SIX MAJOR PROPHETS
purpose of giving the pupils greater manual skill, still less with the object of improving their chances of getting a job or of making them more efficient for the benefit of the employer, but chiefly because it is only through participation in industry that one can get an understanding of the meaning of science and the constitution of the social organism. In the old days when most industries were carried on in the household or the neighborhood children learned them by observation and participation. School was then a place where this very effective form of home education could be supplemented by "book learning."
But Dewey faced frankly the fact that the household arts and handicrafts had passed away for keeps, and he refused to join in the pretense that they could be profitably "revived" by the various esthetic and socialist movements of the William Morris and Ruskin type. He recognized that the machine and the factory had come to stay, and if the worker is not to become a factory machine himself he must receive in school such a broad and diversified training as will make him realize the significance of the work he does. Or as Dewey said in "School and Society" in 1899:
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