history of rogues

"If you examine into the history of rogues, you will find that they are as truly manufactured articles as anything else, and it is just because our present system of political economy gives so large a stimulus to that manufacture that you may know it to be a false one. We had better seek for a system which will develop honest men than for one which will deal cunningly with vagabonds. Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons."

Unto This Last, John Ruskin 1883

Charles H. Ham, Mind and Hand, 1886:

"There is a system of training which produces a much higher average of culture than that of the public schools and universities. we allude to the training received by the students of special mechanical and technical institutions, and by the apprentices in trade-shops. The proof of this is found in the worlds' railways, ships, harbors, docks canals, bridges, telegraph and telephone lines, and in a thousand and one other manifestations of skill in art."

"The difference in effects upon the mental and moral nature, between purely mental training and mental and manual training combined, is susceptible of logical explanation. It is only in things that the truth stands clearly revealed, and only in things that the false is sure of exposure. Hence exclusively mental training stops far short of the objective point of true education. For if it be true that the last analysis of education is art, progress can find expression only in things--in the work of men's hands. And it is true; for ideas are mere vain speculations until they are embodied in things.... They may be expressed feebly, through the voice, in words; more durably, and therefore more forcibly, with the pen, on paper; more forcibly still in drawing--pictures of things; and with the superlative degree of force, in real things."