ank's factory and took home all my
wages to keep the kids in school. I met this fellow in a dance hall. I
just had to go to dances sometimes after pushing down the lever of my
machine with my right foot and using both my arms feeding it for ten
hours a day--nobody knows how I felt some nights. I agreed to go away
with this man for a week but when I was ready to go home he tried to
drive me out on the street to earn money for him and, of course, I
threatened to kill him--any decent girl would," she concluded, as
unconscious of the irony of the reflection as she was of the
connection between her lurid week and her monotonous years.

Knowing as educators do that thousands of the city youth will enter
factory life at an age as early as the state law will permit;
instructed as the modern teacher is as to youth's requirements for a
normal mental and muscular development, it is hard to understand the
apathy in regard to youth's inevitable experience in modern industry.
Are the educators, like the rest of us, so caught in admiration of the
astonishing achievements of modern industry that they forget the
children themselves?

A Scotch educator who recently visited America considered it very
strange that with a remarkable industrial development all about us,
affording such amazing educational opportunities, our schools should
continually cling to a past which did not fit the American
temperament, was not adapted to our needs, and made no vigorous pull
upon our faculties. He concluded that our educators, overwhelmed by
the size and vigor of American industry, were too timid to seize upon
the industrial situation, and to extract its enormous educational
value. He lamented that this lack of courage and initiative failed not
only to fit the child for an intelligent and conscious participation
in industrial life, but that it was reflected in the industrial
development itself; that industry had fallen back into old habits, and
repeated traditional mistakes until American cities exhibited
stupendous extensions of the medievalisms in the traditional Ghetto,
and of the hideousness in the Black Country of Lancashire.

He contended that this condition is the inevitable result of
separating education from contemporary life. Education becomes unreal
and far fetched, while industry becomes ruthless and materialistic. In
spite of the severity of the indictment, one much more severe and well
deserved might have been brought against us. He mig