Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV EDUCATION If the preceding suggestions are not entirely incorrect, and if the nation or employers or both are perplexed with the seething mass of proposals for betterment put forward on behalf of equally perplexed workers under the guise of ideals, it may not be out of place to ask them to pay more attention to the subject of youth. The present practice not only stunts the proper growth of our youths, but tilts their activities in a wrong direction. Nothing has been so marked during the last thirty years as the growth of labour troubles. Reams of paper have been consumed in dealing with it. Labour troubles vied with the war as a nightmare troubling everybody, and since the war have oppressed the nation. Are they not largely the result of a system, or, rather, the lack of a system? And are not the majority of labour troubles due to a movement of the young men ? Let it be admitted that the education of children has been progressive, that the good education of twenty years ago was not equal to that of ten years ago, that the education of ten years ago fell short of the education of to-day, and that the training of our children from five to fifteen years of age is being constantly improved. Let it be allowed that there is a general desire to equip the rising generations as thoroughly as possible for the battle of life, and that large sums (a fact only too obvious) are annually spent in the perfecting of this equipment. The tendency is in the direction of education and still more education. For eight or ten years in the life of our children the aim of our National Education is to broaden, develop, and expand their minds and latent capabilities, an endeavour generally endorsed as right and proper, even though a strong volume of opinion may exist that, as a nation,...