never be satisfied by the conventional type of city public school.
A traditional school founded on the bookish education of a leisure
class can never be made into a pre-vocational school that will give
power and dignity to labor, without a fundamental transformation of
the present spirit, subject matter and teaching methods. An elementary
school which gives its children no more than narrow drill in the three
R’s plus a little remote and unreal text-book information in history
and geography, with what little half-hearted music and drawing and
nature-study can be squeezed in, will never provide the foundation that
the trained worker will need. No system of trade-training or vocational
education superimposed upon such an elementary school will remedy the
evils. Children who have been listlessly and ineffectively drilled in
book-work will have acquired attitudes that are likely to be carried
over into vocational work. Except for the few, industrial training will
seem sheer drudgery, for it will have its roots in no interests and
powers developed in earlier years. Pre-vocational education must mean
something more than a mere sop to the motor-minded boys and girls who
are restless with their books and are on the verge of leaving school
for work. Such training, if it is to mean anything, must be woven in
as an organic part of the school course. The entire elementary school
could be a general, free, spontaneous, amateur pre-vocational school,
where in direct contact with machines and industrial processes as
well as books, with gardens and gymnasiums as well as laboratories
and kitchens, with tools and print and pottery shops and drawing and
music studios, children might have their imaginations stirred, try out
their busy hands on things, and gradually sift out of the variety the
interests that they can lay hold on with some promise of creative use.
The school might be a place where play passed insensibly into work, and
aimless experiment into purposeful construction.
Most of the current criticism of the public schools arises from the
rapidly growing conviction that only in such a school will the modern
city child have a chance to be educated in any way which will meet
the demands in industrial or commercial life that will be made upon
him. There is danger in current educational experiments that we become
too easily satisfied with the mere addition of desirable courses,
without at the same time transforming the school so that the new
work is organically assimilated. Labor cannot be content with the
school reform which many cities are adopting in the introduction of
vocational courses merely in the upper grades. Such a postponement
means an invidious class-distinction in those grades between the
children who are going on to academic work and those who are going on
to industrial work. It broadens the gulf between labor and leisure
rather than diminishes it. Labor should be the first to protest against
these “pre-vocational courses,” “junior high school plans,” as they
are variously called. A school which consists merely of six years of
bookish schooling with trade-learning and athletics tacked on at the
top would merely intensify the evils under which labor now suffers.
It would produce mechanical drudges. It would almost guarantee that
industrially exploitable horde of young workers the creation of which
organized labor so much fears.
In advocating such a system the lesser labor chiefs in New York have
been very badly advised. The program of “immediate demands,” put forth
under Mr. Gompers’s nose with a great flourish of the rights of labor,
is not only unprogressive but actually reactionary. It is exactly
the kind of specious program that the narrow-minded employer might
demand who wished a docile but intelligent labor force trained at the
public expense. In whose interest does labor demand the “immediate
elimination from the course of study of any activity which takes away
from the essentials and fundamentals of education in the elementary
schools?” To eliminate organized play, auditorium dramatics, shopwork,
gardening, dancing, etc., is surely the best way to drive children
out of school, or to train them into mere appendages to machines.
What labor needs is the most varied kind of work-study-and-play
school, where imagination and interest are awakened. Yet here we find
a conference on organized labor and education demanding simply more
of the old kind of traditional schools! What good will it do to have
more school buildings, more teachers, more pay for teachers, even
more night-schools and playgrounds, if the schools merely pursue the
old limited grind? Labor needs a school enriched in opportunity and
vitalized with the modern spirit of “learning by doing,” yet all it can
think of to demand is “a seat for every child”! And to ram home to the
public a sense of its straitened vision, this conference records its
“emphatic protest against any further extension of the Gary plan.”
Now opposition to the Gary plan may be a useful attitude for the
lesser labor leaders who are playing for political stakes, but we
cannot believe that this is the attitude of the intelligent elements
in the labor movement. For what the Gary plan does is exactly to make
possible for the first time on a large public scale this greatly
enriched elementary school which labor needs for the realization of its
own expressed educational ideals. The broad curriculum, the flexibility
which adapts the school to the needs of every child, the interweaving
work, study and play, transform the traditional school into a kind
of child-community, where children throughout the course are laying
the rudiments of their vocations. They have a chance from the early
years, by trial and error, by experiment and realization, to find out
what they can do and what they cannot do. To quote Superintendent
Wirt, the Gary school is educating them just as the home, shop and
school teacher educated the children of earlier American days. No
formal pre-vocational course begun in the seventh or eighth year can
do what this simple intimate contact with things and processes does.
