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قراءة كتاب The Scrap Book. Volume 1, No. 2 April 1906
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
course of great public events, like peace or war between nations. It enables a man to do good or harm, to give joy or pain, and places him in a position to be feared or looked up to.
There is pleasure in the satisfaction of directing such a power, and the greater the character the greater may be the satisfaction. In giving this direction the great capitalist may find an enjoyable and strenuous occupation. For a conscientious, dutiful man a great sense of responsibility accompanies this power. It may become so powerful as to wipe out the enjoyment itself.
The most serious disadvantage under which the very rich have labored is the bringing up of children. It is well-nigh impossible for a very rich man to develop his children from habits of indifference and laziness. These children are so situated that they have no opportunity of doing productive labor, and do nothing for themselves, parents, brothers, or sisters, no one acquiring the habit of work. In striking contrast are the farmer's children, who cooperate at tender years in the work of the household.
Among President Eliot's hearers were many young men to whom the blessings of poverty were unknown.
TO TEACH TRADES TO YOUNG WORKERS.
Dean Balliet Emphasizes the Importance
of Trade-Schools in the Adjustment
of Our Economic Problems.
A box of tools, and not a bundle of books, will be the burden of many a school-child, if the trade-school system becomes firmly established. In Germany the public trade-schools have proved very effective. In the United States there has been an encouraging seven-year experiment at Springfield, Massachusetts, and two schools have recently been established in New York City.
The trade-school differs from the manual training-school. Manual training is educational. "It develops the motor and executive sides of a child's nature," to quote Dean T.M. Balliet, of the School of Pedagogy in New York University. Also it fits young men for higher technical training. The trade-school, on the other hand, teaches young people how to work at actual wage-paying trades—how to be plumbers, electrical fitters, carpenters, masons, ironworkers.
Dean Balliet, having made an exhaustive study of the system, not long ago gave the following answer to an interviewer from the New York Tribune who asked what the trade-school meant:
The aim must be entirely practical, but not narrowly so. Students must be trained to perform specific kinds of skilled labor which has a commercial value. But the learning of a trade must include the scientific principles underlying it, and must not be confined to mere hand-training. In the case of the mechanical trades, instruction in drawing, in physics, and in mathematics applicable to the trade must be included.
Trades frequently change, and the invention of a new machine may make a trade suddenly obsolete. Instruction must, therefore, be broad enough to make workmen versatile and enable them to adjust themselves to these changes. The apprentice system is gone. In a shop a man can at best learn only a small part of his trade, and that only the mechanical part. Shop-training, even where it is still possible, is too narrow to make a man versatile. If the one machine which he has learned to run becomes obsolete he is stranded. We need trade-schools for just such men, to enable them to learn the whole of their trade and to receive instructions in the principles underlying it.
Years ago men read medicine in the office of physicians; now they go to a medical school. Lawyers read law in an office only; now they attend law schools. In like manner the learning of a trade in the shop is rapidly becoming obsolete, and trade-schools must take the place of the shop. The fact that some things can be learned only in the shop is no argument against the school. There are things in the training of a lawyer which can be learned only in an office.
A COLLEGE CAREER—IS IT WORTH WHILE?
President Butler, of Columbia, Points
Out That Self-Made Men Wish
Their Sons to Go to College.
Business men are sometimes contemptuous toward the young college graduate's bumptiousness and lack of practical knowledge. Educators, on the other hand, give a strong argument, backed by statistics and corroborating detail, to prove that a college education is the best foundation in all the work of life. The subject has been discussed probably since men of education first left the cloisters and went out into the world.
President Nicholas Murray Butler, of Columbia University, presents this brief for the college man:
No doubt there are many who believe a college education is a hindrance to the necessary business wisdom of the age. There are merchants down-town who will tell you how they started at ten or fourteen to sweep out the office and rose, by virtues and industry, to become members of the firm. This is true. But you follow the career of the office-boy who began his utilitarian studies with a broom, and the college boy who began with his books, and you will find that when the office-boy reaches thirty he is still an employee, whereas the college graduate is probably at that age his employer.
Statistics show that out of ten thousand successful men in the world, taken in all classes of life, eight thousand are college graduates. Look at the tremendous increase of educational effort all over the United States in the last few years. Why, I have parents come to me with tears in their eyes and ask me to tell them how they can get their boys through college with only the small sum of money they can afford to do it with. Even your self-made man isn't satisfied unless his son can go to college.
ATHENIAN CULTURE IS AMERICA'S NEED.
President Schurman Would Like to See
Here a Little More of "The Glory
That Was Greece."
Jacob Gould Schurman, president of Cornell University, has taken to heart the contrast between American culture of to-day and the culture of the ancient Greeks. In an address before an association of teachers last February, he charged that while our people "knows something of everything," its knowledge is "superficial, inaccurate, chaotic, and ill-digested." Furthermore, he says that we are indifferent to esthetic culture and suspicious of theory, of principles, and of reason.
These are serious, fundamental charges. But let us hear President Schurman's fuller statement of his case:
If the American mind is to be raised to its highest potency, a remedy must be found for these evils. The first condition of any improvement is the perception and recognition of the defects themselves.
I repeat, then, that while as a people we are wonderfully energetic, industrious, inventive, and well-informed, we are, in comparison with the ancient Athenians, little more than half developed on the side of our highest rational and artistic capabilities.
The problem is to develop these potencies in an environment which has hitherto been little favorable—and to develop them in the American people, and not merely in the isolated thinker, scholar, and artist.
If no American city is an Athens, if no American poet is a Homer or Sophocles, if no American thinker is a Plato or Aristotle, it is not merely because Americans possess only a rudimentary reason and imagination and sensibility, but because, owing to causes which are part of our national being—causes which are connected with our task of subduing a continent—the capacities with which nature has generously endowed us have not been developed and exercised to the fulness of their pitch and potency.
Our work in the nineteenth century was largely of the utilitarian order; in the twentieth century we are summoned to conquer and