THE BOY'S CHOICE OF A VOCATION[7]
It is practically impossible to overemphasize the importance of the
boy's vocational choice. Next to his attitude toward his Maker and his
subsequent choice of a life partner this decision controls his worth and
destiny. For it is not to be supposed that play with all its virtue, its
nourish and exercise of nascent powers, and its happy emancipation into
broader and richer living can adequately motivate and permanently
ennoble the energies of youth. Until some vocational interest dawns,
education is received rather than sought and will-power is latent or but
intermittently exercised. Play has a great orbit, but every true parent
and educator seeks to know the axis of a given life.
For some boys presumably of high-school age and over, this problem
becomes real and engrossing, but for the vast majority there is little
intelligent choice, no wise counsel, no conscious fronting of the
profoundly religious question of how to invest one's life. The children
of ease graduate but slowly, if at all, from the "good-time" ideal,
while the children of want are ordinarily without option in the choice
of work. But for all who, being permitted and helped, both seek and find
then-proper places in the ranks of labor, life becomes constructively
social and therefore self-respecting. To be able to do some bit of the
world's work well and to dedicate one's self to the task is the
individual right of every normal youth and the sure pledge of social
solvency. Ideally an art interest in work for its own sake should cover
the whole field of human labor, and in proportion as each person finds a
task suited to his natural ability and is well trained for that task
does he lift himself from the grade of a menial or a pauper and enter
into conscious and worthy citizenship.
Here then, as in the case of the mating instinct, the vocational quest
rightly handled forces the ego by its very inclination and success into
the altruism of a social order. For it is the misfits, the vocationally
dormant, the defeated, and those who, however successful, have not
considered such choice as an ethical concern of religion that make up
the anti-social classes of the present time.
Hence this problem of vocational guidance which is so agitating the
educational world comes home to the minister in his work with youth. It
may be that he shall find new and practical use for the maligned
doctrine of election and that he shall place under intelligent, and
heavenly commission the ideals and hopes of later adolescence. At any
rate where the life career hinges, there the religious expert should be
on hand. For what profit is there in society's vast investment in early
and compulsory education if at the crucial time of initial experiment in
the world's work there be neither high resolve nor intelligent direction
nor sympathetic coaching into efficiency?
But the importance of vocational choice does not turn upon the doubtful
supposition that there is one and only one suitable task for a given
youth. Probably there are groups or families of activities within which
the constructive endeavor may have happy and progressive expression.
Nor, from the minister's point of view, is the economic aspect of the
problem paramount. It is true that an investment of $50,000 worth of
working ability deserves study and wise placing and it is true that the
sanction of public education is to return to the state a socially
solvent citizen who will contribute to the common welfare and will more
than pay his way; but the immediately religious importance of this
commanding interest consists in the honest and voluntary request for
counsel on the part of the youth himself.
Fortunately in the very midst of a reticent and often skeptical period
there comes, through the awakened vocational interest, an inlet into the
soul of youth. No religious inquisitor or evangelistic brigand could
have forced an entrance, but lo, all at once the doors are opened from
within and examination is invited. It is invited because the boy wishes
to know what manner of person he is and for what pursuit he is or may be
fitted. When once this issue is on and one is honored as counselor and
friend, the moral honesty and eagerness of youth, the thoroughgoing
confession on all the personal and moral phases of the problem in hand
are enough to move and humble the heart of any pastor. Such conference
solemnizes and reassures the worker with boys, while to have spent no
time as an invited and reverent guest within this sacred precinct is to
fail of a priesthood that is profoundly beautiful.
Several experiences with both individuals and groups are fresh in mind
at this writing. On one occasion a guild of working boys in later
adolescence were living together in a church fraternity house, and it
was their custom on one evening of each week to have some prominent man
as guest at dinner and to hear an informal address from him after the
meal. It chanced that on the list of guests there was, in addition to
the mayor of their city and a well-known bishop of the Episcopal church,
the manager of one of the greatest automobile factories in America. On
the occasion on which this captain of industry spoke, he told in simple
fashion his own experience in search of a vocation.