In a sense, industrial education may begin in the Gary school as soon
as the small child is interested in going into the school-shops or
laboratories as helper or observer. All the activities may be tested
in the same way. The school is thoroughly democratic because the
opportunities, bookish, manual, artistic, are open on equal terms to
all the children. For labor to oppose the Gary plan means that labor
is suicidally opposing the very kind of school that holds out the most
opportunity for an enriched education for its children.
Mr. Gompers and the other responsible leaders of organized labor could
do nothing more important than make an immediate and thorough study of
the educational promise of the Gary school. If organized labor were to
put itself enthusiastically behind the Gary plan, it would have at once
an enlightened policy on elementary education which would effectively
prevent any insidious exploitation of the movement. It would be well if
the responsible leaders would repudiate these lesser labor chiefs who
manipulate education for political purposes. The time has come for a
bold and progressive stand.
XXIV
EDUCATION FOR WORK
The urgency of vocational education in this country has been immensely
reinforced during the past few years by the rapidly growing social
solicitude for child welfare. Child-labor laws, compulsory education,
minimum wage, children’s courts, welfare bureaus, devised primarily
as mere protective agencies for the weaker and less self-defensible
members of the community, are now suddenly seen to involve a host of
positive social responsibilities. We are recognizing that the state
has a duty not only to save the younger generation from exploitation,
premature labor and demoralizing environments, but also to give it
every possible opportunity to be trained for an effective vocation.
In particular, the recent raising of the age limit for child labor in
many of the states, by keeping in school thousands of children who
would otherwise have passed out to work, has put a great strain upon
the public school. The challenge so far has done little else than make
evident an alarming inadequacy of the present type of school to train
children for the work which they will shortly be called upon to do. The
school systems of the large northern cities are having thrust upon them
great numbers of children for whose education, in this new sense of the
word, they are unprepared. And the burden and urgency is one that will
increase rather than diminish.
This is one of the lessons of a document like the recent admirable
report of the Minneapolis Survey for Vocational Education, made last
year under the auspices of the National Society for the Promotion of
Industrial Education. It would be difficult to advise reading more
important for educator, employer and employee than this cross-section
of the skilled-labor life of a great American city, looked at with a
view to vocational guidance. In Minneapolis all the conditions were at
their best for such a social laboratory experiment. The rapid growth of
manufacturing and the unusually high proportion of skilled industries
make the demand for the training of workers paramount. The stringent
state laws require attendance at the school until the age of sixteen or
the completion of the entire elementary course. The city has a school
system of high traditional excellence. Clearly all the factors that
would stimulate a campaign for vocational education are here in their
most exacting form.
The analysis here given of the training which the manufacturing and
mechanical industries require for their various skilled positions,
the training which public schools and special schools are purporting
to give, the increase in resources which school and shop will have
to make to meet the social demands made upon them--all this will be
found typical in greater or less degree throughout the country. The
most general impression one gets from the Survey is of industrial
unpreparedness. The public school is seen not with its usual fault as
an institution of general education which has ignored pre-vocational
needs, but as a pre-vocational school of narrow and exclusive type,
for the vocational training of the classes in the community whose
actual need was least. For above the earlier years of rudimentary
schooling there has been superimposed a bookish school which is
really a pre-vocational school for the professions or for domestic
leisure. The boys and girls whose futures were to be professional and
domestic had the benefit of the public school. The vast majority, the
motor-minded and those whose aptitudes were not intellectual, very
properly and automatically left this bookish school as soon as they had
obtained their rudimentary general education. When the state suddenly
refuses to allow these children to leave the school until they have
finished the elementary course, the school system is faced with the
necessity of broadening itself from a narrow pre-vocational school for
the professions into a pre-vocational school for all the industries
and arts of the modern community. The smatterings of wood-working and
domestic science which the city schools have introduced are shown not
to have broadened the school in the least. Even the technical courses
in the high schools have quite failed to meet the problem. Of the
recent graduates from these courses in the Minneapolis schools it is
shown that one-half went directly to college, only one-tenth passing
into occupations for which the course could in any way be regarded
as preparatory. Most of these students, moreover, went into drafting
rooms. It may be said therefore that to the training of the great
artisan class of such a modern and progressive city the public schools
have contributed practically nothing. A typically American progressive
school system with all its technical and manual accessories is shown
functioning at its very highest limit as a pre-vocational school,
not for skilled labor, but for the professions and what the Survey
suggestively calls the “commissioned officers of industry.”
