INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION AND DEPENDENCY
Commons, John R.
Industrial Education and Dependency Change in System Needed To Offset the Monotony of Modern Industry and To Enable Workmen To Find and Keep Their Jobs By JOHN R. COMMONS Professor of Political...
...They do not even know how to hunt a job, much less to keep it...
...THE law does not as yet apply, in its compulsory attendance requirements, to children who work at home, (although it does apply to domestic service), nor to children op the farm...
...This is the one great and pressing problem ahead of the continuation schools in this state—howto get and keep the right kind of teachers...
...The excuse which some employers have offered SOCIAL progress does not spring suddenly, like a full-grown talking machine, from the forehead of Edison...
...But this modern apprenticeship cannot go very far...
...These are the machines that the state must de-- pend upon for its future food, clothing, and shelter, for its politics, its prosperity, and its power of endurance...
...Three million people cannot figure out together in advance just what they all want...
...Every local industrial board .could well afford at its own expense, to give to its teachers, who have had shop experience, a summer course every year in that school...
...The boys make more money than their fathers who have gone through the same machine and so their fathers get the pauper's idea of living on the wages of their children...
...So it is...
...If they can build up a skeleton framework of, Bay, a hundred foremen, superintendents, skilled mechanics, and efficiency experts, who stay with the establishment permanently, then they are independent of the five hundred machine hands and common laborers that pass through their shops like sub-conscious machines...
...A more rational excuse would be that the kind of teaching secured does not help the boys to become more intelligent workmen...
...Failure of the Common Schools •X'HE common schools in America started on* * some sixty or seventy years ago with the idea of making the common laborer and the working man intelligent workers...
...Further, the employer's apprenticeship system really enlarges the evils which it should reduce...
...Theirs was the artistic and romantic point of view...
...The foreman must have output—he puts up with beginners and learners only because he must...
...This teacher is what would be called "practical...
...If this is true, then the blame is on the teachers in the continuation schools...
...A shop of 5,000 men will have only a hundred or two hundred apprentices...
...To meet this, a wave of manual training passed over the schools...
...At sixteen or seventeen they are put to work feeding a semi-automatic machine...
...Instead of thousands of intelligent boys and young men in their shops, from whom to select, the employers are compelled to resort to engineering colleges, and then to start their young engineers on a course of shop-apprenticeship...
...Even then, there are many other things that are also necessary— a state-wide system of employment offices to reduce the time lost between jobs—to bring employes to the jobs they are fitted for—to equalize employment in dull seasons and busy seasons—to shorten hours of labor for monotonous and specialized work...
...Consequently, the modern apprentice, if he becomes more than a multiplied machine-hand or an imitative journeyman, must understand the machines and the forces of nature that he is charged with directing...
...Instead of turning out teachers for the common schools, they turned crat scientists, engineers, and experts...
...He disregards the fact that, with his specialized machinery, he does not ^ant intelligence, except in his foreman and master mechanics...
...This would be the case if all boys under twenty-one were by law treated as apprentices...
...They quit on the least provocation...
...Here is a kind of raw material taken in every day and a kind of half-finished product poured out, that means more for the state of Wisconsin than its inflow of pig iron and its outflow of machinery...
...That ten years from now they will be loafing in the back part of th...
...Industrial Education and Dependency Change in System Needed To Offset the Monotony of Modern Industry and To Enable Workmen To Find and Keep Their Jobs By JOHN R. COMMONS Professor of Political Economy, University of Wisconsin WITH the growth of factory centers the question of industrial education has become one of increasing importance...
...second, "Harmony,H or "the consistency of likeness...
...It is the mind, not the hand, that they are teaching...
...but they gradually slipped off Into experiment stations, engineering colleges, the higher colleges of agriculture, or the usual academic colleges of letters and arts...
...for thus evading it, is that they do not purpose to pay their boys for something they do not earn—they will not pay apprentices for going to school...
...or else they get teachers who only know how to teach a trade, just as the old-style journeyman taught the apprentice to imitate himself...
...Industrial education id (me of tho essential things needed to offset...
