Part 14 (2/2)
Chicago is fairly typical of a large industrial city, and there the City Club found after investigation that forty-three per cent. of the pupils who enter the first grade do not reach the eighth grade; forty-nine per cent. do not go through the eighth grade; eleven per cent. do not reach the sixth grade, and sixteen per cent. more do not go through the sixth grade.
A child who goes through the eighth grade has some sort of an equipment (on the literary side at least) with which to set out in life. He has learned how to read a book or a newspaper intelligently, and how to express himself in writing. If he is an average child he has acquired a good deal of useful information. He will remember much of what he has learned, and can turn what knowledge he has to some account. But the child who leaves school in the fifth or sixth grade, or, perhaps, even earlier, is apt to have no hold on what he has been taught, and it all too soon pa.s.ses from his memory, especially if he has in his home surroundings no stimulus to mental activity. Poor little thing! What a mockery to call this education, so little as it has fitted him to understand life and its problems! What he has learned out of school, meanwhile, as often as not, is harmful rather than beneficial.
The school door closes and the factory gate stands open wide. The children get their working papers, and slip out of the one, and through the other. At once, as we arrange matters, begins the fatal effect of handing over children, body and soul, into the control of industry. After a few days or weeks of wrapping candy, or carrying bundles or drawing out bastings, the work, whatever it is, becomes but a mere mechanical repet.i.tion. A few of the muscles only, and none of the higher faculties of observation, inquiry and judgment come into play at all, until, at the end of two years the brightest school-children have perceptibly lost ground in all these directions.
Two of the most precious years of life are gone. The little workers are not promoted from performing one process to another more difficult. They are as far as ever from any prospect of learning a trade in any intelligent fas.h.i.+on. The slack season comes on. The little fingers, the quick feet are not required any longer. Once more there is a scurrying round to look for a job, less cheerfully this time, the same haphazard applying at another factory for some other job, that like the first needs no training, like the first, leads nowhere, but also like the first, brings in three or four dollars a week, perhaps less. A teacher at a public-school social center inquired of a group of fifty girls, cracker-packers, garment-workers and bindery girls, how long each had been in her present situation.
Only one had held hers eighteen months. No other had reached a year in the same place. The average appeared to be about three or four months.
Worse still is another cla.s.s of blind-alley occupation. These are the street trades. The newsboy, the messenger and the telegraph boy often make good money to begin with. Girls, too, are being employed by some of the messenger companies. These are all trades, that apart from the many dangers inseparable from their pursuit, spell dismissal after two or three years at most, or as soon as the boy reaches the awkward age.
The experience gained is of no use in any other employment, and the unusual freedom makes the messenger who has outgrown his calling averse to the discipline of more regular occupations.
What a normal vocational education can be, and a normal development of occupation, is seen in the professions, such as law and medicine. The lawyer and the doctor are, it is true, confining themselves more and more to particular branches of their respective callings, and more and more are they becoming experts in the branch of law or medicine selected. The lawyer specializes in criminal cases or in damage suits, in commercial or const.i.tutional law; he is a pleader or a consultant.
The doctor may decide to be a surgeon, or an oculist, an anesthetist or a laboratory worker. And the public reap the benefit in more expert advice and treatment. But the likeness between such professional specialization and the dehumanizing and brain-deadening industrial specialization, which is the outgrowth of the factory system, is one in name only as was admirably put by Samuel Gompers, when presiding over the Convention of the American Federation of Labor at Toronto in 1909.
”It must be recognized that specialists in industry are vastly different from specialists in the professions. In the professions, specialists develop from all the elements of the science of the profession. Specialists in industry are those who know but one part of a trade, and absolutely nothing of any other part of it. In the professions specialists are possessed of all the learning of their art; in industry they are denied the opportunity of learning the commonest elementary rudiments of industry other than the same infinitesimal part performed by them perhaps thousands of times over each day.”
When the speaker emphasized these points of unlikeness, he was at the same time, and in the same breath, pointing out the direction in which industry must be transformed. Training in the whole occupation must precede the exercise of the specialty. Furthermore, as all professional training has its cultural side, as well as its strictly professional side, so the cultural training of the worker must ever keep step with his vocational training.
The motto of the school should be, ”We are for all,” for it is what teachers and the community are forever forgetting. Think of the innumerable foundations in the countries of the old world, intended for poor boys, which have been gradually appropriated by the rich. Of others again, supposed to be for both boys and girls, from which the girls have long been excluded. The splendid technical schools of this country, nominally open to all boys, at least, are by their very terms closed to the poor boy, however gifted. To give to him that hath is the tendency against which we must ever guard in planning and administering systems of public education. With many, perhaps most, educational inst.i.tutions, as they grow older, more and more do they incline to improve the standards of their work, technically speaking, but to bestow their benefits upon comparatively fewer and fewer recipients.
I would not be understood to deprecate original research, or the training of expert professional workers in any field, still less as undervaluing thoroughness in any department of teaching. But I plead for a sense of proportion, that as long as the world is either so poor or its wealth and opportunities so unequally distributed, a certain minimum of vocational training shall be insured to all.
