Part 10

The Gary plan, on the other hand, prepares for a genuinely vocational life. It views the world outside the school not as a collection of trades but as a community, a network of occupations and interests, of interweaving services, intellectual, administrative, manual. It sees the individual as a citizen who contributes his share to the community and pays for the things he enjoys. The school itself is organized as a community, self-supporting industrially and as varied in its work, study and play as is the larger community. The industrial work is made an indispensable part of the maintenance and enhancement of this school community life. The Gary child begins in his third or fourth school year as helper in a shop or laboratory that interests him. If he is to work at a trade after he leaves school, he gets a long and thorough training under real workmen in the school shops engaged in the repair and maintenance of the school-plant. He is at no time called upon to choose between the “academic” and the “industrial.” His work is a focusing of all the interests of the school, and the attitudes developed in the school are bound to be carried into productive life and to give a new setting to the business of making a livelihood. Science, apart from the light it throws upon the artisan’s trade, is bound to mean something to him, for in the Gary school it has answered his questions about the physical world around him. History and geography and sociology and economics are likely to mean something because they have answered questions about the social institutions and the relations of men. Art and music will continue to interest him because they have been an integral part of the school life. The Gary plan would tend to produce not only a skilled workman but a critical citizen, ready, like the energetic professional man, to affect the standards and endeavors of his profession and the community life.

The Ettinger plan is as economically unsound as it is pedagogically unsound. It requires special teachers, and expensive shops which are unproductive. Without state or federal subsidies, the cost of any extensive or even adequate industrial training in trade-school or elementary school will continue to be prohibitive. The Gary plan, which connects the school shops directly with the repair and maintenance of the school-plant, demands and can afford a much greater variety of shops than the ordinary school. And since the workmen-teachers earn their salaries by their work, the children get their industrial training practically without cost to the community. By the Gary plan the vocational training features are only practicable if all the other liberally varied “cultural” features are put into operation at the same time. This effectually prevents that “exploitation” of the children which its opponents fear because the young workers get their training as “apprentices” in the school shops.

Many who admit the superior social aims of the Gary plan are inclined to feel that the practical results of the two plans will not be radically different. But the Gary plan and the Ettinger plan are not merely two different ways of reaching the same end. They not only involve different conceptions of the school and of industrial society, but they are bound to turn out different kinds of people.

The Ettinger plan is dangerous because it is typical of most schemes now being put forward by the advocates of industrial education. These plans are concerned neither with genuine educational interests nor with genuine industrial interests, but only with the interest of the employer. No person who feels that the public schools should train critical citizens who will have something to say to the industrial system into which they go, and not mere docile workers, counting socially no more than their tools, will fail to realize the vast importance that the Gary plan should prevail over all these schemes.

XXIII

ORGANIZED LABOR ON EDUCATION

At a recent labor conference in New York City, May, 1916, called to present a program for the local public schools, Mr. Gompers expressed himself as open-minded towards the Gary plan which is about to be extended to thirty-five more New York schools. This open-mindedness of Mr. Gompers is in welcome and significant contrast to the attitude taken by some of the smaller leaders in the city, who have apparently tried to line up organized labor with a personal political machine and with reactionary schoolmen in obstructing the reorganization of the elementary schools. But organized labor has better business than opposing educational reform, and Mr. Gompers’s remarks, made with full responsibility and in direct opposition to the thinly-veiled partisan spirit of the conference, suggest that the responsible leaders of labor are willing to take a more enlightened stand in this important movement.

Organized labor has repeatedly gone on record in favor of a public school system which will train a labor citizenry so versatile and intelligent as to be able to protect itself from exploitation and the hazards of our social shiftlessness. It has demanded that vocational teaching be kept intimately related to life, so that children come out from the school neither helpless unskilled workers nor narrow machine-tenders, but potential citizens acquainted with the backgrounds of their crafts, with the significance of the labor movement and the institutions and movements of the world about them. Labor above all classes has a vital interest in an education for all children which acknowledges the full intellectual and social meanings of industrial processes and occupations. The education that labor desires is one which will give, particularly to those who engage in industrial callings, the desire and ability to share in social control, and to become masters of their industrial fate.

Now organized labor must be rapidly coming to see that this demand will never be satisfied by the conventional type of city public school. A traditional school founded on the bookish education of a leisure class can never be made into a pre-vocational school that will give power and dignity to labor, without a fundamental transformation of the present spirit, subject matter and teaching methods. 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. Except for the few, industrial training will seem sheer drudgery, for it will have its roots in no interests and powers developed in earlier years. Pre-vocational education must mean something more than a mere sop to the motor-minded boys and girls who are restless with their books and are on the verge of leaving school for work. Such training, if it is to mean anything, must be woven in as an organic part of the school course. The entire elementary school could be a general, free, spontaneous, amateur pre-vocational school, where in direct contact with machines and industrial processes as well as books, with gardens and gymnasiums as well as laboratories and kitchens, with tools and print and pottery shops and drawing and music studios, children might have their imaginations stirred, try out their busy hands on things, and gradually sift out of the variety the interests that they can lay hold on with some promise of creative use. The school might be a place where play passed insensibly into work, and aimless experiment into purposeful construction.

