Chapter 10

VOCATIONAL GUIDANCE

Very few of the army of young people who become wage earners each year take up the occupations in which they engage as the result of any conscious selection of their own or of their parents. They drift into some job aimlessly and ignorantly, following the line of least resistance, driven or led by the accidents and exigencies of gaining a livelihood. They possess no accurate or comprehensive knowledge of the advantages and disadvantages of different types of wage earning occupations, and frequently take up work for which they are entirely unfitted or which holds little future beyond a bare livelihood.

THE WORK OF THE VOCATIONAL COUNSELOR

The plan now followed in the technical high schools of the city, by which one teacher in the school specially qualified for such work is charged with the duty of advising pupils who leave school and aiding them in securing desirable employment, could be adapted to the junior high school, where the need for service of this kind is even greater than in the technical high schools. Such work requires men who have had some contact with industrial conditions, and who possess sound judgment, common sense, and a fairly comprehensive knowledge of the local industries. If the curriculum embraces the course in "Industrial Information" suggested in a previous chapter, the teacher of this subject might well be designated as vocational counselor for the boys in the school. A course similar in nature should be provided for the girls and a woman teacher selected to advise them when they leave school. Considerable difficulty probably will be experienced in securing women teachers competent to assume this task, but any wide-awake teacher who will devote some attention to published studies of industrial conditions and get in touch with the local organizations engaged in the investigation of wage earning employments, such as the Consumers' League and the Girls' Vocation Bureau, can soon acquire a fund of information that will enable her to offer valuable suggestions and advice to girls who expect to become wage earners.

The vocational counselor must guard against conventional thinking and the mass of "inspirational" nonsense which forms the main contribution to the vocational guidance of youth provided in the average schoolroom. The ideals of success usually held up before school children seem to have been drawn from a mixture of Sunday school literature and the prospectuses of efficiency bureaus. Boiled down the rules prescribed for their attainment are two: first, "Be good;" and second, "Get ahead." The pupils are told about well-known men who became famous or rich, usually rich, by practicing these rules. Occasionally there is some prattle about the "dignity of labor," as a rule meaningless in the light of our current ideas of success. We do not think of a well-paid artisan as "successful." His success begins when he is promoted to office work, or becomes a foreman.

The inherent difficulty with ideals of success which demand that the worker become a boss of somebody else is that the world of industry needs only a relatively small number of bosses. Theoretically it is possible for any individual to reach the eminence of boss-ship. In real life less than one-tenth of the boys who enter industrial employment can rise above the level of the journeyman artisan, at least before later middle age, because only about that proportion of bosses are needed.

The task of the vocational counselor will consist in putting the pupil's feet on the first steps of the ladder rather than showing him rosy pictures of the top of it. For the great majority the top means no more than decent wages. This, after all, is a worthy ambition, frequently requiring the worker's best efforts for its realization.

THE GIRLS' VOCATION BUREAU

The Girls' Vocation Bureau, for the placement of girls and women in wage-earning employment, has been in operation about six years. At present it is under the general charge of the state and municipal employment bureau, although part of the funds for the support of the bureau is raised through private subscription. From July, 1914, to July, 1915, the Bureau secured positions for nearly 11,000 girls and women. Of these approximately 12 per cent were girls under 21. In many instances only temporary employment is secured, although efforts are made to place the girls in permanent positions. More girls are placed in office positions than in any other line of work, but a considerable proportion take employment in factories, domestic service, restaurants, and stores.

A careful record is kept of each applicant's qualifications, home conditions, the names of employers, etc. The Bureau endeavors to keep in touch with the girls after they are placed through follow-up reports and visits by members of the office staff or by volunteer investigators.

This spring every school in the city was visited by representatives of the Bureau in the endeavor to interest principals in the work of placement, and arrangements were made for sending to the Bureau lists of the girls who were expected to leave school permanently. This effort met with slight success, as only about 100 girls were reported from all the schools in the city, although the number of girls leaving school each year from the elementary grades alone is over 2,000. In all cases the girls were visited by a representative of the Bureau and urged to return to school, or if they were determined to seek employment the advantages of registering in the Bureau were brought to their attention.

It is to be hoped that more effective coöperation between the Bureau and the schools can be established and that plans for a placement bureau for boys similar in method and aim to the Girls' Bureau may be realized. The matter of placement is the most difficult part of the vocational counselor's duties, and an arrangement whereby the vocational guidance departments of the various schools might serve as feeders to a central placement bureau would probably in the long run give the best results. Both guidance and placement are new things in the public schools and efficient methods of administration can be worked out only through trial and experiment.