It was of a kind very common in our country: early privation, put to
work at thirteen, an attempt to keep him in an office when he longed to
have hold of the tools in the shop. In time his request was granted.
While he worked he observed and studied the organization of the shop and
the progression of the raw material to the finished product. Having
mastered the method he left this shop and hired in another, and then in
due time in still another shop, much to the disgust of his friends. But
in reply to their warning that "a rolling stone gathers no moss" he said
that that was not his aim. As a result of faithfully following his bent
he was ready to respond to the great demand for men to organize and run
bicycle factories, and when that demand was followed by the much
greater need of doing a similar work in the manufacture of automobiles
he was chosen for the very responsible position which he now holds.
[Illustration: THE GUILD, First Baptist Church, Detroit, Mich.]
There was, to be sure, nothing distinctly spiritual in his story, but
after he had finished the young men kept him for two hours answering
their questions and there was there revealed to the pastor more of their
fine hopes and purposes and possibilities--their deep-buried yet vital
dreams--than he had ever heard unfolded in any religious meeting. Many
of these youths were taken in hand in a personal way and are now "making
good." Their subsequent use of leisure, their patronage of evening
schools, Y.M.C.A. courses, and many other helps to their ambitions
testified to the depth and tenacity of good purposes which were timidly
voiced but heroically executed. On the other hand, the writer has
knowledge of many cases of delinquency in which apparently the deciding
cause was the vocational misfit foisted upon the young would-be laborer
in the trying years between fourteen and sixteen.
There comes to mind the instance of a lad of seventeen found in the Cook
County jail. He had left his Michigan home with fifty dollars of
savings and had come to Chicago to make his fortune. His mother's story,
which was secured after he got into trouble, narrated how that as a boy
he had taken to pieces the sewing-machine and the clocks and, unlike
many boys, had put them together again without damage. Reaching Chicago
he hired in a garage and conceived the idea of building an automobile.
After the fashion of a boy he became totally absorbed in this project.
His ingenuity and thrift and the help of his employers enabled him to
get well along with his enterprise. But at last he was balked because of
lack of a particular part which he knew to be essential, but as to the
nature of which he was not informed.
Going along the street one day in profound concern over this matter an
impulse seized him to learn at once the nature of the needed part. He
jumped into an automobile standing by the curb, drove it to the nearest
alley, and crawled under it to make the necessary disconnections, when
the police caught him in the act. The case was a clear one and he was
thrown into jail. The mother in her letter to the Juvenile Protective
Association which was working for his release said that now, since he
had been so unfortunate as to fall into the hands of the authorities,
she wondered whether they might not perform an operation for his
benefit, for she had heard that there was an operation by which the
skull could be opened and a certain part of the brain removed, and she
thought that possibly they might do this for her boy and take out that
part of his brain which made him so "wild about machinery"!
Public education in America is only beginning to respond to the need of
intelligently connecting our educational product with the world's work.
Trade schools for boys and girls, half-time schools, continuation
schools, night schools, and in a few cities vocational bureaus are at
work, but so are poverty and the helpless ignorance of the hard-pressed
home. The children who must in tender years be offered to our rapacious
industries are the very children who are without hope of parental
counsel and direction.
In New York City 42,000 children between fourteen and sixteen years of
age take out their "working papers" every year, and out of 12,000 to
13,000 taking out working papers in Chicago annually about 9,000 are
only fourteen years of age and 1,500 have not yet reached the fifth
grade. Many of these walk the streets and degenerate while in search of
work or because of such fitful employment as only serves to balk the
department of compulsory education, which has the power to insist upon
school attendance for children of this age if not employed.
It is not that work is uniformly bad for these children. Indeed,
idleness would be worse. And it is not that all these children are
forced to turn out bad. But as a matter of fact children under sixteen
are not generally wanted save in positions of monotonous and unpromising
employment, and their early experience, which is quite without reference
to taste and native ability, is likely to turn them against all work as
being an imposition rather than an opportunity. In the long run this
cheap labor is the most expensive in the world, and society cannot
afford to fully release children from school control and training prior
to sixteen years of age. Much less can it permit them at any time to
approach the employment problem blindly and unaided. Nor should it fail
to reduce the hours of labor for such children as fall into permanently
unprogressive toil and to organize their leisure as well as to provide
opportunities whereby some may extricate themselves.
