DEMAND FOR INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS.
THE demand increases for industrial schools. Many taxpayers complain that the public school gives its pupils an education insufficient for a profession, but more than enough for the common needs and utilities of life. The High School graduate, in many cases, feels too exalted in disposition, owing to a sense of his attainments, to engage in any trade requiring manual toil, and leaving dust and stains on his fine clothes. He wants to stand behind a counter, or write up bank books, or live somehow by his wits, without doing much of anything in particular. Indeed, it is said large numbers of young men from the High School hang around our city offices and buildings, too proud to undertake mechanical labor, and yet incompetent to enter the spheres of skilled and professional life. The fault is largely in their training. There are in every city thousands of boys whose early associations do not fit them for usefulness. They need to be sent to schools which, along with reading and arithmetic, will teach the use of tools, and confer both a taste and skill for doing something that shall benefit the community, as well as prove a source of profit to the doer. While the head is not neglected the hand ought also to be trained. To send boys out of the school with the capacity and the desire to be producers of something, say wood-carvings, or pattern mouldings, or wheels for machinery, or even nails and pins, is to redeem them from temptations to idleness, vagabondage, vice, ultimate pauperism and crime. If the State is to educate, let it educate for usefulness as well as for elegance.—Selected.