THE DEFECT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION.

Waikato Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 2379, 8 October 1887, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE DEFECT IN AMERICAN EDUCATION.

Tint most obvious defect in American education, the writer holds, is the lack of practical training in the productive crafts. Pile consequence is that the productive crafts and those who practice them arc despised, so that American citizens will not learn them if they can find any other way of making a living. The children of the very poor classes, who, for want of anything better, would be glad to learn them, can find no opportunity to do so, especially now that the labour organisations so strongly object to the employment of apprentices. Thus there are developed, on the one hand, an unscrupulous, supercilious non-labouring class, that, in trying to live by its wits, corrupts public morality in a thousand ways ; on the other, a halpless class, utterly unprepared to fight life’s battle, and sinking down after a brief ineffectual struggle into tramps, “ loafers ” and criminals, or, at best, into public slaves, for whom no one is responsible, and whose labour is sold as a substitute for steam power at competition prices in a labour-glutted market.