eneral
as it is, they are right, and will be as long as the whole social
system discounts productive effort and rewards exploitation of
productive enterprise.

Obviously false from an educational point of view as these school
standards are, they are true to the facts, to the actual situation
which the parents have to face. The wave of popular opposition to a
reorganization of the schools for a preparation of the children for
factory life expresses the original conception of popular education
among sovereign people. The common school system exists, it is still
assumed, to fit the children to rule their own lives; to give them
an equipment which will protect them from a servitude to others. Its
ability to do this had not been questioned a generation ago and,
theoretical as its original intention is to-day, its traditional
purpose to develop the power of each child to govern his destiny,
holds over. If training children to read, write and count, training
them in facts relating to history and language, did not, as it had
been hoped, lay the world at the feet of the children, training them
in factory processes, parents felt competent to declare, laid the
children at the feet of exploiters. That is where in any case, in
the light of common experience, they might expect them to land. To
reorganize the schools with that possibility in mind was for the
parents a surrender of their gambling chance.

The promoters of industrial education, with some success, have made it
clear to the community generally that parents were giving heavy odds
in their gamble, but these promoters would have made this more obvious
to parents if they could have shown that the assets accruing from the
new school curriculum increased more materially than has the wage
earning capacity of their children. The results for individual
children are not sufficiently striking to advertise the departure, and
if they were, the departure would not warrant the endorsement of the
community on the ground of the higher wage, as wages are fixed by
competition. They are advanced by a general increase in productivity.
But the increase that occurs through more efficient methods in
productive enterprise is not a real increase; it does not relatively
affect the social or economic position of the wage earner.

In the last analysis, the wage return is not an educator's criterion,
in spite of the pragmatic recommendation of the Cleveland Survey. The
Survey's recommendation for