e difficulty common among educated people of having to get rid
of old ideas before they took on new ones. I think what he had in mind
to say that it is difficult to accept new ideas when your mind is
filled with ideas which are institutional. The ideas which come out of
formal education, out of the schools, out of books, are ideas which
have been stamped as the true and important ones; many of them are,
as they have proved their worth in service. But as they represent
authority, they pass into a people's mind with the full weight of
an accepted fact. The schools, the colleges, and the books are
not responsible primarily for the fixed ideas; every established
institution contributes fixed ideas as well as fixed customs and rules
of action. The schools and colleges circulate and interpret them.
The movement for industrial education in the United States is an
illustration of this.

The ideas which we find there have not sprung from schools or colleges
but from industry. The institution of industry, rather than the
institution of education, dominates thought in industrial education
courses. It is the institution of industry as it has affected the life
of every man, woman and child, which has inhibited educational thought
in conjunction with schemes for industrial schools. No established
system of education or none proposed is more circumscribed by
institutionalized thought than the vocational and industrial school
movement.

Educators have opposed the desire of business to attach the schools
to the industrial enterprise. They have rightly opposed it because
industry under the influence of business prostitutes effort.
Nevertheless, hand in hand with industry, the schools must function;
unattached to the human hive they are denied participation in life.
Promoters of industrial education are hung up between this fact of
prostituted industry and their desire to establish the children's
connection with life. They have tried to meet opposing interests; they
have not recognized all the facts because the facts were conflicting,
and their minds as well as their interests, institutionally speaking,
were committed to both.

This was the impasse we had apparently reached when the war occurred;
it is where we still are. But ahead of us, sometime, the war will end
and we shall be called then to face a period of reconstruction. The
reconstruction will center around industry. The efficiency with which
a worker serves industry will be t