Vocational education

“ Vocational education is a mighty step in advance, which offers inspiring opportunities for the extension of general education, as an accompaniment of technical training, to those who might otherwise have secured neither. Ought we not to rejoice at the retention of boys and girls in schools, where they can be under the disinterested influence of teachers, whereas they might have drifted from one shabby and depressing experience to another until they had been able, perhaps, to "pick up a trade," acquiring their views of life and their ethical principles and habits who knows how? ”

“ The social and educational need for vocational training is equally urgent. Widespread vocational training will democratize the education of the country: (1) by recognizing different tastes and abilities, and by giving an equal opportunity to all to prepare for their lifework; (2) by extending education through part-time and evening instruction to those who are at work in the shop or on the farm. ”

“ These bills defined vocational education as including all types of industrial, commercial, agricultural, and home-making schools, between the upper grammar grades and the college, whose controlling purpose is to fit for specific profitable employments and which receive pupils 14 years of age and over. ”

“ But vocational guidance, as distinguished from vocational selection, must for some time to come depend largely on the determination of interests, incentives, satisfactions, emotional values and preferences, and the discovery and direction of these through general channels of information and through the methods of industrial and pre-vocational education. ”

“ This type of education is designed to train the young person to earn a good living in that branch of work for which he seems best fitted. Some of the supporters of vocational education believe that this specialized form of training ought to be commenced very early and in connection with the regular curriculum. Others think that vocational education should not be attempted until the child has been given enough generalized training to enable him properly to perform the fundamental duties of citizenship.
But whatever its relation to the curriculum, vocational education is of great significance. ”

“ From vocational education, introduced to meet the differing community needs, will result greater efficiency and better appreciation of the schools, increased attendance of pupils, greater compensation for teachers, greater productiveness, higher wages, and improved society. ”

“ If vocational education means simply that the arts and skills of industrial life are to be transmitted safely from generation to generation, a minimum of educational machinery is all that is necessary, and we do not need to worry much about it. ”

“ This problem of vocational education to which I have just referred is one that is likely to remain unsolved until we have made a searching investigation of its factors in the light of scientific method. Some people profess not to be worried by the difficulty of finding time in our elementary and secondary schools for the introduction of the newer subjects making for increased vocational efficiency. ”

“ Vocational education includes all forms of specialized education, the controlling purposes of which are to fit for useful occupations, whether in agriculture, commerce, industry or the household arts. ”

“ The Commission estimated that a million new young people were required annually by our industries, and that it would need three years of vocational education, beyond the elementary-school age, to prepare them for efficient service. ”

“ General public awareness is important, too. During Vocational-Technical Education Week, all Americans can pause to consider the need for strong vocational education programs that enjoy the full support of our communities. ”

“ True vocational education aims at efficiency in a special field of work—it trains printers, stenographers, dressmakers, carpenters, mechanicians, doctors, lawyers, clergymen, journalists, engineers. It brings into play the purpose to earn a living by what one learns—which President Eliot has called the "life-career motive." It narrows, not unjustifiably, but inevitably. The difficulty is to educate for citizenship, for the duties of parenthood and social living, for leisure, and for the interpretation of life—in spite of the need for early specialization, when that need is present. ”

“ If vocational education turns unskilled workmen into entrepreneurs, such education has the doubly beneficial effect of lessening the supply of unskilled labor, and of increasing the demand for labor. The importance of trade schools, continuation schools, and other agencies of vocational education can hardly be exaggerated. ”

“ But there is a great field for the practical arts in general education,—a field which no scheme of vocational training can possibly occupy. Each has its place. Vocational training is fitting young persons for profitable employment in chosen vocations. Practical arts in general education consists of varied lines of activity taken from the fields of agriculture, commerce, industry, and the household and taught in the school for the purpose of developing capacity to deal with concrete things and of arousing social and industrial interests in the workaday world. ”

“ Organized labor at first looked with suspicion upon the movement, but is now more favorably disposed toward it. Vocational education should be clearly distinguished from manual training, which is merely a general education in the principles of skilful hand work without regard to any particular vocation or trade. Vocational education does not turn out a fully-trained worker, but only one who has practically finished the apprentice stage. ”

“ If it is left exclusively in the hands of educators, the employers fear the other danger. Vocational education in this country has, therefore, run its uncertain course through experiments in continuation schools, “pre-vocational” courses in the regular schools, trade courses, “coöperative” courses, until a certain skepticism has been aroused in the minds of professional educators and the interested public whether we can institute a workable system at all in our present public school. ”

“ In vocational education, then, there is at least an obvious basis for discussion concerning schools, courses, and curricula. The state must train its workers, and work for which there is fundamental need is work which pays. Vocational education presents problems of the most vexing sort, but its rationale is clear.
THE NEED FOR GENERAL EDUCATION
It is the persistent need for general education that complicates the issue. Economic demand may justify child labor, but educational theory does not. A theory of education which finds no place for vocational education is antiquated and meager ”