We recognize the need for thorough training in the case of the coming original investigator, and the expert professional, and they form the minority. We do not recognize the at least equally pressing need for the thorough training of the whole working population, and these make up the vast majority. In so far as the pre-vocational work in primary schools, the manual work and technical training in high schools, the short courses, the extension lectures and the correspondence instruction of universities are meeting this urgent popular need, just so far are they raising all work to a professional standard, just so far are they bringing down to the whole nation the gifts of culture and expert training that have hitherto been the privilege of the few.
I have often noticed college professors, in turning over the leaves of a university calendar or syllabus of lectures, pa.s.s lightly over the pages recounting the provision made for short courses, summer schools, extension or correspondence work, and linger lovingly over the fuller and more satisfactory program outlined for the teacher or the professional worker. The latter is only apparently the more interesting. Take Wisconsin's College of Agriculture, for example. It sends forth yearly teachers and original investigators, but quite as great and important a product are the hundreds of farmers and farmers'
sons who come fresh from field and dairy to take their six weeks'
training in the management of cattle or of crops, and to field and dairy return, carrying away with them the garnered experience of others, as well as increased intelligence and self-reliance in handling the problems of their daily toil.
Anna Garlin Spencer, in her ”Woman and Social Culture,” points out how our much-lauded schools of domestic economy fail to benefit the schoolgirl, through this very overthoroughness and expensiveness how they are narrowed down to the turning out of teachers of domestic economy and diet.i.tians and other inst.i.tutional workers. Domestic economy as a wage-earning vocation cannot be taught too thoroughly, but what every girl is ent.i.tled to have from the public school during her school years is a ”short course” in the simple elements of domestic economy, with opportunity for practice. It is nothing so very elaborate that girls need, but that little they need so badly. Such a course has in view the girl as a homemaker, and is quite apart from her training as a wage-earner.
When again we turn to that side, matters are not any more promising.
If the boy of the working cla.s.ses is badly off for industrial training, his sister is in far worse case. Some provision is already made for the boy, and more is coming his way presently, but of training for the girl, which shall be adequate to fit her for self-support, we hear hardly anything. We have noted that women are already in most of the trades followed by men, and that the number of this army of working, wage-earning women is legion; that they are not trained at all, and are so badly paid that as underbidders they perpetually cut the wages of men. Nay, the young working-girl is even ”her own worst compet.i.tor--the compet.i.tor against her own future home, and as wife and mother she may have to live on the wage she herself has cheapened.”
And to face a situation like this are we making any adequate preparation? With how little we are satisfied, let me ill.u.s.trate.
In the address of Mrs. Raymond Robins as president of the National Women's Trade Union League of America before their Fourth Biennial Convention in St. Louis, in June, 1913, she told how ”in a curriculum of industrial education we find that under the heading 'Science' boys study elementary physics, mechanics and electricity, and girls the action of alkalies, and the removal of stains. While under 'Drawing'
we read, 'For boys the drawing will consist of the practical application of mechanical and free-hand work to parts of machinery, house plans, and so forth. Emphasis will be placed upon the reading of drawings, making sketches of machine parts quickly and accurately. For the girls the drawing will attempt to apply the simple principles of design and color to the work. The girls will design and stencil curtains for the dining-and sewing-rooms and will make designs for doilies for the table. They will plan attractive s.p.a.cing for tucks, ruffles and embroidery for underwear.' Women have entered nearly three hundred different occupations and trades in America within the past quarter of a century, three hundred trades and occupations, and they are to qualify for these by learning to s.p.a.ce tucks attractively.”
In the very valuable Twenty-fifth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, published in 1910, which is devoted to industrial education, there is but one chapter dealing with girls' industrial schools, in itself a commentary upon the backwardness of the movement for industrial education where girls are affected. It is true that the schools included under this heading do not account for all the school trade-training given to girls in this country, for the cla.s.sification of industrial schools, where there is no general system, is very difficult, and under no plan of tabulation can there be an all-inclusive heading for any one type. For instance a school for colored girls might be cla.s.sified either as a school for Negroes or as a school for girls, as a public school, a philanthropic school, or an evening school, and a school giving trade-training to boys might also include girls. The writer of this most exhaustive report, however, states definitely that ”trade schools for girls are rare, and even schools offering them industrial courses as a part of their work are not common.”
It is impossible to consider vocational training without bearing in mind the example of Germany. Germany has been the pioneer in this work and has laid down for the rest of us certain broad principles, even if there are in the German systems some elements which are unsuitable to this country. These general principles are most clearly exemplified in the schools of the city of Munich. Indeed, when people talk of the German plan, they nearly always mean the Munich plan. What it aims at is:
1. To deal in a more satisfactory way with the eighty or ninety per cent. of children who leave school for work at fourteen, and to bridge over with profit alike to the child, the employer and the community the gap between fourteen and sixteen which is the unsolved riddle of educators everywhere today.
2. To retain the best elements of the old apprentices.h.i.+p system, though in form so unlike it. The boy (for it mainly touches boys) is learning his trade and he is also working at his trade, and he has cultural as well as industrial training, and this teaching he receives during his working hours and in his employer's time.
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