best we can expect from an industrial school to-day is a
good apprentice.

Another handicap was that at that time conditions were seldom
sufficiently favorable to enable the employer to derive profit enough
from students' work to compensate for the maintenance of the youth
at a manual labor school. Besides, such a school could not be
far-reaching in its results because it could not be so conducted as to
accommodate a large number of students. With a slight change in its
aims the manual labor schools might have been more successful in
the large urban communities, but the aim of their advocates was to
establish them in the country where sufficient land for agricultural
training could be had, and where students would not be corrupted by
the vices of the city.

It was equally unfortunate that the teachers who were chosen to carry
out this educational policy lacked the preparation adequate to
their task. They had any amount of spirit, but an evident lack of
understanding as to the meaning of this new education. They failed
to unite the qualifications for both the industrial and academic
instruction. It was the fault that we find to-day in our industrial
schools. Those who were responsible for the literary training knew
little of and cared still less for the work in mechanic arts, and
those who were employed to teach trades seldom had sufficient
education to impart what they knew. The students, too, in their
efforts to pursue these uncorrelated courses seldom succeeded in
making much advance in either. We have no evidence that many Negroes
were equipped for higher service in the manual labor schools.
Statistics of 1850 and 1860 show that there was an increase in the
number of colored mechanics, especially in Philadelphia, Cincinnati,
Columbus, the Western Reserve, and Canada.[1] But this was probably
due to the decreasing prejudice of the local white mechanics toward
the Negro artisans fleeing from the South rather than to formal
industrial training.[2]

[Footnote 1: Clarke, _Present Condition of the Free People of Color of
the United States_, 1859, pp. 9, 10, 11, 13, and 29.]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, pp. 9, 10, and 23.]

Schools of this kind tended gradually to abandon the idea of combining
labor and learning, leaving such provisions mainly as catalogue
fictions. Many of the western colleges were founded as manual
labor schools, but the remains of these beginnings are few and
insignificant. Oberlin, which was once oper