The industries themselves, however, are found to be no more adequately
engaged than the school in training their own workers. Apprenticeship
has all but died out, and among neither employers nor employees is
there any enthusiasm for its return. Yet, although all the trades
require a constant supply of trained workers, no substitute has yet
been found for apprenticeship. The movement for industrial education
has at times seemed like an attempt of employers to get their skilled
workers trained at public expense. The effort to establish separate
boards in the cities for industrial education threatened to limit
such training to the narrow skill which each industry would demand
and to supply employers with apprentices at no cost to the industry
itself. Fortunately the Minneapolis Survey warns against this narrow
and sinister conception of vocational education. Industrial interests
cannot shirk the responsibility for the special training of their
workers. The rapid growth of “corporation schools” shows that at
least the most prosperous and highly skilled shops and factories are
accepting this responsibility. All the employer has a right to demand
is that the school give the young worker a general pre-vocational
training which will introduce him to the special trade work. The
graduate of the elementary school should have been through a well
rounded course which not only cultivated a general intelligence, but
discovered, by submitting him to many different kinds of activity, his
particular flair or knack, and thus enlisted his interest in further
training for a particular vocation.
The elementary school should, in other words, be a general
pre-vocational school, where the boy or girl could get a bearing
towards every type of vocation. The Survey strikingly confirms the
far-sighted vision of William Wirt and his unspecialized and varied
Gary school in which the children from their earliest years are testing
out their powers in shop and foundry and laboratory and studio and
classroom. “What is needed,” it says, “is not a course in special
woodworking--the extent of manual work in most elementary schools of
the present time--but rather organized training in practical arts
which will include a variety of experiences fundamental to the life of
the community. Woodwork, metal work, printing and bookbinding, clay
modeling, concrete and electrical work, are some of the industries
which give an opportunity for experience in certain fundamental
processes which are most valuable to boys without respect to the
occupation in which they may later engage.”
In the last year of the elementary school, or in the years of the
junior high school, more specialized technical courses could be
introduced. For the advanced work, more and more responsibility should
be thrown on the shop, the school providing the background of theory,
the shop the practical application, and the student alternating between
shop and school as in the so-called coöperative course. For the workers
already engaged, part-time continuation classes are advised, with
“dull-season classes,” and evening trade-extension courses. For these
the various special schools in the city, commercial and technical,
could coöperate. In this correlation of shop and school a new form
of apprenticeship would grow up. The Survey reports trade agreements
already worked out in several trades which provide that after two
years of high-school instruction in practical, technical and academic
subjects, the worker will be placed in the occupation at wages equal to
those of a third-year apprentice. The agreements require the approval
of the union, and the employers agree to use the school as the first
source of supply in engaging new workers.
On some such constructive lines as are suggested in this Minneapolis
Survey will the problems of vocational education be worked out. In
its discussion of such topics as home gardening, office work, art
education, domestic service, the Survey suggests the breadth of the
field to be covered. An ideal system of vocational training would
not only give every boy and girl in the school an opportunity to
find an aptitude and cultivate some skill but it would make possible
the training of “non-commissioned officers” in the industrial army.
The education of such leaders will really be the goal of organized
vocational education. As the industries, trades and occupations
become more technical and more scientifically managed, the demand for
administrative, supervisory, directive and planning officers taken
from the ranks is constantly widening. Efficient management is becoming
recognized as almost the most important factor in production, and
management will be the reward for intelligence and skill. Until we have
an educational system which in coöperation with shop and factory gives
fullest opportunities for each child in the schools to work towards
qualifying as such a “non-commissioned officer” in some occupation
of the social army, we shall not have our democratic school or our
framework for the future democratization of industry. Nor shall we be
able to attack those mountainous problems of unskilled labor which no
system of vocational training can touch.
XXV
CONTINUATION SCHOOLS
The movement for vocational education has done nothing more valuable
than to show us how far we are still from realizing the public school
as a child-community, first of all as a quickening life and only
secondarily as an educational institution. The rapidly extending
“continuation school” is perhaps the most obvious symptom of this
failure. The term itself is unfortunate, for it drags along with it the
old separation of education from living. It suggests something in the
way of a surplus, of extension schooling beyond an allotted time, as if
its pupils were getting an educational largess out of some great social
bounty. Actually the “continuation school” represents educational
deficit; the necessity for it registers our failure to provide an
earlier school-community life for children which would have kept them
out of industry. Also it registers our failure to provide child-labor
laws which would have protected them.