...If the boy and the girl are to learn how to design and appreciate a beautiful product, they must learn it outside the factory...
...A continuation school does not always need machinery and tools, like a manual training school—indeed, the great continuation schools of Magdeburg and Berlin in Germany have no machine equipment whatever...
...Lack of Intelligence in Mass of Workers...
...It is built on theories of mathematics and mechanics that have accumulated since the time of Archimedes...
...Worst of all, other employers "steal" the apprentices, and the company finds itself educating mechanics for the use of its competitors...
...Apprentices also are required to attend, but employers can evade the apprenticeship part of the law by refusing' to make apprenticeship contracts, or by Canceling contracts already made...
...Let us measure it by the thousands of men and women turned out and placed upon the labor market...
...We may expect that when teachers of continuation schools have learned to teach the theory and science which modern apprenticeship requires, then all the boys and girls up to eighteen and perhaps even to twenty-one years of age shall be declared by law to be apprentices...
...The problem is so well outlined by so able an authority that we have decided to reprint the entire article,—Editor's Note...
...But it reaches such a small number of people, $nd is so remote from the great current of factory industry that it needs only to be mentioned to show its inadequacy...
...If we want to see the industries of Wisconsin, let us begin not at the factory or shop or farm, but at the free employment office in Milwaukee...
...It would be far better for the boys to get lower wages if therewith they get industrial education...
...Consequently, in the third place, if the apprentice studies different plans of shop organization, book-keeping, eost-keeping, efficiency, labor problems, and so on, he is thinking out the elements of accounting, government, political economy, and even psychology, aa applied to the business of which be is a part...
...It developes the intelligence of a few, and makes it less necessary to develop the intelligence of the great mass of machine-hands and common laborers...
...He keeps on—his mind shrinks— he never thinks of his work unless something goes wrong—he thinks of other things—his childhood, his former playmates— his days and nights of fun and wild oats—anything to keep his mind off the deadly monotony...
...Their high wages are not due to their skill or speed, but to their disgust...
...Hence, large employers, who can afford it, have set up apprenticeship schools in their establishments, where the apprentice puts in part time along with his shop work...
...You can measure it by the rate of pay...
...Neither leads to that combination of the shop and the school that should distinguish tho method of the continuation school...
...It merely means that he must think over again and understand the principles that philosophers, scientists, engineers, and inventors of the past have embodied in the workshop of the present...
...The modern factory is indeed the forces of nature obeying the stored-up thought of man...
...Every town that starts a school and gets a full attendance, thereby gets a share of the state fund, and the effort in some of the towns is directed more to forcing large numbers of children into the schools from the homes as well as from the factories, in order to qualify for the state fund, than it is to making sure that they will get the right kind of instruction after they are forced in...
...Numbers of "mechanics' colleges," "mechanics' institutes," "agricultural colleges," and so-called colleges of "learning and labor" were started and were expected to teach the boys to become intelligent farmers and mechanics...
...Outside tho towns it is the problem of the rural schools in agricultural education...
...that if the machine hand stops to think about his work, he promptly abhors it...
...The Blind Alley Job THE law of 1911, amended in 1917, requires boys and girls under seventeen to attend school eight hours a week in the daytime...
...When the employer starts off in the schooling business, he gets no further than the trade school...
...This does not mean that he must be a scientist, engineer, chemist, or biologist...
...Thus the evils create each other in a vicious circle...
...So far, the apprentice is merely a machine-haxxL Hia apprenticeship differs only from that of the other machine hands, in that he learns the different machines in the same shop, while they learn them by traveling from shop to shop...
...first, to make the intellectual and artistic side of industry reach every boy and girl, instead of a few apprentices...
...In many cases they lack even the essentials of common school education which parochial or common schools should have given them before they attempt to qualify for the industrial essentials...
...No wonder that manual train...
...Other boys have got the speed there...
...What shall we say of a factory that hires and discharges a thousand men and boys in one year in order to keep up a steady force of three hundred...
...This movement jeally accomplished the object intended...
...This separates out a few with the intelligent and artistic work, and leaves the thousands with only the manual and monotonous work...
