JANE ADDAMS ON EDUCATION.
She Says It Must Repair the Harm to Individuals from Specialized Labor.
Miss Jane Addams addressed the members of the Ethical Society yesterday morning at the meeting in Steinway Hall on "Education and Labor." A double quartet of the Hull House girls sang Irish folk songs, including "The Weavers," and closed the exercises by singing a [pantomime] melody, "The Sweatshop." Miss Addams in her address dwelt on the ill effects of specialized labor on the working classes.
"Our schools still prepare children for commercial and professional life," she said. "We may well regret the time when the variety of work performed in the unspecialized workshops naturally stimulated the intelligence of the workingmen, and brought them into contact with the raw material and the finished product.
"The problem of education is to supply the essentials of experience by the short route, as it were, and if the shop constantly tends to make the workingman a specialist then the problem of the educator in regard to him is quite clear. It is to supply him with general knowledge, to make him understand why the work is done."
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