Most of the current criticism of the public schools arises from the rapidly growing conviction that only in such a school will the modern city child have a chance to be educated in any way which will meet the demands in industrial or commercial life that will be made upon him. There is danger in current educational experiments that we become too easily satisfied with the mere addition of desirable courses, without at the same time transforming the school so that the new work is organically assimilated. Labor cannot be content with the school reform which many cities are adopting in the introduction of vocational courses merely in the upper grades. Such a postponement means an invidious class-distinction in those grades between the children who are going on to academic work and those who are going on to industrial work. It broadens the gulf between labor and leisure rather than diminishes it. Labor should be the first to protest against these “pre-vocational courses,” “junior high school plans,” as they are variously called. A school which consists merely of six years of bookish schooling with trade-learning and athletics tacked on at the top would merely intensify the evils under which labor now suffers. It would produce mechanical drudges. It would almost guarantee that industrially exploitable horde of young workers the creation of which organized labor so much fears.

In advocating such a system the lesser labor chiefs in New York have been very badly advised. The program of “immediate demands,” put forth under Mr. Gompers’s nose with a great flourish of the rights of labor, is not only unprogressive but actually reactionary. It is exactly the kind of specious program that the narrow-minded employer might demand who wished a docile but intelligent labor force trained at the public expense. In whose interest does labor demand the “immediate elimination from the course of study of any activity which takes away from the essentials and fundamentals of education in the elementary schools?” To eliminate organized play, auditorium dramatics, shopwork, gardening, dancing, etc., is surely the best way to drive children out of school, or to train them into mere appendages to machines. What labor needs is the most varied kind of work-study-and-play school, where imagination and interest are awakened. Yet here we find a conference on organized labor and education demanding simply more of the old kind of traditional schools! What good will it do to have more school buildings, more teachers, more pay for teachers, even more night-schools and playgrounds, if the schools merely pursue the old limited grind? Labor needs a school enriched in opportunity and vitalized with the modern spirit of “learning by doing,” yet all it can think of to demand is “a seat for every child”! And to ram home to the public a sense of its straitened vision, this conference records its “emphatic protest against any further extension of the Gary plan.”

Now opposition to the Gary plan may be a useful attitude for the lesser labor leaders who are playing for political stakes, but we cannot believe that this is the attitude of the intelligent elements in the labor movement. For what the Gary plan does is exactly to make possible for the first time on a large public scale this greatly enriched elementary school which labor needs for the realization of its own expressed educational ideals. The broad curriculum, the flexibility which adapts the school to the needs of every child, the interweaving work, study and play, transform the traditional school into a kind of child-community, where children throughout the course are laying the rudiments of their vocations. They have a chance from the early years, by trial and error, by experiment and realization, to find out what they can do and what they cannot do. To quote Superintendent Wirt, the Gary school is educating them just as the home, shop and school teacher educated the children of earlier American days. No formal pre-vocational course begun in the seventh or eighth year can do what this simple intimate contact with things and processes does. In a sense, industrial education may begin in the Gary school as soon as the small child is interested in going into the school-shops or laboratories as helper or observer. All the activities may be tested in the same way. The school is thoroughly democratic because the opportunities, bookish, manual, artistic, are open on equal terms to all the children. For labor to oppose the Gary plan means that labor is suicidally opposing the very kind of school that holds out the most opportunity for an enriched education for its children.

Mr. Gompers and the other responsible leaders of organized labor could do nothing more important than make an immediate and thorough study of the educational promise of the Gary school. If organized labor were to put itself enthusiastically behind the Gary plan, it would have at once an enlightened policy on elementary education which would effectively prevent any insidious exploitation of the movement. It would be well if the responsible leaders would repudiate these lesser labor chiefs who manipulate education for political purposes. The time has come for a bold and progressive stand.

XXIV

EDUCATION FOR WORK

The urgency of vocational education in this country has been immensely reinforced during the past few years by the rapidly growing social solicitude for child welfare. Child-labor laws, compulsory education, minimum wage, children’s courts, welfare bureaus, devised primarily as mere protective agencies for the weaker and less self-defensible members of the community, are now suddenly seen to involve a host of positive social responsibilities. We are recognizing that the state has a duty not only to save the younger generation from exploitation, premature labor and demoralizing environments, but also to give it every possible opportunity to be trained for an effective vocation. In particular, the recent raising of the age limit for child labor in many of the states, by keeping in school thousands of children who would otherwise have passed out to work, has put a great strain upon the public school. The challenge so far has done little else than make evident an alarming inadequacy of the present type of school to train children for the work which they will shortly be called upon to do. The school systems of the large northern cities are having thrust upon them great numbers of children for whose education, in this new sense of the word, they are unprepared. And the burden and urgency is one that will increase rather than diminish.