...He thinks first of all of the dearth of skilled mechanics for his shop, or of the short supply of skillful cooks and domestic servants for his household...
...In two months they have learned the job and get the speed...
...They went back to the time of small industries, when each worker made a complete article and had an interest and an ambition in his work...
...But the amazing stupidity of these workers, as it shows itself at the employment office, disqualifies them even for finding jobs at machinery or common labor...
...But the modern apprentice works with machines...
...In fact, the continuation school, in Wisconsin, is the first step in recognizing the most important need of both modern industry and modern education—the need of making apprenticeship universal...
...We are accustomed to measure prosperity by the millions of dollars' worth of cheese and butter and machinery and leather put out and placed on the market...
...The employer ascribes their instability and impudence to their laziness, intemperance, vice...
...One is half-baked philosophy—the other is rule-of-thumb...
...The Girl Worker...
...It will afford a wifler range of selection for the mechanics, foremen and intelligent leaders in its industries...
...The first thing is to go slow on numbers and, above all else, get teachers...
...To the boy of sixteen, twenty cents an hour, at a two-months' job, looks bigger than fifty cents or a dollar an hour and steady work at the e'.id of a ten-year line of future promotion...
...The modern factory is just as wonderful in its system of organization, division of labor, specialization, and management as it is in its mathematics and engineering...
...WHAT is the part that industrial education should perform in preventing vagrancy, irregular employment, and pauperism ? Before we can answer the question we need to know what kind of industrial education we mean, and what kind of industry it is that needs this education...
...The employer storms...
...Arts and Crafts Movement IMIGHT mention other efforts that have been made to connect up industry with education...
...Machine industry compels the majority to stay with the machine and to remain common laborers...
...Then the numbers will come...
...The Army of the Unskilled OU are astonished at seeing the crowds of * boys and young men—the army of the semi-skilled...
...But there is a difference...
...These have not, of course, been drawn into the stream that runs through the modem factory...
...You offer them a position at a dollar or a dollar and a quarter a day, where they can learn a trade or get promotion, and they laugh at you...
...Their factories are not built to produce intelligence...
...They lack the essentials of shop arithmetic, elementary bookkeeping, shop organization, business correspondence, and so on...
...It is not reasonable from tho standpoint of the state, that takes into account the interests of all employers, as well as the future working population that all industries must depend upon...
...He has suddenly found himself earning more than hia immigrant father...
...A boy of eighteen years of age, at ten or twelve cents an hour, is prima facie an apprentice, although he may have no apprenticeship contract...
...Need to Unite Factory and School ¦X'HERE is evidently needed something that * will unite the factory and the school, that will bring together the employer and the schoolmaster...
...All of these requirements are commou ttf all occupations, yet no occupation of modern industry teaches them...
...So in the past ten or fifteen years they have begun to create positions for apprentices...
...On the other hand, picture a teacher in a continuation school who comes to his superintendent after the third day, and says: "I have showed the boys all I know about wiping joints, • tting pipes and using tools—what shall I teach \hem next...
...In the first place, he must learn to operate the machine...
...But this is not enough for modern apprenticeship...
...On the other hand, when the schoolmaster starts off in the industrial business, his idea is the training of the hand to supplement the training of the brain...
...They could earn that much before they were sixteen years old...
...There had been plenty of private schools for the education of boys to become doctors, lawyers, preachers, and teachers, but there was little or nothing for the workingman except charity schools or pauper schools...
...Monotony Proves Deadly LET us see where they get their notions of work and wages...
...The boy quarrels and quits in a huff...
...Tho gap must be filled by the state, the school, the teacher...
...It moves by the generation of power that began with the brain of Isaac Watt, Michael Faraday, or the inventor of the gas engine...
...He mnst get a move...
...It is but just that the employer should give up a few hours of his girl's time that she may get instruction in home-keeping, cooking, sewing and the like, as well as industrial and business essentials...
...As fast as teachers are equipped, in town or country, for the kind of instruction that their children require, go fast may we expect the people and the lawmakers to requira their children to attend...
...Wa are, in fact, calling for a new profession in teaching—the profession of the practical man who can teach the theory and science that underlie his practice...
