Vocational school

“ Besides further democratizing education by extending its advantages to those who work in the shop and the office and on the farm, vocational education tends to correct many of the evils of modern industrial life. It puts the worker in possession of a great body of scientific knowledge relating to his work which shops and offices cannot give, and it keeps him, for several years after he becomes a wage earner and at a very impressionable period of his life, under the directing care of the school. ”

“ When any primary school is transformed into a vocational school there shall be annexed the elementary primary course in which shall be taught intensively the manual arts prescribed for the elementary instruction of the institutes, but the pupils shall attend the shopwork of the vocational courses only when they have completed the work of the middle course and attained the age of 13 years. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This would require that three million young people of elementary-school age be continually enrolled in schools offering some form of vocational training. This was approximately three times the number of young people then enrolled in all public and private high schools in the United States, and following any kind of a course of study. In addition, the untrained adult workers then in farming and industry also needed some form of adult or extension education to enable them to do more effective work. ”

“ Should the present agitation over vocational education come to nothing—which is almost inconceivable—it will have been worth while if it forces teachers, boys and, eventually, employers to ask themselves straight questions and to face actual conditions. What does modern business really require of the average boy? How fully can the boy meet—or can he be trained to meet—those requirements? And, finally, what can the school do and how far can it go in bringing the boy into line with the reasonable demands of a rational, up-to-date mercantile or manufacturing concern? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Studies of vocations are being made; vocational training is being offered; vocational guidance is at last coming to be considered the concern of the school.
Vocational work is sometimes concentrated in the high school, but this is reaching back scarcely far enough, since those who do not reach high school need help quite as much as the older ones, while those who expect to continue their training can do so better if they have some idea of the goal to be reached. ”

“ And in so far as all education is a preparation for such a life, all education is vocational. But within vocational education, which, as we have seen, is the whole of education, we may distinguish "general" education from "occupational" education; and the question we have to answer becomes, Ought education in the elementary school to be general or occupational? ”

“ 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. ”

“ All this applies with gradually lessened force to the other vocational schools, occupied with training for occupations that are of more substantial use to the community and less widely out of touch with the higher learning. ”

“ These consider that it is not sufficient that there be a close interlocking of the technical school and class and the factory. It is equally essential that vocational education, supported by public funds, shall be an integral part of the public-school system, of which it is indeed but a normal development, and therefore that we must have a unit and not a dual system. Only thus can we insure that vocational education will remain education at all and not just provide a training-school for docile labor as an annex and a convenient entrance hall to the factory system. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 higher intellectual education should grow out of and be earned by productive vocational training.
Hence our schools should be surrounded by lands of the best quality obtainable, plots of 10, 50, 100 and more acres. These lands should be the scene of labor that would be actually productive and not mere play.... In such a school the moral elements of labor should be primary, viz.: joy to the producer, through industry and art; perfect honesty in quality of material and character of workmanship; social coöperation, mutualism, and fellowship among the workers or students ”

“ The art work also broadens to take in designing and hand metal work. There is no break between the work of the grades and the high school in the vocational department, except that as the pupil grows older he naturally tends to specialize toward what is to be his life work. The vocational department is on exactly the same level as the academic, and the school takes the wholesome attitude that the boy who intends to be a carpenter or painter needs to stay in school just as many years as the boy who is going to college. The result is the very high per cent. of pupils who go on to higher schools. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is the opinion of the Survey Staff that a separate school in which direct training for the industrial trades is emphasized would result in more profitable use of the pupils' time and probably induce many of them to remain in school up to the apprentice entering age. Such a school, with a curriculum embracing vocational training for all the principal trades, would easily command an enrollment sufficient to justify the installation of a good shop equipment and the employment of a corps of teachers qualified by special training and experience for this kind of work. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In keeping with 508this attitude the vocational studies have come into great prominence during the past twenty years or more, for they are regarded as connecting the pupil with his future life-work. Shopwork, millinery, sewing, cooking, stenography, mechanical drawing, and a dozen other branches of vocational work have been brought into the school program. They are crowding the older high school studies, particularly the classical languages, into the background. ”

“ If one is content with a vocational [Pg 229] result in economic teaching, stopping short of the theoretical, philosophic outlook, more can be accomplished in a short time by the concrete method. But such teaching would seem to belong in a trade school rather than in a college of higher studies, and in any case should be given by a vocational teacher rather than by a specialist in social, or political, economy. ”

“ The foreign-born are taken out of the regular grades where they cannot fit, and are taught English by themselves first of all. The subnormal children are studied for latent vocational possibilities, and where minds are deficient, hands are the more carefully trained for suitable work. Courses are being revised with a view to holding in school the boy or girl who wants practical training for practical work. Secondary schools have taken their eyes off college requirements long enough to consider fitting the majority of their pupils to face life without the college. ”

“ But many other cities are realizing more and more strongly the necessity of linking their curriculum more closely to the lives of their pupils, by furnishing the children with a general training and outlook on life which will fit them for their place in the world as adults.269 Recently the Chicago public schools have been introducing vocational work in some of the school buildings, while technical high schools give courses that are vocational, besides work in trade-training. ”

“ The work, however, has hitherto been neglected except in the curriculum of schools which have vocational courses, so that only girls electing domestic arts have had the opportunity of doing it as a part of their school program, but there is no reason why it should be limited to these girls. Those who are taking academic courses in high schools—and they greatly outnumber the vocational students—should have a chance to render service through the schools. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In either case children must be led to decide upon the kind of work for which they are fitted before they leave the school.
Jesse B. Davis, Principal of the Central High School at Grand Rapids, furnishes a brilliant example of this vocational directing. Mr. Davis begins his work through the theme writing and oral composition of the seventh and eighth grades. The purpose of the pupils’ reading and discussion is to arouse their vocational ambition and to lead them to appreciate the value of further education and training for life. ”

“ 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 ”

“ In another course emphasis is placed upon work in industrial or household arts in the expectation that work in these fields may lead to a higher degree of efficiency in later vocational training, and possibly to the retention of children during this period who might otherwise see little or no meaning in the traditional school course. The best junior high schools are offering in the industrial course a variety of shop work. ”