future are to be largely commercial battles; and in part to the dawning upon the American people of the conception, first thought out and put into practice by Imperial Germany (R. 371), that that nation will triumph in foreign trade, with all that such triumph means to-day in terms of the happiness and welfare of its citizenship (R. 372), which puts the greatest amount of skill and brains into what it produces and sells.

After a number of sporadic efforts in different parts of the country, [17]

and the introduction of a number of bills into Congress which failed to secure pa.s.sage, the favorite English plan was followed and a Presidential Commission was appointed (1913) to inquire into the matter, and to report on the desirability and feasibility of some form of national aid to stimulate the development of vocational education. The Commission made its report in 1914, and submitted a plan for gradually increasing national aid to the States to a.s.sist them in developing and maintaining what will virtually become a national system of agricultural, trade, commercial, and home-economics education.

THE COMMISSION'S FINDINGS. The Commission found that there were, in 1910, in round numbers, 12,500,000 persons engaged in agriculture in the United States, of whom not over one per cent had had any adequate preparation for farming; and that there were 14,250,000 persons engaged in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits, not one per cent of whom had had any opportunity for adequate training. [18] In the whole United States there were fewer trade schools, of all kinds, than existed in the little German kingdom of Bavaria, a State about the size of South Carolina; while the one Bavarian city of Munich, a city about the size of Pittsburgh, had more trade schools than were to be found in all the larger cities of the United States, put together. The Commission further found that there were 25,000,000 persons in the nation, eighteen years of age or over, engaged in farming, mining, manufacturing, and mechanical pursuits, and in trade and transportation, and of these the _Report_ said:

If we a.s.sume that a system of vocational education, pursued through the years of the past, would have increased the wage-earning capacity of each of these persons to the extent of only ten cents a day, this would have made an increase of wages for the group of $2,500,000 a day, or $750,000,000 a year, with all that this would mean to the wealth and life of the nation.

This is a very moderate estimate, and the facts would probably show a difference between the earning power of the vocationally trained and the vocationally untrained of at least twenty-five cents a day. This would indicate a waste of wages, through lack of training, amounting to $6,250,000 every day, or $1,875,000,000 for the year.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 234. SCHOOL ATTENDANCE OF AMERICAN CHILDREN, FOURTEEN TO TWENTY YEARS or AGE Based on an estimate made by the United States Bureau of Education in 1907 (Bulletin No. 1, p. 29), and based on conditions then existing, but probably still approximately true. In evening schools all cla.s.ses were counted--public, private, Y.M.C.A., Y.W.C.A., etc. Public and private day schools, both elementary and secondary, also were counted.]

The Commission estimated that a million new young people were required annually by our industries, and that it would need three years of vocational education, beyond the elementary-school age, to prepare them for efficient service. This would require that three million young people of elementary-school age be continually enrolled in schools offering some form of vocational training. This was approximately three times the number of young people then enrolled in all public and private high schools in the United States, and following any kind of a course of study. In addition, the untrained adult workers then in farming and industry also needed some form of adult or extension education to enable them to do more effective work. The Commission further pointed out that there were in the United States, in 1910, 7,220,298 young people between the ages of fourteen and eighteen years, only 1,032,461 of whom were enrolled in a high school of any type, public or private, day or evening (Fig. 234), and few of those enrolled were pursuing studies of a technical type.

AMERICAN BEGINNINGS; MEANING OF THE WORK. In 1917 the American Congress made the beginnings of what is destined to develop rapidly into a truly national system of vocational education for the boys and girls of secondary-school age in the United States. This new addition to the systems of public instruction now provided is one which in time will bring returns out of all proportion to its costs. Without it the national prosperity and happiness would be at stake, and the position the United States has attained in the markets of the world could not possibly be maintained (R. 372).

This new American legislation is based on the best continental European experience, and is somewhat typical of recent national legislation for similar objects elsewhere. It is to include vocational training for agriculture, the trades and industries, commerce, and home economics. [19]

A certain portion of the money appropriated annually by the national government is to be used for making or cooperating in studies and investigations as to needs and courses in agriculture, home economics, trades, industries, and commerce. The courses must be given in the public schools; must be for those over fourteen years of age and of less than college grade; and must be primarily intended for those who are preparing to enter or who have entered (part-time cla.s.ses) a trade or a useful industrial pursuit.

As nation after nation becomes industrialized, as all except the smallest and poorest nations are bound to become in time, vocational education for its workers in the field, shop, and office will be found to be another state necessity. Only the State can adequately provide this, for only the State can finance or properly organize and integrate the work of so large and so important an undertaking. Though costly, this new extension of state educational effort will be found to be a wise business investment for every industrial and commercial nation. Considered nationally, the workers of any nation not provided with vocational education will find themselves unable to compete with the workers of other nations which do provide such specialized training.

