"The man behind the gun" has always been a significant phase, and the present war has simply shown that "the man behind the gun" includes the women in our homes, the men on the farms and in the factories; and that this strain on the material side comes back after all to a question of human morale and of our capacity and training. It is significant that an English newspaper whose sub-title is "a journal of practical trade and finance," has been led by the emergencies of the war to say that the true wealth of England consists not in capital but in the labor, industry, skill, intelligence and experience of man. If this lesson of the war is fully learned, it is the lesson upon which educational reconstruction and reorganization after the war must go on-it must go on with a view of greater liberation of human power.

I am speaking particularly of the bearing of this possible and necessary educational reconstruction upon vocational education. I wish to confine myself particularly to the older yearsthe years which in the present scheme are covered by what are ordinarily called the continuation schools, or the continuation educational work. In the light of the emergencies, the stress and strain, revealed by the war, it sometimes seems to me that there are bolder plans, and that some more comprehensive and fundamental realignment is demanded.

The war has brought us a large physical plant which may be and which ought to be used, after the war is over, for constructive and educational purposes. The existence of these large cantonments and buildings and various resources will certainly be employed after the war as an argument, and a strong argument, for forcing upon the reluctant but practical minded people some system of military training unless it can be shown to be still more usefully employed, more usefully available, in other directions.

Our cantonments, the equipment of physical of physical and mechanical facilities which the war has been creating, furnish, then, a considerable part of the scheme of vocational education. It is meant to include the youth of the country of the same

A. E. WINSHIP, Editor

OF THE

ages. It ought to be truly universal, applying tɔ young women as well as young men. Now upon this physical basis that we have spent millions of dollars securing, an education should be built which comprises the four essentials of preparation for a vocation, namely: Physique, economic efficiency, social competency and a trained capacity for the consumption and for the employment of labor. A thorough-going solution of the economic and industrial problem from the labor point of view in this country is a national scheme of socialized education applying to the youth between the older ages, just as we have already made our more elementary system universal and conscriptive.

It is not necessary to speak of the first of these elements-the need of a sound physique. The war enforces that as it does so many other things. A sound physique in a population is not merely designed for the success and happiness of an individual, but it is the fundamental basic social asset. If the war had not made it clear that no nation can afford to neglect systematic attention to the physical condition of its citizens, the same lesson has been impressed in a score of other ways. We have realized that one very significant aspect of our slum problem is the extent to which it is undermining national health and national efficiency on a broad scale. Our housing and recreation problem has brought us face to face with the same question of the social and national necessity of good health, as have the campaigns against consumption, against contagious sexual diseases, while the rapid spread of the movement against the drink evil has centered in a recognition again of the undermining of health from a social point of view. Consequently we have learned to see from a variety of points of view the very close connection which exists between physical deficiencies on the one side and civic delinquencies and the various forms of degeneration which require great waste of money and energy in the mitigating forms of private and public charitable relief. At the same time, although we are beginning to recognize this need, the problem involved in the production of a citizenship of a thoroughly sound phy

sique has never been systematically presented, and one of the strongest factors in the claims which are put up for the universal military training, apart from the exigencies of war, is precisely along this line. While, however, all of the lessons of methods of training which the war has produced should be utilized, as well as all other expert knowledge in physical training and culture, it must be noted that the military system not only neglects the future mothers of the nation but is fatally defective in that it begins by rejecting and eliminating precisely that portion of the male population-from forty to fifty per cent.--which is already most imperatively in need of the training that will furnish a remedy for the defects and, I am better physique.

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By the second element, economic efficiency, I mean industrial training in its stricter sense. The plan that we already have, can, if imaginatively and wisely used, be made the basis for instruction in agriculture, various kinds of farming, various forms of productive industry, manufacturing distribution, household management of different forms. The aims should not be immediate, highly-specialized efficiency that is immediate and so specialized as to limit future growth or to predestine individuals to

оссиру simply a particular niche. It should be aimed, rather, at a discovery of personal aptitude to practice familiarly with the fundamental processes of industry and should be devoted to the development of as much initiative, as much variety, as is possible. Moreover, the industries and the education that go with them should be organized from the beginning on a productive socially productive-basis, not merely to reduce the expense but even more than that, to cultivate the self-respect which comes to individuals when they know that they are doing work which is of actual practical use, financially measured.

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It should be used, but on a productive basis, so as to avoid that deadening influence which comes from the mechanical exercises and the doing of pieces of work which have been devised simply for purposes of teaching and education as they are found in several of our best schools, our best schools, and which so readily impair the training given in many of these schools, for a very considerable part of the school population. What we need in this industry, organized on a productive basis, would be to have the education devised so as to meet actual social needs, productively measured instead of being based on exercises which have been invented to be repeated simply in the hope of sooner or later getting a certain amount of education.

By social competency I mean the necessity for a certain surrounding atmosphere and spirit in connection with the industrial and physical training; the necessity for methods of training; the necessity for methods of industrial management and operation which will promote civic efficiency

and the co-operative spirit. The industry should. be run as far as possible on a democratic basis. Co-operation in respect to sharing in products or in profits is not nearly so important as the cooperation in the method of management. The aim should be to secure training of persons in and for groups.

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This means putting individuals in positions of responsibility as rapidly as they are prepared to take it, to give them the experience of directing, of leading as well as of being led; so as to initiate the individuals into what at the present time are so largely the mysterious secrets of trade managements and of the marketing of goods, taking men out from the haphazard industrial education which individuals now get, whether in school or in labor itself, which leaves so many of them totally unfitted for anything beyond routine labor under the direction of others.

Probably the greatest social waste which exists at present is our failure to detect tastes.. capacity and ability, and find for them the channels in which they can operate with advantage to their possessors and with usefulness to others.. We either put all individuals through an undifferentiated training, a required uniform training, in the pious hope that it will catch some of them, unspecified, at some point-also unspecified; or else, under the name of an elective system, we permit individuals to drift along according to their own untrained and unenlightened wishes from moment to moment. We have as yet absolutely no conception of the possibilities of an education, its possibilities both with respect topersonal happiness and social usefulness, which should engage youths in activities sufficiently varied and sufficiently productive to detect their capacity, needs and powers; and then, after that has been done to concentrate our specialized resources upon a full training of these selected capacities.

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The social idealism of the young people of our country has not been genuinely touched and called upon in times of peace, and we have to admit that one of the features of the war system has been that hundreds of thousands of young men have been brought to view their training and their capacity in the light of social needs and demands, in a way in which their college and technical education before that was not calling them out.

It will be hardly short of a crime if we permit this newly stirred idealism of our youth to beaten dissipate itself in the colleges and channels.