Well, experience is more valuable than argument in answering assertions. A few years ago a man who had scarcely ever done any work in the school-room brought some theories on the subject of technical education over here from Germany, although he was an American. He went to Philadelphia and started a little class for the instruction of teachers. The majority of common school teachers sneered at his theories, so he proposed to silence all further opposition by a practical test. He started a model school for the purpose of demonstrating that what he asserted was practicable. He did not select the brighter pupils in the public schools, but went deliberately into the streets and picked up at random a lot of little gutter-snipes who had never been to school at all, or who, if they had, were persistent truants ever since. In a short time people saw--for it was necessary to have them see in order to make them believe at all--these ignorant children of the street doing better technical work in several directions than could be found anywhere else in the city except in establishments paying high prices for artistic labor. They carved wood, they modelled in clay, they made designs on paper, they stamped leather and brass and even showed some capacity for engraving and coloring in the direction of the higher arts.
The effect of this display should have been to have given the system prominence and practical demonstration in the public schools, but it amounted to little except the gathering of a few wide-awake teachers who wished to learn to teach as the theorist had been teaching. A few of those who took the course went into public school work elsewhere and have succeeded admirably ever since. In the city of Elizabeth, New Jersey, any child who wishes can now receive a technical education under the direction of the common school authorities. The work began in a single school with a single teacher. It has since been extended to all the public schools of the city, and two teachers work hard from morning until night. A strange development of this course of teaching deserves notice. Elizabeth is a city containing a great many large manufacturing establishments, and the modest young woman who had charge of the technical education in the public schools was amazed one day to receive a written request from a number of master mechanics in different establishments for a night school for their own benefit, for which they were willing to pay freely; and some of them told the teacher that their attention to the subject was first attracted by their own children doing clearer and more rapid work in the line of design than they, these master mechanics, who had been in the business all their lives, had ever yet succeeded in doing. So for months there was visible the astonishing spectacle of a lot of middle-aged men being taught their own business by a young woman who herself knew nothing whatever of their business.