IV. SOCIOLOGICAL

A NEW ESTIMATE AS TO THE VALUE OF CHILD LIFE. As we saw in chapter XVIII, which described the opportunities for and the kind of schooling developed up to the middle of the eighteenth century, but little of what may be called formal education had been provided up to then for the great ma.s.s of children, even in the most progressive nations. We also noted the extreme brutality of the school. Such was the history of childhood, so far as it may be said to have had a history at all, up to the rise of the great humanitarian movement early in the nineteenth century. [20] Neglect, abuse, mutilation, excessive labor, heavy punishments, and often virtual slavery awaited children everywhere up to recent times. The sufferings of childhood at home were added to by others in the school (p. 455) for such as frequented these inst.i.tutions.

After the coming of mills and manufacturing the lot of children became, for a time, worse than before. The demand for cheap labor led to the apprenticing of children to the factories to tend machines, instead of to a master to learn a trade, and there they became virtual slaves and their treatment was most inhuman. [21] Conditions were worse in England than elsewhere, not because the English were more brutal than the French or the Germans, but because the Industrial Revolution began earlier in England and before the rise of humanitarian influences. England was a manufacturing nation decades before France, and longer still before Germany. By the time Germany had changed from an agricultural to a manufacturing nation (after 1871), the new humanitarianism and new economic conditions had placed a new value on child life and child welfare.

Since about 1850 an entirely new estimate has come to be placed on the importance of national attention to child welfare, though the beginnings of the change date back much earlier. As we have seen (p. 325), England early began to care for the children of its poor. In the Poor-Relief and Apprenticeship Law of 1601 (R. 174) England organized into law the growing practice of a century (p. 326) and laid the basis for much future work of importance. In this legislation, as we have seen, the foundations of the Ma.s.sachusetts school law of 1642 were laid. In the Virginia laws of 1643 and 1646 (R. 200 a) and the Ma.s.sachusetts law of 1660, providing for the apprenticeship of orphans and homeless children, the beginnings of child- welfare work in the American Colonies were made.

Many of the Catholic religious orders in Europe had for long cared for and brought up poor and neglected children, and in 1729 the first private orphanage in the new world was established by the Ursulines (p. 346) in New Orleans. The first public orphanage in America was established in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1790; the first in England at Birmingham, in 1817, and in 1824 the New York House of Refuge was founded. The latter was the forerunner of the juvenile reformatory inst.i.tutions established later by practically all of the American States. These have developed chiefly since 1850. To-day most of the American States and governments in many other lands also provide state homes for orphan and neglected children, where they are clothed, fed, cared for, educated, and trained for some useful employment.

CHILD-LABOR LEGISLATION. One of the best evidences of the new nineteenth- century humanitarianism is to be found in the large amount of child-labor legislation which arose, largely after 1850, and which has been particularly prominent since 1900.

Under the earlier agricultural conditions and the restricted demand for education for ordinary life needs, child labor was not especially harmful, as most of it was out of doors and under reasonably good health conditions. With the coming of the factory system, the rise of cities and the city congestion of population, and other evils connected with the Industrial Revolution, the whole situation was changed. Humanitarians now began to demand legislation to restrict the evils that had arisen. This demand arose earliest in England, and resulted in the earliest legislation there.

The year 1802 is important in the history of child-welfare work for the enactment, by the English Parliament, of the first law to regulate the employment of children in factories. This was known as the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act (R. 373). This Act, though largely ineffectual at the time, ordered important reforms which aroused public opinion and which later bore important fruit. By it the employment of work-house orphans was limited; it forbade the labor of children under twelve, for more than twelve hours a day; provided that night labor of children should be discontinued, after 1804; ordered that the children so employed must be taught reading and writing and ciphering, be instructed in religion one hour a week, be taken to church every Sunday, and be given one new suit of clothes a year; ordered separate sleeping apartments for the two s.e.xes, and not over two children to a bed; and provided for the registration and inspection of factories. This law represents the beginnings of modern child-labor legislation. It was 1843 before any further child-labor legislation of importance was enacted, and 1878 before a comprehensive child-labor bill was finally pa.s.sed. In the United States the first laws regulating the employment of children and providing for their school attendance were enacted by Rhode Island in 1840, and Ma.s.sachusetts in 1842. Factory legislation in other countries has been a product of more recent forces and times.