...This problem of industry and education, therefore, agaht forced itself to the front...
...We must look elsewhere for the system that will unite intelligence and labor...
...Let us imagine these two kinds of teachers...
...They have been spoiled...
...Even for the boys and girls Between fourteen and sixteen years of age the true object of the continuation school is not so much to teach them a trade different from that of the industry in which they are employed...
...The machine is the accumulated intelligence of the past, harnessed up to belts and motors...
...n our revolt against academic teaching, which is merely brains without experience, we are in danger of going to the other "practical" extreme, which is experience without brains...
...But for them, industrial education should have a place as well as for the factory worker...
...IN THE case of girls there is an additional problem...
...They are conducting a continuous, unorganized strike...
...If he studies the raw material he is using, and compares it with other material, he is getting into such sciences as chemistry, biology, or commercial geography...
...It comes to them in the scarcity of all-around mechanics and intelligent foremen...
...Problem of the Teacher T^HE great danger that threatens this for* ward attempt is the same as that which has side-tracked similar attempts in the past— namely, the lack of teachers who have had a thorough acquaintance in the shops with some industry or trade, and at the same time are capable of using that knowledge to teach the intellectual and artistic principles that the boy does not get in the shop...
...John R. Commons has written a bulletin on the matter for the Extension Division of the University of Wisconsin...
...Their wages go up to eighteen or twenty cents an hour...
...It is a good thinf for the professional man to have done some work with his bands...
...The New Apprenticeship ¥ ARGE employers have begun to feel the pinch...
...We are, indeed, already well prepared to train these teachers, provided that they have had the shop experience that is first in order...
...Otherwise reaction occurs, and the program goes further back than it was at the beginning...
...That they will scarcely hold such a job more than four or five months...
...It will produce a smaller proportion of helpless and ill-fitted workers—an expensive charge on the growing and changing industries of the state, or on the taxpayers who must provide their useless support...
...In some towns the continuation schools are beginning to provide for them...
...It will produce a larger proportion of steady and intelligent workers...
...employment office with the flotsam and jetsam that they already see behind them, vainly waiting for a twentycent job of two or three days, or else hopelessly accepting, for the rest of their lives, an old man's job at a dollar or so a day, long hours, and Sundays thrown in...
...How to solve this problem has been for years a much debated educational question...
...Thus gradually shall we approach the new apprenticeship that modern business, in industry and agriculture, imperatively demands...
...These are essentials that every workingman and work-ingwoman should know, for upon them depen> their future ability to take care of tbemselvc-and thus to become steady and successful workers instead of casual workers, paupers, and dependents...
...He makes each boy take a course in carpentering, or drawing, even though the boy wants to be a grocery boy, a bookkeeper, or a salesman...
...The one is the type that leads to manual training, in order to supplement academic philosophy—the other that leads to trade schools, in order to supply manual dexterity...
...The machine-hand gets eighteen to twenty cents an hour on piece-work —the apprentice gets ten or twelve cents an hour on time-work...
...Even then, there are many other things that are also necessary—a state-wide system of employment offices to reduce the time lost between jobs—to bring employes to the jobs they are fitted for—to equalise employment in dull seasons and busy seasons—to shorten hours of labor for monotonous and specialized work...
...Such a teacher is what we call "academic...
...The danger in Wisconsin grows out of our sudden and comprehensive plan of stimulating industrial education without securing in advance the quasity of teachers required...
...Other policies that are necessary might also be mentioned...
...This may give an appearance of success, but, if it is success based on the police power of the state rather than the useful education secured, the success will be temporary...
...This would be the case if all boys under twenty-one were by law treated as apprentices...
...Here he is paying eighteen to twenty cents an hour for work that takes little intelligence...
...Picture to yourself a schoolteacher who starts her thirteen-year old children off with what she calls the "principles of design...
...Modern industry must employ a hundred and fifty to five hundred men every year in order to keep a hundred positions steadily filled...
...he must become a citizen, in fact as well as law, if he would take his part in the complicated government that determines his opportunities and his burdens...