This is one of the lessons of a document like the recent admirable report of the Minneapolis Survey for Vocational Education, made last year under the auspices of the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education. It would be difficult to advise reading more important for educator, employer and employee than this cross-section of the skilled-labor life of a great American city, looked at with a view to vocational guidance. In Minneapolis all the conditions were at their best for such a social laboratory experiment. The rapid growth of manufacturing and the unusually high proportion of skilled industries make the demand for the training of workers paramount. The stringent state laws require attendance at the school until the age of sixteen or the completion of the entire elementary course. The city has a school system of high traditional excellence. Clearly all the factors that would stimulate a campaign for vocational education are here in their most exacting form.

The analysis here given of the training which the manufacturing and mechanical industries require for their various skilled positions, the training which public schools and special schools are purporting to give, the increase in resources which school and shop will have to make to meet the social demands made upon them--all this will be found typical in greater or less degree throughout the country. 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. For above the earlier years of rudimentary schooling there has been superimposed a bookish school which is really a pre-vocational school for the professions or for domestic leisure. The boys and girls whose futures were to be professional and domestic had the benefit of the public school. The vast majority, the motor-minded and those whose aptitudes were not intellectual, very properly and automatically left this bookish school as soon as they had obtained their rudimentary general education. When the state suddenly refuses to allow these children to leave the school until they have finished the elementary course, the school system is faced with the necessity of broadening itself from a narrow pre-vocational school for the professions into a pre-vocational school for all the industries and arts of the modern community. The smatterings of wood-working and domestic science which the city schools have introduced are shown not to have broadened the school in the least. Even the technical courses in the high schools have quite failed to meet the problem. Of the recent graduates from these courses in the Minneapolis schools it is shown that one-half went directly to college, only one-tenth passing into occupations for which the course could in any way be regarded as preparatory. Most of these students, moreover, went into drafting rooms. It may be said therefore that to the training of the great artisan class of such a modern and progressive city the public schools have contributed practically nothing. A typically American progressive school system with all its technical and manual accessories is shown functioning at its very highest limit as a pre-vocational school, not for skilled labor, but for the professions and what the Survey suggestively calls the “commissioned officers of industry.”

The industries themselves, however, are found to be no more adequately engaged than the school in training their own workers. Apprenticeship has all but died out, and among neither employers nor employees is there any enthusiasm for its return. Yet, although all the trades require a constant supply of trained workers, no substitute has yet been found for apprenticeship. The movement for industrial education has at times seemed like an attempt of employers to get their skilled workers trained at public expense. The effort to establish separate boards in the cities for industrial education threatened to limit such training to the narrow skill which each industry would demand and to supply employers with apprentices at no cost to the industry itself. Fortunately the Minneapolis Survey warns against this narrow and sinister conception of vocational education. Industrial interests cannot shirk the responsibility for the special training of their workers. The rapid growth of “corporation schools” shows that at least the most prosperous and highly skilled shops and factories are accepting this responsibility. All the employer has a right to demand is that the school give the young worker a general pre-vocational training which will introduce him to the special trade work. The graduate of the elementary school should have been through a well rounded course which not only cultivated a general intelligence, but discovered, by submitting him to many different kinds of activity, his particular flair or knack, and thus enlisted his interest in further training for a particular vocation.

The elementary school should, in other words, be a general pre-vocational school, where the boy or girl could get a bearing towards every type of vocation. The Survey strikingly confirms the far-sighted vision of William Wirt and his unspecialized and varied Gary school in which the children from their earliest years are testing out their powers in shop and foundry and laboratory and studio and classroom. “What is needed,” it says, “is not a course in special woodworking--the extent of manual work in most elementary schools of the present time--but rather organized training in practical arts which will include a variety of experiences fundamental to the life of the community. Woodwork, metal work, printing and bookbinding, clay modeling, concrete and electrical work, are some of the industries which give an opportunity for experience in certain fundamental processes which are most valuable to boys without respect to the occupation in which they may later engage.”

In the last year of the elementary school, or in the years of the junior high school, more specialized technical courses could be introduced. For the advanced work, more and more responsibility should be thrown on the shop, the school providing the background of theory, the shop the practical application, and the student alternating between shop and school as in the so-called coöperative course. For the workers already engaged, part-time continuation classes are advised, with “dull-season classes,” and evening trade-extension courses. For these the various special schools in the city, commercial and technical, could coöperate. In this correlation of shop and school a new form of apprenticeship would grow up. The Survey reports trade agreements already worked out in several trades which provide that after two years of high-school instruction in practical, technical and academic subjects, the worker will be placed in the occupation at wages equal to those of a third-year apprentice. The agreements require the approval of the union, and the employers agree to use the school as the first source of supply in engaging new workers.

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. The education of such leaders will really be the goal of organized vocational education. As the industries, trades and occupations become more technical and more scientifically managed, the demand for administrative, supervisory, directive and planning officers taken from the ranks is constantly widening. Efficient management is becoming recognized as almost the most important factor in production, and management will be the reward for intelligence and skill. Until we have an educational system which in coöperation with shop and factory gives fullest opportunities for each child in the schools to work towards qualifying as such a “non-commissioned officer” in some occupation of the social army, we shall not have our democratic school or our framework for the future democratization of industry. Nor shall we be able to attack those mountainous problems of unskilled labor which no system of vocational training can touch.

XXV

CONTINUATION SCHOOLS