raising all work to a professional standard, just so
far are they bringing down to the whole nation the gifts of culture
and expert training that have hitherto been the privilege of the few.
I have often noticed college professors, in turning over the leaves of
a university calendar or syllabus of lectures, pass lightly over the
pages recounting the provision made for short courses, summer schools,
extension or correspondence work, and linger lovingly over the
fuller and more satisfactory program outlined for the teacher or
the professional worker. The latter is only apparently the more
interesting. Take Wisconsin's College of Agriculture, for example. It
sends forth yearly teachers and original investigators, but quite as
great and important a product are the hundreds of farmers and farmers'
sons who come fresh from field and dairy to take their six weeks'
training in the management of cattle or of crops, and to field and
dairy return, carrying away with them the garnered experience of
others, as well as increased intelligence and self-reliance in
handling the problems of their daily toil.
Anna Garlin Spencer, in her "Woman and Social Culture," points out
how our much-lauded schools of domestic economy fail to benefit the
schoolgirl, through this very overthoroughness and expensiveness how
they are narrowed down to the turning out of teachers of domestic
economy and dietitians and other institutional workers. Domestic
economy as a wage-earning vocation cannot be taught too thoroughly,
but what every girl is entitled to have from the public school during
her school years is a "short course" in the simple elements of
domestic economy, with opportunity for practice. It is nothing so very
elaborate that girls need, but that little they need so badly. Such a
course has in view the girl as a homemaker, and is quite apart from
her training as a wage-earner.
When again we turn to that side, matters are not any more promising.
If the boy of the working classes is badly off for industrial
training, his sister is in far worse case. Some provision is already
made for the boy, and more is coming his way presently, but of
training for the girl, which shall be adequate to fit her for
self-support, we hear hardly anything. We have noted that women are
already in most of the trades followed by men, and that the number of
this army of working, wage-earning women is legion; that they are
not trained at all, and are so badly paid th
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