down to the needs of boys in their earlier teens without much adaptation.. However, these institutions have served and are serving a very real need in their vocational preparation of mature students. They suggest the need, in many communities, for similar institutions in which work may be offered following that of the industrial courses in the senior high school. For those desiring preparation for entrance to the more highly skilled types of mechanical work we have very few institutions under public support. The "Middle Technical Schools" of Europe serve as excellent models for this development in America. In a considerable number of fields America must still go to Europe for highly skilled workmen. In almost any manufacturing city in this country with a population of over 100,000 not having a privately supported mechanics' institute, a school of this type would be an investment that would yield substantial dividends to the community. PRESENT TENDENCIES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION At present, the whole trend in American public education is to relate the work in the school more closely to the significant aspects of life outside of the school. The greater enrichment of the elementary school curriculum is to be attained by making its problems and interests a true reflection of the problems and activities of everyday life, vocational, civic, and social. In just the measure that school activities are made representative of vocational activities will school performance become an index of probable vocational performance and the school work itself a practical means of vocational guidance. With the possibility for work in the junior high school that appeals to the vocational aptitudes and interests of pupils, and work that is so closely related to vocational needs that its worth is appreciated by parents, the holding or retaining influence of the school will be markedly increased. With the courses giving more and more time each succeeding year to preparation for entrance upon work with advanced standing and increased earning capacity, no child will wish to withdraw, and no parent will permit withdrawal before the work is completed except for the most pressing economic necessity. By safeguarding all vocational courses with supplementary work providing adequate training for citizenship and for the profitable use of leisure, the increased individual efficiency of the workers and the consequent increase of social efficiency, wealth, and solidarity will make the development of vocational education a public investment which will bring large economic and social returns. In vocational education, the American public school has a large opportunity and responsibility in the further development of efficient democracy. Until its offerings for the preparation of workers in non-professional vocations are as adequate as for those in the professions, it will fail in its avowed purpose to provide equality of opportunity. MANUAL LABOR AND THE ACHIEVEMENT OF ΝΑΤΙΟΝAL IDEALS BY B. H. CROCHERON, M. S. A., We are emerging from our first conquest: we have conquered the lands. Farms stretch from coast to coast so that desert and forest push back to the corners of the continent. Our second conquest will be of machines. Already the wheels of industry turn almost of themselves while unlimited power from the turbines streams over wires to distant cities. So great have been our conquests, so many are the powers harnessed to industrial life that the casual onlooker may be brought to conclude industrial labor has been abolished by the accumulated knowledge and surplus property laid up for us by generations of the past and present. The man who lives in cities is likely to travel little and to see little because his routine by its security and monotony starves out all adventurous instinct. So the city man, traveling between his home and the office or store, complacently dwells upon this as the age of the mind and of machines. He charms himself into the belief that the time is here when man will no longer earn his living by the sweat of his brow but rather will sit in Jovian contemplation of a perfected mechanism which will turn the wheels of agriculture, of commerce, of manufacture and of trade. THE MASSES LIVE BY COMMON TOIL The truth is that the world still labors by muscle not by mind. The farmer tills his lands from early morning till late at evening, trudging home at sunset wet with sweat. The miner astride his quivering drill knocks down his tons of ore and gasping comes up from his shift to change sodden clothes for dry. The mill worker and mechanic with flying hands and fingers beat through the day and at night go out the gates tired of muscle and of brain. It would be well if those street-car and subway philosophers who derive their image of America from across desk tops and the penny papers could make a tour of adventure and of exploration to the mills of their town, the farms that lie about it and the mines in the nearby hills. They would there find that manual labor is the means by which America lives and that men not machines are still the contact points with nature. And it is well that it is so. A new and terrible degeneracy would no doubt creep in when the world sat down to watch nature do its work. For man, mechanics is only an assistant, not a substitute. Manual labor must remain the heritage of the masses, their birthright to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. THE SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF MANUAL LABOR WELL DONE Education must emphasize the need of manual labor and the desirability of doing that labor so well that it will produce abundantly for the needs of the individual and society. In the last century of America formal education has become universal but it still clings to the ideals of the fortunate few to whom it was originally restricted; those members of the non-laboring class who were to do the planning, not the working, for the race. Education must aim at the heart of the problem by teaching that manual labor is necessary and therefore honorable and that education is a means whereby manual labor becomes more effective. Educators have long embraced the theory that the province of education is to deal with higher things than mere labor; that labor must come soon enough for the masses of children; and that, therefore, the brief time in schools must be made a vacation period for the hands while the brain takes its short and final exercise from whence, perforce, it must come to rest when school days end and work begins. It seemed to them imperative that the children of the masses should participate for a time in that realm of thought and of scholasticism to which they will probably never have an opportunity to return. As a result some complained that schools were incompetent, that they had no relation to real life and that educators were theorists and dreamers. Meanwhile there sprung up a host of office boys, clerks, odd-job men, hangers-on and others who had come through the school system to find the world a place wherein they were required to do something for a living and to do it by hand as well as by brain. OCCUPATIONAL ELEMENTS IN THE CURRICULUM Only lately have persons grudgingly admitted that schools should have some relation to occupation; that schools should be the training ground for work as well as for thought; and that manual labor on farms, in mines, in mills and shops must be the heritage of the many who attend the public schools. In response to the demand for this occupational work, courses in manual training, home economics and agriculture have crept into the school systems and some persons are bold enough to term these courses "vocational." In truth few of them are yet really vocational because they do not train for a vocation. Rather do they seem to give to the student a very limited amount of manual dexterity and thought familiarity in these subjects. Manual training courses in the school do not train mechanics, home economics courses do not train housekeepers, nor do agricultural courses train farmers. Much manual training still putters with tiny tables and jig-saw work. Many home economics courses peter out in sticky candies badly made and impossible aprons poorly sewn. Most agricultural courses specialize in tiny gardens and never get out to the fields and farms. Some of the best vocational and industrial teaching in America was the earliest. When General Armstrong created the first real industrial school in America at Hampton in 1868 and thereby cut the Gordian knot of education, he established a school which was truly vocational in that he trained men and women for daily work and turned out therefrom a finished product. From uneducated labor Hampton makes farmers, bricklayers, carpenters and mechanics. Hampton is a vocational school. Such schools are only possible, however, where they are regarded as the essential form of education by those who are to be educated and by those who have the schools in charge. For real vocational education in manual pursuits there is not yet wide demand from the common folk or from the educators. Both the people and the pedagogues have received their education in schools of the old academic type; they are therefore likely to regard the old type which trained away from labor as the only real education. Many schools have been founded upon the fond dream that they were to train for life's elemental occupations only to find their trend changed by the men who had their direction or by the people among whom they were to work. TRADITION AND PEDANTRY IN EDUCATION The truth is that the mass of persons whom manual schools would benefit do not want such schools. They still desire to have their children study in the direction which to them means learning. 1 |