“ The demand for vocational education has come from several sources: namely, from parents who believe that education ought to be directly related to earning-power; from teachers who are convinced that there is little or no educational value in drilling pupils in studies which do not interest them; from the general public which thinks the schools would render a larger social service in training pupils to vocational efficiency; and from enterprising employers who see in this form of education a chance to get a supply of trained workers without having to break them in as apprentices. ”

“ Fundamentally the core of the elementary curriculum must, I believe, always be the arts that are essential to every one who lives the social life. In other words, the language arts and the number arts are, and always must be, the fundamentals of elementary education. I do not believe that specialized vocational education should ever be introduced at the expense of thorough training in the subjects that already hold their place in the curriculum. And yet we are confronted by the economic necessity of solving in some way this vocational problem. ”

“ More vocational education will come, and better education, because it will be based on quantitative studies of aims, needs, and values—of educational processes and results,measured with precision. Even in school administration, guesses, opinions, and prejudices are gradually giving way to science. ”

“ There is some ground for identifying specialized education with vocational education, largely because specialization has some reference to the division of labor and the diversity of occupations, and for identifying general education with liberal education because the efforts of general education are directed toward the liberal training of man as man. ”

“ The movement for the development of vocational education means, above all else, an attempt to train all members of the group to the highest possible degree of efficiency, instead of offering a common education which, though liberal in its character, is actually neglected or refused by a large part of our population. ”

“ Those who remain in the primary schools until fourteen will be of roughly two grades; those whose ability fits them for work of some skill in trades or in the humbler ranks of business, and those of very low intelligence who are naturally destined for unskilled occupations. The former will pass from the elementary schools into some form of vocational training; the latter will go straight into industry and will receive no further teaching other than what may be given in some kind of continuation class. ”

“ An efficient system of vocational education requires different methods of administration, different courses of study, different qualifications of teachers, different equipment, different ways of meeting the needs of pupils and much greater flexibility in adapting means to ends than is possible under the ordinary system of public school administration. ”

“ The most important contribution to vocational education the elementary school can make consists in getting the children through the lower grades fast enough so that they will reach the junior high school by the time they are 13 years old, in order that before the end of the compulsory attendance period they may spend at least two years in a school where some kind of industrial training is possible. ”

“ The crucial position of the question of vocational education at present is due, in other words, to the fact that it concentrates in a specific issue two fundamental questions:—Whether intelligence is best exercised apart from or within activity which puts nature to human use, and whether individual culture is best secured under egoistic or social conditions. ”

“ In terms of this very brief and sketchy analysis of the parts of life, and of these distinctions between work, play, and leisure activities, we now can see clearly the difference between vocational training and liberal education. Vocational training is learning for the sake of earning. I hope I step on nobody's toes too hard when I say, as I must say, that therefore it is an absolute misuse of school to include any vocational training at all. School is a place of learning for the sake of learning, not for the sake of earning. ”

“ In the early days of the nation’s life the absence of any definite plan for public vocational education of young people was not a serious matter. Industrial life was relatively simple, and the family lived close to its sources of supplies. ”

“ The present experiment in vocational guidance and placement should be extended as rapidly as possible. Courses in vocational information should be offered in the junior high school and vocational counsellors appointed to advise pupils in the selection of their future vocations and aid them in securing desirable employment when they leave school. ”

“ During the later Middle Ages and in modern times it rendered an important educational service; in the later nineteenth century it became such an obstacle to educational and industrial progress that it has had to be supplemented or replaced by systematic vocational education. ”

“ But inasmuch as nearly ninety per cent of all the pupils in the public school go directly into some form of industrial or mercantile employment (not into the learned professions) it can readily be seen that a school program of strictly cultural studies does not satisfy the real needs of the community. Hence the demand for vocational education, for such study and practice as will connect the pupil directly with his future life work. ”

“ The responsibility of power."
The books in the bulletin were arranged in accordance with the foregoing outline, which takes the pupil through the whole four years of high school work. Principal Davis' statement of the aims and methods of vocational guidance as it is being carried on in Grand Rapids is sufficiently clear I think, and does not require any additional explanation. It should be clearly understood, however, that vocational guidance is altogether different from vocational education and from industrial education, subjects with which it is sometimes confused. ”

“ A glance at the list of courses shows at once that while the vocational motive is given first importance, the schools also aim to provide instruction in cultural subjects which have only an indirect vocational application. ”

“ The growing importance in our industrial life of efficiency and practical training should not blind us to the fact that education is cultural as well as occupational or vocational. The education of an individual is not estimated alone by the degree to which he succeeds in practical affairs, but as well by the extent to which he shows evidence of training in the appreciation of moral, artistic, and literary values. ”

“ Please understand that I do not mean vocational training can be totally dispensed with; I mean only that it should be done on the job. It should be done as preparatory to work; and as preparatory to work, it should be compensated. ”

“ The organization of vocational training in junior high school grades presents many difficulties which cannot be solved by a more or less abstract study of educational and industrial needs. Experimentation on an extensive scale, covering a considerable period of time, is necessary before definite conclusions can be drawn as to the limitations and possibilities of such work. ”