Industrial Reform
Because difficulties arise, we are not to drop the industries that
have been taken hold of as branches of education. While attending
school the youth should have an opportunity for learning the use of
tools. Under the guidance of experienced workmen, carpenters who
are apt to teach, patient, and kind, the students themselves should
erect buildings on the school grounds and make needed improvements,
thus by practical lessons learning how to build economically. The
students should also be trained to manage all the different kinds of
work connected with printing, such as typesetting, presswork, and
book binding, together with tentmaking and other useful lines of work.
Small fruits should be planted, and vegetables and flowers cultivated,
and this work the lady students may be called out of doors to do. Thus,
while exercising brain, bone, and muscle, they will also be gaining a
knowledge of practical life.
Culture on all these points will make our youth useful in carrying
the truth to foreign countries. They will not then have to depend upon
the people among whom they are living to cook and sew and build
for them, nor will it be necessary to spend money to transport men
thousands of miles to plan schoolhouses, meetinghouses, and cottages.
Missionaries will be much more influential among the people if they
are able to teach the inexperienced how to labor according to the best
methods and to produce the best results. They will thus be able to
demonstrate that missionaries can become industrial educators, and
this kind of instruction will be appreciated especially where means
are limited. A much smaller fund will be required to sustain such
missionaries, because, combined with their studies, they have put to
the very best use their physical powers in practical labor; and wherever
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they may go all they have gained in this line will give them vantage
ground. Students in the industrial departments, whether they are
employed in domestic work, in cultivating the ground, or in other
ways, should have time and opportunity given them to tell the practical,
spiritual lessons they have learned in connection with the work. In
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