...At the age of seventeen or eighteen they have been earning eighteen to twenty cents an hour—twice as much as you offer them...
...He gets no further than manual training...
...Boys and girls are eager to get to work...
...It must be universal, in that ev« ery apprentice must become a business maat if he would hold his own in the increasing competition of buying and selling...
...His foreman will not change him to a different machine or a different foreman...
...This limits their instruction to the benefit of the few whose work is to be intellectual or artistic, and neglects the thousands who must earn their living by manual work...
...Some twenty or thirty years ago the states began to enforce compulsory attendance at school and to prohibit child labor in factories...
...Thus the evils create each other in a vicious circle...
...But the boy rebels...
...After a while he has learned several machines by a wandering apprenticeship through several shops...
...A system of ednegation that leads to the learned and scientific professions, conducted by teachers trained to that system, makes of manual training a branch of liberal education—not industrial education...
...The older man at the machine is afraid to quit...
...It makes the worker see and understand both the beauty and the money to be obtained from his work...
...It would be far better for the boy$ to get lower wages, if therewith they get industrial education...
...The common school has proven to be little adapted to such circumstances...
...This was inevitable, because there were as yet no teachers except those who had been taught in the learning that led to the professions...
...They think they want to take up something else, such as machinery, carpentry, or stenography...
...He is virtually paying the employer eight or ten cents an hour for the opportunity of leaving one machine as soon as he has learned-to operate it, and learning to operate the next machine...
...It is the business of those who do the planning to know in advance what the results will be...
...They can pass upon the results after they have happened...
...The employer who hires a girl must be looked upon as making a present profit at the expense of the girl's own future promotion in industry...
...The other extreme is the mere shop-man or mechanic, who knows how to do a thing with his hands, but does not know anything of the science, philosophy, or mathematics that is necessary to make the thing an intelligent process, and is necessary to set the worker to thinking out the reasons for the job that he is merely imitating...
...Why do they not know that twenty cents is th» highest they will ever earn...
...He hunts another shop—get* on another machine or a similar machine under different surroundings...
...Workers in the Home...
...If he is rightly instructed in shop mathematics and mechanical drawing, he is really thinking out for himself the thoughts that go back to Newton, Watt, or Faraday, and applying them to the machines and forces that he is pretending to manage...
...It would not bo strange if the children did not understand...
...But compulsory attendance is not compulsory education...
...These schools, with their mathematics, designing, business organization, and other studies, are the brain-factories of modern industry which produce intelligence, while the shop itself, like the older kind of apprenticeship, turns out only manual dexterity...
...He compares them with himself and others who, by hard work, low pay and thrift, have climbed to eminence...
...The Stout Institute at Menomo-nie is recognized the country over as a normal school without a^ superior in the training of industrial teachers...
...With such a system of industrial education beginning at fourteen, extending to eighteen or twenty-one and supplementing the training of the shop, we may expect considerably to erase that blot on our modern industry—the boy of seventeen to twenty, vainly wandering from shop to shop in search of higher wages and an illicit apprenticeship, and finally sinking into the class of stupid low-paid workers, or the class of dependent paupers...
...he must protect his health, if he would stand the strain of study and exertion that are the first condition of promotion...
...But manual training starts from the standpoint of the professions...
...He roust pass around the shop and learn to operate all the machines...
...Not until such a policy is adopted can we predict that industrial conditions will do much toward reducing the amount of dependency that modern industry produces...
...Monotony and specialization teflM minate in mental degradation, irregular work, underpaid work, or pauperism, for the grown-up workingman of the state, although it is seemingly offset by fallacious high wages for boys...
...If boards of industrial education do not know the kind of teachers required for this work, they are likely to get teachers who only know how to lead their boys and girls along the lines of manual training, where they simply try to teach what the boys can learn just as well or better in the shops...
...If we start from the educational side, we find that the teachers, also, have been specialized in the learned, scientific, or artistic professions...
...They are, first, she says, "Rhythm," which she defines as "joint movement or action...
...There is the spot in the state where yju can see passing before you, in miniature, the panorama of modern industry...
...gets impudent and is "fired...
