This group is declared to be typical of every city and town in
Massachusetts.
]
The third line of work for the vocational counselor in a
vocational school is that of “following up.” This is the only way
of ascertaining whether schools are fitting the children for those
walks of life for which they are attempting to train them. If the
school is doing this satisfactorily _we want_ to know it, and if
it is not doing it _we ought_ to know it. The child may be
followed up by a regular system of reporting by mail, by visits to
employes and by alumni meetings. Alumni meetings are particularly
profitable when turned into experience meetings at which the
children tell what they have been doing with especial emphasis on
the relation of their training in the school and their work in the
world. In this way schools can keep in touch with their graduates
and create a spirit of friendly intercourse even after they leave.
The best advertisement a school can have is an enthusiastic body
of loyal graduates.
The work of the vocational assistant in a vocational or other
school is thus one of adjustment; adjusting children to the right
course in school; adjusting them to the right course after they
leave school; and adjusting the relationship between the school
and the home, and that between the school and the business life.
If this work is needed in a vocational school how much more it
must be needed in a regular school! For it is an adjustment which
tends always toward keeping the children in school, but if they
must leave, insists upon seeing that they are at least given a
helping hand toward that new life which is so different from
school life and so bewildering to the youthful mind.
There is plentiful testimony that fathers and mothers now turn to
the Boston schools as never before for advice and help in their
perplexities concerning their children’s future. It has been most
pathetic in the past to see how little parents knew of real
industrial conditions, and of what educational and vocational
opportunities existed in Boston, entirely within their reach. Our
experience has been that the vast majority of parents have
heretofore known nothing about the various high schools and their
specialties, except what they have learned through the vocational
work of the school itself. The attitude of the parents when
visited in the homes, makes it appear only too clear that
practically all welcome such guidance and are anxious to avail
themselves of it.
These, then, are pictures of the vocational counselor at work.
What is the machinery behind her? Every school in the city has at
least one teacher who has given her time freely to this service.
In some schools committees of teachers have formed voluntarily to
take thought over the dropping out of boys and girls, and to
organize that assistance which a school can give to parents and
children in administering to the life-career motive. The work of
the vocational counselors has been a labor of love. Nobody has
expected that the occupational talks to which they have listened
twice a month would equip them for effective vocational guidance.
But no group of persons can listen to intimate discussions of the
shoe industry, department stores, machine industries, stenography
and typewriting, mechanical and civil engineering, building trades
and needle trades—which have been actual subjects in these
meetings—without being better fitted than before to advise and
guide those who are making hit-or-miss guesses at work in the fond
hope that it will pay well and that it is suited to their
particular capacities.
The Vocation Bureau, through whose influence the Boston schools
were induced to introduce vocational guidance, does not aim at the
placing of individual boys and girls in particular jobs. It
endeavors to study the causes of the waste which attends the
passing of unguided and untrained young people from school to
work, and to assist by experiments to prevent this waste. It aims
to work out the problem of co-operation between schools and
occupations, for the purpose of enabling both to make a more
socially profitable use of human talents and opportunities. It
publishes studies of vocations from the viewpoint of their
educational and other efficiency requirements. It conducts a
training course for qualified men and women who desire to prepare
themselves for vocational guidance in the public school system,
philanthropic institutions, and business establishments. Its
interests therefore lie both in the direction of personal service
to the individual and of constructive experiment and research in
the field of education and employment.
A capable investigator spends his entire time in studying
occupations open to boys and young men, what these occupations
require, and what they lead to. From three months to a year is
devoted to each study. The result of these inquiries is published
in tentative pamphlet form. Such pamphlets have already been
published on the machinist, banking, the baker, confectionery
manufacture, the architect, the landscape architect, the grocer,
the department store, and the profession of law.
In each of these studies it is sought to supply parents, teachers
and others interested with the material necessary to an
intelligent conception of the occupation, its needs, demands,
opportunities, relative desirability and its training,
requirements and possibilities. It is further sought to analyze
the relation of aptitudes, interests and habits to modern
industrial demands, and thus to lay an adequate foundation for a
system of training that regards social as well as economic needs.
The Vocation Bureau has constantly borne in mind that a sound
development of vocational guidance requires that contact with the
employments be more than mere onlooking. To leave the employer out
of such a plan, to fail to profit by his criticism and point of
view, is to omit one of the most important elements in such
guidance. The bureau has therefore been in close touch with a
large number of industrial and commercial concerns in sympathy
with its purposes. Manufacturers have approved its methods, and
have even supported its demands for more thorough-going protection
and opportunity for the young worker.
To understand better the employer’s relation to vocational
guidance, the bureau organized last year a conference of
employment managers. Men representing a score or more of important
manufacturing and business establishments have met regularly for
informal discussions. In December an employment managers’
association was formed. One of the most important fruits of this
close contact is the possibility of formulating plans for
organizing the generally chaotic entrance into occupations. It is
now planned to undertake some experiments in placement work in
co-operation with several social agencies and a group of
employers. The bureau believes that the country is ready to
undertake through responsible agencies, having in mind primarily
the needs of young workers, experiments to point the way to some
less wasteful and costly method of bringing together what has been
called “the manless job and the jobless man.”
Persons of constructive imagination throughout the country, alert
to the needs of coming generations of workers, and interested in
the reforms which must succeed if our future citizens are to enter
into their inheritance, have come to recognize that a new
co-ordinating agency is needed—an agency which shall secure team
play in home, school and occupation, to the end that a richer
vocational life of all the workers may be realized. It is likely
that in the near future there will not only be for the work in the
public schools a specially trained vocational counselor, but that
there will also be in business and manufacturing establishments a
new type of employment manager, especially trained and empowered
to develop in the worker not only the efficiency which the
employer requires, but also that efficiency which society
requires. Through the working together of such employment managers
and school counselors, society will gain an important factor in
making for its progress.