"According to my view he who would be good at anything must practise that thing from his youth upwards, both in sport and earnest, in the particular way which the work requires: for example, he who is to be a good builder, should play at building children's houses; and he who is to be a good husbandman at tilling the ground; those who have the care of their education should provide them when young with mimic tools. And they should learn beforehand the knowledge which they will afterwards require for their art. For example, the future carpenter should learn to measure or apply the line in play; and the future warrior should learn riding or some other exercise for amusement, and the teacher should endeavor to direct the children's inclinations and pleasures by the help of amusements to their final aim in life. The sum of edu

The soul of the

cation is right training in the nursery. child in his play should be trained to that sort of excellence in which, when he grows up to manhood, he will have to be perfected. Do you agree with me thus far?"-PLATO, Laws (Jowett), Vol. IV, p. 173. Scrib1902.

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"There will be gymnasia and schools in the midst of the city, and outside the city circuses (playgrounds) and open spaces for riding places and archery. In all of these there should be instructors of the young."-PLATO, Laws (Jowett), Vol. IV, p. 82. Scribner, 1902.

IDEAL POPULAR EDUCATION *

We have come to realize in recent years that in many ways our education of the masses is a failure. Teaching people to read and write and occupying them with books till they are fifteen years of age, when all that they will use their power to read for is to devote themselves to three or four editions of the daily paper and the huge, overgrown Sunday papers on their only day of leisure, with perhaps occasional recourse to a cheap magazine or a cheaper novel, in order to kill time, as they frankly declare, is scarcely worth while. Indeed we have even come to realize that such education gives opportunity rather for the development of discontent than of happiness. The learning to write which enables a man to be a clerk, or a bookkeeper, the occupations that are, as a rule, the least lucrative, that are so full that there is no question of organizing them, that confine men for long hours in dark rooms very often and furnish the least possible opportunity to rise, is of itself not ideal. With some rather discon

* The material for this lecture was collected for a course on the History of Education delivered to the Sisters of Charity of Mount St. Vincent's, at St. Stephen's Hall, New York City, in January and February, 1909. The material was subsequently developed for a similar set of lectures for the religious teachers in the parochial schools of Philadelphia in the spring of 1910.

nected information this is practically all that our ordinary education teaches people, and yet we spend eight years and large sums of money on it. We are just beginning to realize that other forms of education and not these superficial introductions to supposed scholarship, which can mean so little, constitute realities in education.

We have come to realize that Germany, where it is said that more than sixty per cent. of the population has its opportunity for some technical training, so that men are taught the rudiments of a trade or a handicraft or some occupation other than that which shall make them mere routine servants of some one else, does far better than this. By contrast it is remarked that less than one per cent. of our children have the opportunity for such training. We are very prone to think, however, that the technical school is a modern idea. We assume that it owes its origin to the development of mankind in the process of evolution to a point where the recognition of the value of handiwork and craftsmanship has at length arisen. Nothing could well be less true than this. is true that the eighteenth century saw practically no education of this kind and it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that any modern nation even began to wake up to the necessity for it. In the older times, however, and, above all, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there was a magnificent training afforded the masses of the people in all sorts of arts and

It

crafts and trades and occupations, such as can now be obtained only in technical schools. They did not call these teaching institutions technical schools, but they had all the benefits that we would now derive from such schools.

This training the people of these times owed to the gilds. These were, of course, of many forms, the Arts Gilds, the Crafts Gilds, the Merchants Gilds, and then the various Trades Gilds. Boys were apprenticed to men following such an occupation as the youth had expressed a liking for, or that he seemed to be adapted to, or that his parents chose for him, and then began his training. It was conducted for five or six years usually in the house of the master or tradesman to whom he was apprenticed. The master provided him with board and clothes, at least, after the first year, and he gradually trained him in the trade or craft or industry, whatever it might be. After his apprenticeship was over the young man of eighteen or so became a journeyman workman and usually wandered from his native town to other places, sometimes going even over seas in order to learn the foreign secrets of his craft or art or trade, and after three years of this, when ready to settle down, presented evidence as to his accomplishments, and if this was accepted he became a master in his gild. If he were a craftsman or an artisan he made a lock or a bolt or some more artistic piece of work in the metals base or precious, and if this sample was con

sidered worthy of them by his fellow-gildsmen he was admitted as a master in the gild. This was the highest rank of workman, and the men who held it were supposed to be able to do anything that had been done by fellow-workmen up to that time. The piece that he presented was then called a masterpiece, and it is from this that our good old English word masterpiece was derived.

This might seem a very inadequate training, and perhaps appeal to many as not deserving of the name of technical training or schooling. The only way to decide as to that, however, is to appreciate the products turned out by these workmen. It was these graduates of the apprentice-journeyman system of technical training who produced the great series of marvellous art objects which adorn the English cathedrals, the English municipal buildings, the castles and the palaces and the monasteries of the thirteenth century. It was the graduates of these schools, or at least of this method of schooling, who produced the wonderful stained glass, the beautiful bells, the finished ironwork, the surpassing woodwork, the sculpture, the decoration,-in a word, all the artistic details of the architecture of the wonderful Gothic periods of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,-which we have learned to value so highly in recent years. If we wanted to produce such work in our large cities now, we would have to import the workmen. These wonderful