Introductory to our discussion of modern education, let us recall a few prominent historical illustrations.

The Athenian state was a pure democracy. The citizens of this citystate numbered some twenty-five thousand, and were the governing element of a community ten times as great, consisting of slaves, peasant farmers, tradesmen, and the like. The high ideal of these free citizens was philosophic leisure. To this end their education provided a most complete and harmonious culture-physical, intellectual, and social-in the palæstra, the gymnasium, the military service, the games, the theater, and the forum. But this most remarkable system was confined to the few citizens of the state, citizens who were relieved of toil, trade, and all occupations of industry, these being left to slaves and foreigners. Their system of education, so complete when considered with reference to their ideal, was correspondingly narrow. Gymnastics for the body, and music for the culture of the soul in æsthetics and philosophy, comprehended the entire range of their education. Commerce, manufacturing, and domestic arts being occupations of slaves, foreigners, and women, the subjects themselves could find no place in the curriculum of freemen.

Passing now to the Middle Ages, when the Christian church was the educator of the world, the clergy were the dominant class. Life for them was religious, and education was especially for them as guides and teachers of the people. In this period philosophy was made the handmaid of theology. The product of Roman civilization in Roman law was made the foundation of canon law, even as temples and basilicas of pagan Rome were transformed into the churches of Christian Rome. Later, as in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as state governments began to form and take somewhat independent direction of affairs, Roman law became the foundation of civil law. Thus it was that the universities of Europe developed a curriculum intensely practical in the interest of the two great and dominant classes, the clergy and the secular aristocracy. This curriculum culminated in philosophy and theology, canon law, and civil law, to which should be added the no less practical one of medicine.

Again, as in the sixteenth and seventeen centuries, the democratic spirit began to appear, as the people began to realize that life was for them as well as for their lords, and that a share of the comforts of life was for them also; they began to claim for themselves the advantage of education in gaining a livelihood. They instituted guilds for the protection of labor, and schools for the better instruction of the laboring classes. These schools, so imperfect in their beginnings, grew to be the Burger- and Realschulen of Germany, the manual-training and polytechnic schools of America. Harvard and Yale and Princeton each provided an education of immediate and practical advantage to the clerical and legal professions, following the traditions of the past. If the representatives of labor and in this I include all secular occupations of trade and the

mechanic arts- pursued these collegiate courses, it would be for the general culture afforded by them, and not because they expected to make any practical application of learning to their several callings.

During the past century our school system, culminating in the university, has been greatly modified and expanded to satisfy the demands of industrial life. In the University of Minnesota we have colleges of law and medicine, of pharmacy, dentistry, civil engineering, electrical engineering, mining engineering, and mechanic arts, and, last of all, agriculture. So bountiful has this provision become that it seems as if no form of productive labor had been overlooked in the educational facilities of the state.

If, now, you will recall the history from which we have selected our illustrations, you will observe that as the people have gained freedom and recognition as citizens, with the rights of freemen, the system of education has gradually expanded to give practical preparation for the several interests which citizenship represents.

First, you will also observe that there have been two stages of development; the first was that of education for the governing classes, social, secular, and clerical. The second, and that with which we have to do, is that of labor, or productive industry-not to supersede the first, but rather to supplement it and give it a more extended application. Thus far, too, the progress of education, as we have considered it, has been confined to men, because citizenship has been for men. Authoritative direction in affairs of church and state, in matters social and industrial, has been limited to men. Accordingly, education in all its history has

been for men.

In the earlier periods women were without either social or political consideration, and were consequently excluded from all privileges of education. It is only in recent times that the rights of woman and her position in state and church have come under serious discussion. As her rights of citizenship were recognized, she was admitted to the public schools, and the era of coeducation began. But the schools to which she was admitted had been planned for the ruling classes. What she was to get was because of what she was, and what she wished to pursue, in common with men. This education began in the elementary grades, where study, like play and work, is quite the same for boys and girls. Later, as women have been admitted to colleges of academic and technical instruction, they have found the courses those that are demanded by men in the professions and the industries.

As women emerged from the seclusion and the limitations of domestic life to assume the responsibilities and to discharge the duties of citizenship, they first asserted their industrial rights-the right to work for pay, to undertake enterprises requiring skill-according to their own preferences and abilities. The industries and the technical schools opened to

her were planned for men, and from them she must choose those adapted to her tastes and capacities. This condition has prevailed and still prevails thruout state institutions with few exceptions. In the University of Minnesota we have colleges of law, medicine, dentistry, several colleges of engineering, and one of agriculture, including instruction in dairying, horticulture, and general farming. From these women are free to select instruction on equal terms with men, and on the same terms offer their services to the public.

Surely this is great progress, and in which our own country takes precedence over all others. And yet this is not the goal for women and their education. The significance of what we have done is that, in so far as men and women have common abilities, common rights, and common aims, they may study and labor together; but beyond the point of differentiation, in a department of life which belongs pre-eminently and exclusively to woman, namely, the home and motherhood, no provision has been made. So noticeable is this neglect that the criticism has been provoked that we are educating shopkeepers and artisans-money-makers of our daughters, instead of wives, and mothers, and home-makers.

