the
student the impression that he could raise more corn than his neighbor
and sell it at a higher price if he mastered the principles of
nitrification; and all without one single reference to the basic
principle of conservation upon which the welfare of the human race for
all time to come must inevitably depend,--without a single reference to
the moral iniquity of waste and sloth and ignorance. But I have also
seen men who have mastered the scientific method,--the method of
controlled observation, and unprejudiced induction and inference,--in
the laboratories of pure science; and who have gained so overweening and
hypertrophied a regard for this method that they have considered it too
holy to be contaminated by application to practical problems,--who have
sneered contemptuously when some adventurer has proposed, for example,
to subject the teaching of science itself to the searchlight of
scientific method.

I trust that these examples have made my point clear, for it is
certainly simple enough. If vocational education means simply that the
arts and skills of industrial life are to be transmitted safely from
generation to generation, a minimum of educational machinery is all that
is necessary, and we do not need to worry much about it. If vocational
education means simply this, it need not trouble us much; for economic
conditions will sooner or later provide for an effective means of
transmission, just as economic conditions will sooner or later perfect,
through a blind and empirical process of elimination, the most effective
methods of agriculture, as in the case of China and other overpopulated
nations of the Orient.

But I take it that we mean by vocational education something more than
this, just as we mean by cultural education something more than a veneer
of language, history, pure science, and the fine arts. In the former
case, the practical problems of life are to be lifted to the plane of
fundamental principles; in the latter case, fundamental principles are
to be brought down to the plane of present, everyday life. I can see no
discrepancy here. To my mind there is no cultural subject that has not
its practical outcome, and there is no practical subject that has not
its humanizing influence if only we go to some pains to seek it out. I
do not object to a subject of instruction that promises to put dollars
into the pockets of those that study it. I do object to the mode of
teaching that subject which fails t