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Caption: Book - History of the University (Powell)
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Men Who Led 188 grant institutions Bronson Murray, one of his strongest supporters, wrote to Turner's daughter, Mrs. Carriel: "Your father was the soul, spirit, and battle axe during all the fifties of the movement favoring Industrial Education as compared with and in preference to the Linguistic or Professional." 6 Turner felt acutely, when he announced his plan in 1851, the dull tragedy of ignorance that was being enacted on our prairie farms and in our workshops. " A s things now are," he said, "our best farmers and mechanics by their own native force of mind, by the slow process of individual experience, come to know at forty what they might have been taught in six months at twenty; while a still greater number of less fortunate or less gifted stumble on through life almost as ignorant of every true principle of their art as when they began." 7 It was this drama of ignorance that he wished to stop; thus preventing the tragic fifth act when a completely depleted soil brings the furies of famine and poverty. " I t may d o , " he said again, "for the man of books thus to plunge at once amid the catacombs of buried institutions and languages, to soar away to Greece and Rome and Nova Zembla, Kamchatka and the fixed stars before he knows how to plant his own beans or harness his own horse or can tell whether the functions of his own body are performed by a heart, stomach and lungs or with a gizzard or gills. But for the man of work thus to bolt away at once from himself and all his pursuits in after life contravenes the plainest principles of nature and common sense. ->s The task of forcing upon his generation a more practical scheme of education than the one in vogue proved herculean. Truth is not a power that coaxes error gently from the lap of time; she merely arms the devotee with a weapon that makes it possible for him to pitch it out if he has the strength. Turner gave himself unsparingly to his idea: he wrote, lectured, thought, suffered disappointment, and escaped defeat only because he was not defeatable. "Murray to Mrs. Carriel, November 10, 1901, Turner manuscripts, Springfield. 'Turner, Industrial UiwversiUes for the People. *Ibid.
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