FORECASTING FUTURE PROBABILITIES
The industrial education survey of Cleveland differs from other
studies conducted elsewhere in that it bases its educational program
on a careful study of the probable future occupational distribution of
the young people now in school. It does not claim to foretell the
specific positions that individual boys and girls will hold when they
are adults but it does claim very definitely that our safest guide in
foretelling their future vocational distribution is to be found in the
official figures of the present occupational census of the city.
One of the most familiar and time-worn platitudes of educational
speakers and writers is that "The children of today are the citizens
of tomorrow." In the field of industrial education it is quite as true
that the school children of today are the workers of tomorrow.
Moreover, since occupational distributions change but slowly even in
these modern times, it is unquestionably true that the boys and girls
now studying in the public schools will soon be scattered among the
different gainful occupations of Cleveland's industrial, commercial,
and professional life in just about the same proportions as their
fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters are now distributed.
The plan of the survey in advocating types of present preparation
based on studies of future prospects seems at first sight so obvious a
mode of procedure as hardly to warrant extended explanation. This is
far from being the case. The reader who proposes to follow the
working-out of the principle and to scrutinize the evidence underlying
it must be prepared to scan many a detailed table of statistics and to
arrive at most unforeseen conclusions.
THE POPULAR CONCEPT OF INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION
For many years past the public has given respectful attention to the
arguments of the champions of industrial education. There has been
general assent to the proposition that the schools should train for
and not away from the industrial age in which we live. We have come to
think of the carpenter shop, the machine shop, the forge shop, and the
cooking room as necessary and desirable adjuncts of the modern school
and to our minds these shops have typified industrial education. All
of these have come to be almost synonymous with progressive thought
and action in public education. Very generally it has been felt that
the problems of industrial education were to be solved through the
wider extension of these shop facilities in our public schools.
When these familiar generalizations are submitted to careful analysis
their whole structure begins to totter. In Cleveland about 3,700 boys
leave school each year and go to work. They represent various stages
of advancement from the 4th grade of the elementary school to the 4th
year of the high school. They are scattered through more than 100
school buildings. The problem of industrial education is to give these
boys with their differing ages, their widely varied school
preparation, and their scattered geographical distribution, the best
possible preparation for taking their places in the work-a-day world.
They represent every grade of intelligence, every stratum of social
and economic life, and it is extremely difficult to bring them
together for instructional purposes. They are scattered in little
groups through more than a thousand classrooms.
THE IMPORTANCE OF RELATIVE NUMBERS
Now it is possible to foretell with some certainty what these young
people will be doing a few years from now. Almost all of them are of
American birth and it is certain that in a few years they will be
engaged in doing just about the same sorts of work as are now done in
the city of Cleveland by adults of American birth. The data of the
United States Census of Occupations show us that among every 100
American born men in Cleveland there are eight who are clerks, seven
who are machinists, four who are salesmen, and so on through the list
of hundreds of occupations. The number of American born men in each
100 engaged in each of the 10 leading sorts of occupations is
approximately as follows:
Clerks 8
Machinists 7
Salesmen 4
Laborers and porters 4
Retail dealers 4
Draymen, teamsters, etc. 4
Bookkeepers 3
Carpenters 3
Commercial travelers 2
Manufacturers 2
----
41
This simple list at once calls into question all the standard
assumptions about the extension of industrial education depending on
greatly increasing the number of carpenter shops and machine shops in
the public schools. The figures show that among each 100 American born
men in Cleveland only seven are machinists and only three are
carpenters. Clearly we should not be justified in training all the
boys in our public schools to enter the machinist's trade or the
carpenter's trade when nine out of each 10 will in all probability
engage in entirely different sorts of future work. The more the
figures of the little table given above are studied, the clearer it
appears that our conventional ideas about industrial education need
critical scrutiny and careful challenge. These 10 leading occupations
include only 41 out of each 100 American born men. Moreover, more than
half of these 41 are engaged in mental work rather than in manual
work.
From these considerations one definite conclusion inevitably emerges.
It is that the safest guide for thinking and planning for industrial
education is to be found in a study of the occupational distribution
of the present adults. From the very outset such a study indicates
that the most difficult and important problems which must be met and
coped with are not those relating to methods of instruction but rather
those of organization and administration. The future carpenters and
machinists cannot be taught until we can get them together in fair
sized classes. They represent the most numerous of the industrial
groups and yet their numbers are relatively so few that the average
Cleveland school sends out into the world each year only two or three
future machinists and perhaps one future carpenter.
The trouble with present thinking about this matter has been that we
have noted the very large numbers of machinists and carpenters in the
population and have failed to realize that while these groups are
numerous in the aggregate they are after all quite small when
relatively considered and compared with the total number of workers.
Another important fact that has been almost invariably overlooked is
that many of the present carpenters and machinists are foreigners by
birth and that there is every prospect that this same condition will
maintain in the future. Hence these trades and most other industrial
occupations are not recruited from our public schools to anything like
the degree that has been assumed.
A CONSTRUCTIVE PROGRAM MUST FIT THE FACTS
The simple principle which underlies the method employed by the survey
is the same on which all large business undertakings are conducted.
The results of its application in the field of industrial education
are, however, fundamentally different from those commonly arrived at
on the assumption that nine-tenths of the rising generation will earn
their living in industrial pursuits. The fact is that no such
proportion of the children in school will become industrial workers.
All the native born labor now employed in manufacturing and mechanical
industries constitutes only 44 per cent of the total number of native
born workers in the city. Moreover, nearly half of the industrial
workers are employed in unskilled and semi-skilled occupations for
which no training is required beyond a few days' or weeks' practice on
the job. Such training calls for a mechanical equipment far more
extensive than the resources of the school system can provide, and can
be given by the factory more effectively and much more cheaply than by
the schools.
In the final analysis, the problem of industrial training narrows down
to the skilled industrial trades. Approximately 22 per cent of the
total number of American workers in the city are employed in skilled
manual occupations. This does not mean that a constructive program of
industrial education would affect 22 per cent of the present school
enrollment. All the weight of educational opinion and experience is on
the side of excluding the children of the lower and middle age groups
as too young to profit by any sort of industrial training, while the
evidence collected by the survey goes to show that of the remainder
less than one-fifth of the girls and one-fourth of the boys are likely
to become skilled industrial workers.
AN ACTUARIAL BASIS FOR INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION
Considerations like the foregoing have determined the fundamental
method of the Cleveland Industrial Survey. Plans for the present
generation have been formulated on the basis of future prospects as
foretold by state and federal census data. The methods used were
characterized by a member of the Cleveland Foundation Survey Committee
as "the actuarial basis of vocational education." This is accurately
descriptive, because the method of forecasting the number of men the
community will need for each wage-earning occupation closely resembles
that employed by life insurance actuaries in foretelling how long men
of different ages are likely to live. Such methods are similar to
those commonly used in commerce and industry. They deal with mass data
rather than with individual figures, and with relative values rather
than with absolute ones.