To-day important child-labor legislation has been enacted by all progressive nations, and the leading world nations have taken advanced ground on the question. All recent thinking is opposed to children engaging in productive labor. With the rise of organized labor, and the extension of the suffrage to the laboring man, he has joined the humanitarians in opposition to his children being permitted to labor. From an economic point of view also, all recent studies have shown the unprofitableness of child labor and the large money-value, under present industrial conditions, of a good education. As a result of much agitation and the spread of popular education, it has at last come to be a generally accepted principle (R. 374) that it is better for children and better for society that they should remain in school until they are at least fourteen years of age, and be specially trained for some useful type of work. Shown to be economically unprofitable, and for long morally indefensible, child labor is now rapidly being superseded by suitable education and the vocational training and guidance of youth in all progressive nations.

COMPULSORY SCHOOL-ATTENDANCE LEGISLATION. The natural corollary of the taxation of the wealth of the State to educate the children of the State, and the prohibition of children to labor, is the compulsion of children to attend school that they may receive the instruction and training which the State has deemed it wise to tax its citizens to provide.

Except in the German States, compulsory education is a relatively recent idea, though in its origins it is a child of the Protestant Reformation theory as to education for salvation. Luther and his followers had stood for the education of all, supported by (R. 156) and enforced by (R. 158) the State. This idea of the education of all to read the Bible took deep root, as we have seen, with both Lutherans and Calvinists. In 1619 the little Duchy of Weimar made the school attendance of all children, six to twelve years of age, compulsory, and the same idea was inst.i.tuted in Gotha by Duke Ernest (p. 317), in 1642; the same year that the Ma.s.sachusetts General Court ordered the Selectmen of the towns to ascertain if parents and the masters of apprentices (R. 190) were training their children "in learning and labor" and "to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of the country." This latter law is remarkable in that, for the first time in the English-speaking world, a legislative body representing the State ordered that all children should be taught to read.

Five years later (1647) the Ma.s.sachusetts Court ordered the establishment of schools (R. 191) better to enforce the compulsion, and thus laid the foundations upon which the American public-school systems have since been built. In Holland, the Synod of Dort (1618) had tried to inst.i.tute the idea of compulsory education (R. 176), and in 1646 the Scotch Parliament had ordered the compulsory establishment of schools (R. 179).

In German lands the compulsory-attendance idea took deep root, and in consequence the Germans were the first important modern nation to enforce, thoroughly, the education of all. In 1717 King Frederick William I issued (p. 555) the first compulsory-education law for Prussia, ordering that "hereafter wherever there are schools in the place the parents shall be obliged, under severe penalties, to send their children to school,...

daily in winter, but in summer at least twice a week." He further ordered that the fees for the poor were to be paid "from the community's funds."

Finally Frederick the Great organized the earlier procedure into comprehensive codes, and made (1763, R. 274, Section 10; 1765, R. 275 d) detailed provisions relating to the compulsion to attend the schools. In the Code of 1794 (p. 565) the final legislative step was taken when it was ordered that "the instruction in school must be continued until the child is found to possess the knowledge necessary to every rational being." By the middle of the eighteenth century the basis was clearly laid in Prussia for that enforcement of the compulsion to attend schools which, by the middle of the nineteenth century, had become such a notable characteristic of all German education. The same compulsory idea early took deep root among the Scandinavian peoples. In consequence the lowest illiteracy in Europe, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was to be found (see map, p. 714) among the Finns, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, and Germans.

The compulsory-attendance idea died out in America, in the Netherlands, and in part in Scotland. In England and in the Anglican Colonies in America it never took root. In France the idea awaited the work of the National Convention, which (1792) ordered three years of education compulsory for all. War and the lack of interest of Napoleon in primary education caused the requirement, however, to become a dead letter. The Law of 1833 provided for but did not enforce it, and real compulsory education in France did not come until 1882. In England the compulsory idea received but little attention until after 1870, met with much opposition, and only recently have comprehensive reforms been provided. In the United States the new beginnings of compulsory-attendance legislation date from the Rhode Island child-labor law of 1840, and the first modern compulsory-attendance law enacted by Ma.s.sachusetts, in 1852. By 1885, fourteen American States and six Territories had enacted some form of compulsory-attendance law. Since 1900 there has been a general revision of American state legislation on the subject, with a view to increasing and the better enforcement of the compulsory-attendance requirements, and with a general demand that the National Congress should enact a national child- labor law.

