Excerpt from The People's School: A Study in Vocational Training It seems to be difficult for us to learn that human institutions may not be borrowed outright. The sight of some new form of efficiency in our neighbors over the sea stirs the conscious progressives at home to minute and wholesale imitation. This is particularly true where we feel second-rate, - in art, science, and education. In politics and industry, we are a trifle cock-sure of ourselves and copy scarcely at all; but elsewhere we tend to be over-impressed by foreign example. The history of conscious educational reform in America offers many illustrations of indiscriminate institution-matching, all the way from the kindergarten to the university. There have been large gains, of course; but we have paid an unnecessarily high price in maladjustments. If only we had noted the essential elements of foreign experience and moulded the institutional forms to suit our own population and national ideals, we could have made our institutions far more effective. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.