next, and the Christian Brothers third. The last named, the Institute of Brothers of the Christian Schools, is a society of teachers not taking Holy Orders, founded at Rheims in 1680 by St. Jean Baptiste de La Salle. In order not to come into competition with the Jesuits the Christian Brothers were forbidden to teach Latin. This restricted them to a less fashionable and less profitable field, but the whirligig of time has tended to reverse the advantage, for today in the United States classical education is less in demand than English and engineering courses.

The segregation of the sexes above the elementary grades is a feature of Catholic education that distinguishes it from the prevailing American practice. The Reverend Francis Cassilly, S. J., of St. Xavier College, Cincinnati, says: "Coeducation and female teaching in boys' high schools are radically wrong from a pedagogical, a civil, and a religious standpoint."

An important field of the Catholic schools in the past has been in the education of the children of immigrants, and for this reason the instruction has often been given in foreign tongues and by

1 Bulletin Catholic Educational Association, February, 1912,

p. 30.

7

European teachers. But the Great War, by slackening the tide of immigration and accelerating the process of Americanization, has tended to obliterate this characteristic of Catholic education.

CHAPTER XIV

THE RISE OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION

We believe that in the schools of applied science and technology as they are carried on today in the United States, involving the thorough and most scholarly study of principles directed immediately upon useful arts, and rising, in their higher grades, into original investigation and research, is to be found almost the perfection of education for young men. - Francis A. Walker.

AGRICULTURE and fishing were at first the principal industries of the American colonies, and the mother country discouraged rather than favored efforts to establish others. American enterprise was restricted by the navigation and trade laws enacted early in the reign of Charles II and supplemented by later measures, and it was also limited by restrictions on the right to manufacture freely. The iron and beaver-hat industries, if not destroyed by British legislation, were held down within narrow limits. To restrictions on colonial trade and industry were added irritating taxation and prohibitions on paper money. It was such arbitrary interference with their economic independence that

led the colonists to turn to the idea of political independence.

Besides the artificial and legislative restrictions imposed upon manufactures and commerce by the mother country, the natural impediments in the way of establishing industries in a new land were often insurmountable. Resources were undeveloped, and the population was scanty and scattered. Skilled mechanics were hard to get, even when there was capital to employ them. Colonists who possessed some degree of knowledge of industrial processes had little chance to exercise their technical ability and so to transmit it to the next generation.

It was because the ministers of New England were appalled by the thought that their flocks would be left to an unlettered ministry that they established colleges for the education of their successors. It was also perceived that the younger generation was likely to grow up idle and ignorant for lack of training in the trades. The first public school law, the Massachusetts Ordinance of 1642, deals with the training of children “in learning and labor." It insists that they be taught "to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of this country," and it also stipulates that

they be provided with hemp and flax and "the tools and implements for working out the same."

The early educational laws of the other colonies also lay stress upon the importance of training in the crafts, but all relied, as was the custom in England, upon the apprentice system to carry it out. Where the educational needs of the apprentice conflicted with the financial interests of the master, however, the latter were likely to receive first consideration. For the master the educational system provided no substitute. The world was slow to bridge the gap between pure science and applied science, and there were few who realized in the eighteenth century that the university professor might teach the crafts without lowering his dignity. Jefferson was one of the few. His ambitious design for a State University included "a school of technical philosophy" with a very comprehensive kind of university extension. Jefferson believed that:

To such a school will come the mariner, carpenter, shipwright, pump maker, clock maker, mechanist, optician, metallurgist, founder, cutler, druggist, brewer, vinter, distiller, dyer, painter, bleacher, soap maker, tanner, powder maker, salt maker, glass maker to learn as much as shall be necessary to pursue their art understandingly of the sciences of geometry, mechanics, statics, hydrostatics, hydraulics, hydrodynamics,