As a result of this legislation the labor of young children has been greatly restricted; work in many industries has been prohibited entirely, because of the danger to life and health; compulsory education has been extended in a majority of the American States to cover the full school year; poverty, or dependent parents, in many States no longer serves as an excuse for non-attendance; often those having physical or mental defects also are included in the compulsion to attend, if their wants can be provided for; the school census has been changed so as to aid in the location of children of compulsory school-attendance age; and special officers have been authorized or ordered appointed to a.s.sist school authorities in enforcing the compulsory-attendance and child-labor laws.

Having taxed their citizens to provide schools, the different States now require children to attend and partake of the advantages provided. The schools, too, have made a close study of r.e.t.a.r.ded pupils, because of the close connection found to exist between r.e.t.a.r.dation in school and truancy and juvenile delinquency.

ONE RESULT OF THIS LEGISLATION. One of the results of all this legislation has been to throw, during the past quarter of a century, an entirely new burden on schools everywhere. Such legislation has brought into the schools not only the truant and the incorrigible, who under former conditions either left early or were expelled, but also many children who have no apt.i.tude for book learning, and many of inferior mental qualities who do not profit by ordinary cla.s.sroom procedure. Still more, they have brought into the school the crippled, tubercular, deaf, epileptic, and blind, as well as the sick, needy, and physically unfit. By steadily raising the age at which children may leave school, from ten or twelve up to fourteen and sixteen, schools everywhere have come to contain many children who, having no natural apt.i.tude for study, would at once, unless specially handled, become a nuisance in the school and tend to demoralize schoolroom procedure. These laws have thrown upon the school a new burden in the form of public expectancy for results, whereas a compulsory- education law cannot create capacity to profit from education. Under the earlier educational conditions the school, unable to handle or educate such children, dealt with them much as the Church of the time dealt with religious delinquents. It simply expelled them or let them drop from school, and no longer concerned itself about them. To-day the public expects the school to retain and get results with them. Consequently, within the past twenty-five years the whole att.i.tude of the school toward such children has undergone a change; many different kinds of cla.s.ses and courses, that might serve better to handle them, have been introduced; and an attempt has been made to salvage them and turn back to society as many of them as possible, trained for some form of social and personal usefulness.

THE EDUCATION OF DEFECTIVES. Another nineteenth-century expansion of state education has come in the provision now generally made for the education of defectives. To-day the state school systems of Christian nations generally make some provision for state inst.i.tutional care, and often for local cla.s.ses as well, for the training of children who belong to the seriously defective cla.s.ses of society. This work is almost entirely a product of the new humanitarianism of modern times. Excepting the education of the deaf, seriously begun a little earlier, all effective work dates from the first half of the nineteenth century. At first the feasibility of all such instruction was doubted, and the work generally was commenced privately. Out of successes thus achieved, public inst.i.tutions have been built up to carry on, on a large scale, what was begun privately on a small scale. It is now felt to be better for the State, as well as for the unfortunates themselves, that they be cared for and educated, as suitably and well as possible, for self-respect, self- support, and some form of social and vocational usefulness. In consequence, the compulsory-attendance laws of the leading world States to-day require that defectives, between certain ages at least, be sent to a state inst.i.tution or be enrolled in a public-school cla.s.s specialized for their training.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 235. ABBe DE L'ePeE (1712-89)]

BEGINNINGS OF THE WORK. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century a number of private efforts at the education of the deaf are on record, all dating however from the pioneer work of a Spanish Benedictine, in 1578. In 1760 a new era in the education of the deaf was begun when Abbe de l'epee opened a school at Paris for the oral instruction of poor deaf mutes, and Thomas Braidwood (1715-1806) began similar work at Edinburgh. A few years later (1778) a third school was opened at Leipzig. This last was established under the patronage of the Elector of Saxony, and was the first school of its kind in the world to receive government recognition.

The Paris school was taken over as a state inst.i.tution by the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly, in 1791. In England the instruction of the deaf remained a private and a family monopoly until 1819. In 1817 the first school in America was opened, at Hartford, Connecticut, by the Reverend Thomas H.

Gallaudet, and Ma.s.sachusetts, in 1819, sent the first pupils paid for at state expense to this inst.i.tution. In 1823 Kentucky created the first state school for the training of the deaf established in the new world, and Ohio the second, in 1827.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 236. REV. THOMAS H. GALLAUDET TEACHING THE DEAF AND DUMB From a bas-relief on the monument of Gallaudet, erected by the deaf and dumb of the United States, in the grounds of the American Asylum, at Hartford, Connecticut.]

