d heard that there was an operation by which the
skull could be opened and a certain part of the brain removed, and she
thought that possibly they might do this for her boy and take out that
part of his brain which made him so "wild about machinery"!

Public education in America is only beginning to respond to the need of
intelligently connecting our educational product with the world's work.
Trade schools for boys and girls, half-time schools, continuation
schools, night schools, and in a few cities vocational bureaus are at
work, but so are poverty and the helpless ignorance of the hard-pressed
home. The children who must in tender years be offered to our rapacious
industries are the very children who are without hope of parental
counsel and direction.

In New York City 42,000 children between fourteen and sixteen years of
age take out their "working papers" every year, and out of 12,000 to
13,000 taking out working papers in Chicago annually about 9,000 are
only fourteen years of age and 1,500 have not yet reached the fifth
grade. Many of these walk the streets and degenerate while in search of
work or because of such fitful employment as only serves to balk the
department of compulsory education, which has the power to insist upon
school attendance for children of this age if not employed.

It is not that work is uniformly bad for these children. Indeed,
idleness would be worse. And it is not that all these children are
forced to turn out bad. But as a matter of fact children under sixteen
are not generally wanted save in positions of monotonous and unpromising
employment, and their early experience, which is quite without reference
to taste and native ability, is likely to turn them against all work as
being an imposition rather than an opportunity. In the long run this
cheap labor is the most expensive in the world, and society cannot
afford to fully release children from school control and training prior
to sixteen years of age. Much less can it permit them at any time to
approach the employment problem blindly and unaided. Nor should it fail
to reduce the hours of labor for such children as fall into permanently
unprogressive toil and to organize their leisure as well as to provide
opportunities whereby some may extricate themselves.

What is this industrial haste which cuts so much of our corn while it is
only in tassel, that drives square pegs into round holes, that
harnesses trotting stock to heavy drays