The continuation school is officially a “school for employed minors
fourteen to sixteen years of age,” and is intended to hold, by the
tenuous thread of four to six hours a week school attendance, those
boys and girls who have gotten their employment certificates at the
earliest legal age and are floundering about in low-paid occupations,
mostly unskilled. New York City alone has 58,000 such children,
fourteen and fifteen years of age, two-thirds of whom have never
completed the elementary school. Stores, offices, shops, domestic
service, messenger service absorb these boys and girls, untrained and
unfocused, and the truly formidable burden is placed upon them of
making their skilful way in the world. Popular tradition tries to make
us glow with the belief that this world is a ladder up which virtue
and industry will automatically ascend. But unfortunately the ladder
of opportunity rarely reaches down so far. The lowest rung is beyond
their reach. The gap between it and the ground is often too great even
for initiative and character to bridge. The “employed minors fourteen
to sixteen years of age” become the nucleus for that partly employed,
sodden and anemic mass of drifters which drags down labor everywhere
and clogs social progress.
The education which these children have had has in most cases barely
fitted them to remain upright on the ground, not to speak of reaching
for the ladder. The acquirement of literacy, a more or less uncertain
skill in figuring, the exposure to some miscellaneous historical and
geographical information--this has been the real substance of their
five or six years’ schooling. To most of these children it is probable
that the world of printed symbols will never mean very much. A real
school would have striven to awaken their concrete and constructive
intelligence, given play to all the non-intellectual impulses. It is
just the tedium and artificiality of the old school which has sentenced
them now to stand at the bottom of the occupational scale. Without
class-prestige, economic advantages, manners, extraordinary initiative
or intelligence, most of these children are handicapped from the start.
Literate, they are perhaps fitted to compete on equal terms with each
other for work. But for the passing into better-paid, more interesting,
more responsible and skilful activity, their schooling, though it came
at the most plastic and active time of childhood, has done nothing
whatever.
We try, therefore, through the “continuation school” to make up bravely
to these children what they have lost. We try to lift them so that they
can clutch at the lowest rung of the ladder. We find it easier to make
stabs at repairing the damage than to reorganize the elementary school
so as to prevent it. In Wisconsin cities a boy or girl leaving school
at fourteen to go to work is required to attend day continuation school
four or five hours a week for three years. In Boston the children must
attend for four hours a week for two years. In Pennsylvania cities they
must attend eight hours a week for two years. Continuation schools
for 20,000 children are in process of formation by the New York City
Board of Education. Wisconsin’s forty-five industrial and continuation
schools are compulsory, while in the other states which have permissive
laws the schools may be made locally compulsory. Employers are required
to dismiss their child employees on working days and within working
hours, the school time being reckoned as part of the time that minors
are permitted by law to work.
Such laws obviously follow the line of least resistance. They add to
the school system without revitalizing it. At the same time, a scheme
like the Massachusetts plan suggests that the continuation school may
be developed into a real stimulus of incentive. This plan provides for
three kinds of classes. For those “employed minors” who are already in
semi-skilled work, it provides some training and background for the
trade or occupation chosen. There are also trade preparatory classes
for pupils who have definitely chosen the trade for which they wish
training, but have not yet found placement in the trade. Then there
are “pre-vocational” classes for those who are ambitious to make some
intelligent choice of an occupation. These pupils are given varied
shopwork, visits to shops and factories, and personal consultation
with teachers and employers. Classes are small, and intensive work can
be done. The other pupils, employed in unskilled labor and without
definite vocational leanings, go into “general improvement courses,”
where half the time is spent in regular school subjects continuing
the elementary school work; a quarter of the time is devoted to “the
discovery and development of dominant interests and powers,” and
the rest of the time to what is quaintly called “civics, hygiene,
recreation and culture.” In this latter activity one-quarter of the
time of the “pre-vocational” and trade courses is similarly spent.
Pupils may transfer from one class to another when they are ready. If
the purpose of the continuation school is to bridge that gap between
the ground and the level where opportunity can at all begin to mean
anything, this Massachusetts plan would seem to do it in an easily
graduated and flexible way. The untrained and unfocused worker has at
least a chance to have his imagination stimulated and to learn the
rudiments of some better work.