The education of the blind began in France, in 1784; England, in 1791; Austria, in 1804; Prussia, in 1806; Holland, in 1808; Sweden, in 1810; Denmark, in 1811; Scotland, in 1812; in Boston and New York, in 1832; and in Philadelphia, in 1833. All were private inst.i.tutions, and general interest in the education of the blind was awakened later by exhibiting the pupils trained. The first book for the blind was printed in Paris, in 1786. The first kindergarten for the blind was established in Germany, in 1861; the first school for the colored blind, by North Carolina, in 1869.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 237. EDUCATIONAL INSt.i.tUTIONS MAINTAINED BY THE STATE As state inst.i.tutions, other than public schools.]

Before the nineteenth century the feeble-minded and idiotic were the laughing-stock of society, and no one thought of being able to do anything for them. In 1811 Napoleon ordered a census of such individuals, and in 1816 the first school for their training was opened at Salzburg, Austria.

The school was unsuccessful, and closed in 1835. The real beginning of the training of the feeble-minded was made in France, by Edouard Seguin, "The Apostle of the Idiot," in 1837, when he began a life-long study of such defectives. By 1845 three or four inst.i.tutions had been opened in Switzerland and Great Britain for their study and training, and for a time an attempt was made to effect cures. Gallaudet had tried to educate such children at Hartford, about 1820, and a cla.s.s for idiots was established at the Blind Asylum in Boston, in 1848. The interest thus aroused led to the creation of the Ma.s.sachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth, in 1851, the first inst.i.tution of its kind in the United States. In 1867 the first city school cla.s.s to train children of low-grade intelligence was organized in Germany, and all the larger cities of Germany later organized such special cla.s.ses. Norway followed with a similar city organization, in 1874; and England, Switzerland, and Austria, about 1892. The first American city to organize such cla.s.ses was Providence, Rhode Island, in 1893. Since that time special cla.s.ses for children of low-grade mentality have become a common feature of the large city school systems in most American cities.

In 1832 the first attempt to educate crippled children, as such, was made in Munich. The model school in Europe for the education of cripples was established in Copenhagen, in 1872. The work was begun privately in New York City, in 1861, and first publicly in Chicago, in 1899. The London School Board first began such cla.s.ses in England, in 1898.

Dependents, orphans, children of soldiers and sailors, and incorrigibles of various cla.s.ses represent others for whom modern States have now provided special state inst.i.tutions. To-day a modern State finds it necessary to provide a number of such specialized inst.i.tutions, or to make arrangements with neighboring States for the care of its dependents, if it is to meet what have come to be recognized as its humanitarian educational duties. The more important of these special state inst.i.tutions are shown in the diagram given in Fig. 237.

Public playgrounds and play directors, vacation schools, juvenile courts, disciplinary cla.s.ses, parental schools, cla.s.ses for mothers, visiting home-teachers and nurses, and child-welfare societies and officers, are other means for caring for child life and child welfare which have all been begun within the past half-century. The significance of these additions lies chiefly in that the history of the att.i.tude of nations toward their child life is the history of the rise of humanitarianism, altruism, justice, order, morality, and civilization itself.

THE EDUCATION OF SUPERIOR CHILDREN. All the work described above and relating to the work of defectives, delinquents, and children for some reason in need of special attention and care has been for those who represent the less capable and on the whole less useful members of society--the ones from whom society may expect the least. They are at the same time the most costly wards of the State.

Wholly within the second decade of the present century, and largely as a result of the work of the French psychologist Alfred Binet (1857-1911) we are now able to sort out, for special attention, a new cla.s.s of what are known as superior, or gifted children, and to the education of these special attention is to-day here and there beginning to be directed.

Educationally, it is an attempt to do for democratic forms of national organization what a two-cla.s.s school system does for monarchical forms, but to select intellectual capacity from the whole ma.s.s of the people, rather than from a selected cla.s.s or caste. We know now that the number of children of superior ability is approximately as large as the number of the feeble in mind, and also that the future of democratic governments hinges largely upon the proper education and utilization of these superior children. One child of superior intellectual capacity, educated so as to utilize his talents, may confer greater benefits upon mankind, and be educationally far more important, than a thousand of the feeble-minded children upon whom we have recently come to put so much educational effort and expense. Questions relating to the training of leaders for democracy's service attain new significance in terms of the recent ability to measure and grade intelligence, as also do questions relating to grading, cla.s.sification in school, choice of studies, rate of advancement, and the vocational guidance of children in school.

_Net Average Worth of a Person_ _Age_ _Worth_ 0 $90 5 950 10 2000 20 4000 30 4100 40 3650 50 2900 60 1650 70 15 80 -700 (Calculations by Dr. William Farr, formerly Registrar of Vital Statistics for Great Britain. Based on pre-war values.)