Dean Balliet Emphasizes the Importance
of Trade-Schools in the Adjustment
of Our Economic Problems.
A box of tools, and not a bundle of books, will be the burden of many a
school-child, if the trade-school system becomes firmly established. In
Germany the public trade-schools have proved very effective. In the United
States there has been an encouraging seven-year experiment at Springfield,
Massachusetts, and two schools have recently been established in New York
City.
The trade-school differs from the manual training-school. Manual training
is educational. "It develops the motor and executive sides of a child's
nature," to quote Dean T.M. Balliet, of the School of Pedagogy in New York
University. Also it fits young men for higher technical training. The
trade-school, on the other hand, teaches young people how to work at
actual wage-paying trades--how to be plumbers, electrical fitters,
carpenters, masons, ironworkers.
Dean Balliet, having made an exhaustive study of the system, not long ago
gave the following answer to an interviewer from the New York _Tribune_
who asked what the trade-school meant:
The aim must be entirely practical, but not narrowly so.
Students must be trained to perform specific kinds of
skilled labor which has a commercial value. But the learning
of a trade must include the scientific principles underlying
it, and must not be confined to mere hand-training. In the
case of the mechanical trades, instruction in drawing, in
physics, and in mathematics applicable to the trade must be
included.
Trades frequently change, and the invention of a new machine
may make a trade suddenly obsolete. Instruction must,
therefore, be broad enough to make workmen versatile and
enable them to adjust themselves to these changes. The
apprentice system is gone. In a shop a man can at best learn
only a small part of his trade, and that only the mechanical
part. Shop-training, even where it is still possible, is too
narrow to make a man versatile. If the one machine which he
has learned to run becomes obsolete he is stranded. We need
trade-schools for just such men, to enable them to learn the
whole of their trade and to receive instructions in the
principles underlying it.
Years ago men read medicine in the office of physicians; now
they go to a medical school. Lawyers read law in an office
only; now they attend law schools. In like manner the
learning of a trade in the shop is rapidly becoming
obsolete, and trade-schools must take the place of the shop.
The fact that some things can be learned only in the shop is
no argument against the school. There are things in the
training of a lawyer which can be learned only in an office.