It is doubtless true that in the development of civilization the first attention is given to the forum and the arts of government and conquest; after these come the shops and the trades for the acquisition of wealth and the material comforts. But all this is only the beginning - the preparation for a living that is worthy the name. Until wealth brings its treasures from the shop and the bank to the home, in forms of use for the comfort of the family; until aṛt learns to beautify the dwelling-place of the family life as well as the cathedral and the capitol; and until science devotes itself to the healthful rearing of children and the hygiene of the home, all these forces of our modern civilization of which we are so proud fall far short of their highest service, and that to which they were destined.

And this final and noblest application of wealth and learning must be effected in the education of women. With equal rights to do what they may do in common with men, they must be permitted to continue their education in preparation for their higher duties of the home, which they alone are able to make and adorn.

I do not hesitate to affirm that, if the subject is to be estimated from the standpoint of science and education, there is as much intelligence and good judgment required in applying science to the care of home and its. children as to the care of the stock on the farm; and that it comports with the dignity of any educational institution to apply the principles of chemistry as well to the making of wholesome bread for the maintenance of health as to the mixing of drugs for its restoration when lost thru ignorance of the laws of health.

So far in this discussion the progress we have noted has been in our

higher institutions, and for the training of specialists of high grade in the several industrial lines of modern life. This demand of our times that our education should contribute to the better living of the people has found tardy response in the high schools of our states. These high schools are the colleges of the people. They must not only fit the few for the higher institutions, and for the special courses, but they must give the final preparation for practical life to the majority of its students. The positions to be filled by those who are graduated from these high schools are, in the main, common forms of business, the trades, farming, and, for young women, the duties of home life.

That the high school and every other school should, in its appropriate way, represent and keep before its pupils the highest aims of education must not for a moment be lost sight of. Its spirit should be to encourage every youth to make the best of himself and the most of life by the highest culture which his circumstances will allow, and by his intelligence and skill to make himself a part of the largest world of human interests and activity of which he is capable. Nothing would be more calamitous to our high schools than to close the avenues to a high culture, and to give undue prominence to mere money-making occupations of life. Having guarded this aspect of the high school, I may say, without being misunderstood, that, inasmuch as life must be lived by the largest portion of the people without the privileges of a collegiate education, it is the duty of the high school to educate this body of its students to the best ideas and the most practical application of them to the station they are to fill. This is especially important in regard to the industries. Until the era of popular education, the educated classes were occupied with social, governmental, and professional duties. The industries were followed by the uneducated classes. The aristocratic application of education, more properly named training, for the improvement of menial service did nothing toward popularizing industrial life, and in giving it rank with the occupations of the cultivated classes. These young people who are in our high schools will not enter the class of menials, no matter how excellent the training. If, however, the useful industries, as manual training and the domestic arts, are given an educational and a culture value in the curriculum of our high schools, the problem has found a solution. The claims of such commercial courses as bookkeeping, typewriting, stenography, and the like, that are now being urged upon our schools, in educating and social value, are not to be compared in importance with those I have named, and for reasons such as these:

1. They are urged by the spirit of trade-a spirit which is already a dominating one in our American life.

2. The elements of commercial transactions ought to be provided as a practical application of, and within the time given to, writing and arithmetic.

3. In educational value the subjects I have named are immeasurably superior. Domestic science requires skillful application of the best results of the sciences of physiology, hygiene, and chemistry. Manual training is an application of geometrical conceptions of forms, in accurate observation, comparison, and judgment, in forms of wood and metal, and also an æsthetic adaptation of the same to useful ends.

4. But, above all other considerations, these subjects foster those forms of life which, for reasons already given, have been in disrepute, and yet are most important to comfortable living. We are already under the influence of a money-getting, commercial spirit, which is intruding upon the quiet comforts of home life, and diverting our youth from occupations which require diligent and steady application to employments that promise moderate yet certain and steady returns in profit. Our young women have already too many encouragements to take positions of public service in shops, stores, and offices; and our schools as promoters of high ideals of life and service owe it to themselves that these subjects receive the attention they deserve.

The educating policy of continental Europe has been to improve the intelligence of the people in order to make them more efficient in their respective spheres of life, and thereby to increase their usefulness to society above them, as well as to add to their own happiness, but without disturbing the traditional class distinctions as they exist. In America the opposite idea has largely prevailed; those in humbler life have been taught that education is the avenue of escape from the sphere of life into which they have been born, and with which the evils of life have been associated. Under this impulse our educational system has fostered a general migration from domestic and industrial life. Our daughters are headed away from the home fireside, and are strung along the way from the merchant's counter and stenographer's table up to the practice of law and medicine. Our boys have dropped the hoe and the hammer, and are headed for the town to become clerks, doctors, lawyers, and legislators.

Now, it is not in my mind to condemn this view of education or to oppose it; but I do urge that we enlarge our views to include that other idea, that education has for its aim a preparation for a life of comfort and honor in every walk of life. It is to furnish our youth with culture of mind and heart that will make them noble men and women, and with the necessary skill of hand that will make home a place of refinement and health, and the shop a place of intelligent and remunerative industry. It is to make all industry of cultivated life honorable, to encourage every young man and woman to seek and to occupy the largest place of usefulness to which he is by nature adapted, to avoid none as if it were menial, and to make home life the center to which art, science, and wealth make their final and choicest contribution.

It is not only that education should prepare for a better living, but it