What is this industrial haste which cuts so much of our corn while it is
only in tassel, that drives square pegs into round holes, that
harnesses trotting stock to heavy drays and draughting stock to gigs,
that breaks up the violin to kindle a fire quickly, thoughtless of the
music, that takes telescopes for drain pipes and gets commerce--but not
commerce with the stars? It is the delirium in which strong men seek the
standard American testimonial of genius and ability, namely the
accumulation of great wealth; and in this delirium they see labor as a
commodity and childhood as a commercial factor. They do not think of
people like themselves and of children like their own.
But the minister is the very champion of those higher rights, the
defender of idealism, and as such the best friend of an industrial order
which is perversely making this expensive blunder and reaping the blight
of sullen citizenship and cynical and heartless toil. How can these
thousands who, because of "blind-alley" occupations, come to their
majority tradeless and often depleted, having no ability to build and
own a home--how can these who have no stake in the country aid in making
the republic what it ought to be? Partly they become a public care,
expense, or nuisance, and largely they constitute the material for
bossism and dynamite for the demagogue if he shall come. The economic
breakdown, because of vocational misfit and the exploitation of
childhood, usually results in a corresponding moral breakdown. To be
doomed to inadequacy is almost to be elected to crime.
Now the pastor certainly cannot right all this wrong, neither
will he be so brash as to charge it all up to malicious employers,
ignoring the process through which our vaunted individualism, our
free-field-and-no-favor policy, our doctrine for the strong has
disported itself. But is it not reasonable that the minister inform
himself of this problem in all its fundamental phases and that he both
follow and ardently encourage a public-school policy which aims
increasingly to fit the growing generation for productive and stable
citizenship? Our schools are fundamentally religious if we will have
them so in terms of character building, elemental self-respect, social
service, and accountability to the God of all.
The "godless schools" exist only in the minds of those who for purposes
of dispute and sectarianism decree them so. Furthermore, in every effort
toward vocational training and sorting, the employer will be found
interested and ready to help.
But to come more closely to the place of this problem in church work it
must be recognized that the Sunday schools, clubs, and young people's
societies offer wider opportunity for vocational direction than is now
being used. The curricula in these institutions can be greatly vitalized
and enlarged by the inclusion of this very interest, and life can be
made to seem more broadly, sanely, and specifically religious than is
now the case.
Suppose that to groups of boys beyond middle adolescence competent and
high-minded representatives of various trades and professions present in
series the reasons for their choice, the possible good, individual and
social, which they see in their life-work, the qualifications which they
deem necessary, and the obstacles to be met; and suppose further that
the ethical code of a trade, profession, or business is presented for
honest canvass by the class, must there not result a stimulus and aid to
vocational selection and also a more lively interest in the study of
specific moral problems? In this way teaching clusters about an
inevitable field of interest, about live and often urgent problems, and
there is nothing to prevent the use of all the light which may be
adduced from the Bible and religious experience.
To describe the method more specifically, the lawyer presents his
profession and subsequently the class discusses the code of the bar
association; or the physician presents his work and then follows the
canvass of the ethical problems of medical practice, and so of the
trade-union artisan, the merchant or teacher, the minister, or the
captain of industry. All of this is diffused with religion, it has its
setting and sanction within the church, it supplements for a few, at any
rate, the present lack in public education, and it is real and immediate
rather than theoretical and remote.
Let this be complemented with visits to institutions, offices, plants,
courts, and the marts and centers of commercial, industrial, and
agricultural life; and, best of all, cemented in the personal
friendship, practical interest and sponsorship of an adult and wise
counselor who helps the boy both to the place and in the place; and,
within the limits of the rather small constituency of church boys at
least, there is guaranteed a piece of religious work that is bound to
tell. For surely every legitimate interest of life is religious when
handled by religious persons, and the right moral adjustment of the
whole self to the whole world, with the emotion and idealism inhering in
the process, is the task and content of religion.