...This excuse is plausible for the individual employer who looks only at his own personal profits...
...Apprenticeship Schools IT IS this Wnd of training in intelligence arid * in learning to study And tWnk, that th« fcbop itself does mot give...
...Back of this is the bigger question—how to know the kind of teachers that are needed...
...The former ap-j prentice worked with hand tools and learned all parts of the trade by imitating the . journeyman...
...Just as modem industry has no need of intelligent workers to operate its machines, so it has no need of artistic workers...
...The monotony grows—becomes unendurable...
...But, as soon as they secure a nation-wide market for their artistic product, then it pays to make' it on a large scale, and the factory system comes in, with its designers and Brtists on the one hand, separated from its machine hands on the other...
...He became a alallal sua working with his hands, rather than an intelligent one, working with his brains...
...The old apprenticeship system went to pieces with the incoming of specialized ma-] chines and machine hands...
...It has inspired a few maiden ladies of Massachusetts, or a few mountaineers of North Carolina, to restore the quaint weaving and needle work of colonial times...
...Here the problem widens out and reaches into nearly every home...
...The boys make more money than their fathers who have gone through the same machine, and so their fathers get the pauper's idea of living on the wages of their children...
...and all shall be required to attend the school on their employer's time, regardless of any apprenticeship contract...
...The hand is taught in the factory—the mind in the continuation school...
...A half century ago John Ruskin and William Morris revolted against the deadening effects of modern i ndustry on the worker...
...the monotony and specialization of modern lew dufitry, and to enable workmen to find and keojl their jobs...
...They need a certain amount of brains, distributed through the shop, to supervise the machines and to "boss" the machine hands...
...Even the large companies keep it down to narrow limits...
...Stand for an hour in that office and see the hundreds of men and boys waiting for jobs to turn up...
...This is cot trade education, nor even vocational education—it is that nniversal apprenticeship that 19 common to all trades and vocations, Future of Industrial Education...
...The state of Wisconsin, at last, has adopted a system of continuation schools that is planned to remedy the«e things...
...If the continuation schools can furnish them just simple, ordinary intelligence, it will raise their level above its present stage...
...Far more important than the machinery and tools is the supply of teachers...
...that he sees nothing in it for him but the twenty cents he gets for it and f,he cut in piece-rate if he gets more...
...For industry is not merely the machines and shops nor even the commodities turned out in amazing quantities, but it is mainly the boys and girls entering the shops and the men and women coming out...
...But they are not yet ready to take up a trade...
...Of course, not all can get promotion to the ler positions...
...No matter from what standpoint we start, we find the same result...
...If we start from the industrial side, we find the overwhelming pressure of modern industry toward specialization...
...From Morris had come the so-called "arte and crafts" movement...
...and third, 'Balance," or "that repose which results from the opposition of attractions...
...vancement in the industry in which they are employed, and will also be found necessary to any other industry that they may afterwards fall into...
...When they get too speedy and earn too much, the employer cuts their piece-rate prices as much as he dares...
...But this at least can be said for the state that takes the lead in industrial education,—if it adopts a comprehensive system for all boys and girls —if it exerts itself above all else to bring out and train teachers who combine practical shop-work with an understanding of the theories and sciences that underlie intelligent shopwork, and with ability to teach, such a state will take the lead in the industrial development of the country...
...But the work is monotonous—just one or two operations, hour after hour, ten hours a day, sixty hours a week...
...Instead of making labor intelligent they added a number of scientific professors to the former number of learned professions...
...It is rather to teach them the essentials which lead to promotion in that or any other industry...
...IHAVE been able to sketch an outline only of tho relations between industrial education and dependency...
...What happened to the common schools, however, was not the education of labor as such, but the instruction of labor toward the learned professions...
...Only large companies can afford it...
...The one great handicap of this mass of laborers is their lack of intelligence...
...All of these are necessary to adTHE state of Wisconsin at last has adopted a system of continuation schools that is planned to remedy, these things...
...and, second, to make the employer and the schoolmaster cooperate with and supplement each other, instead of duplicating and con* troverting each other...
...The apprentice now needs intelligence more than manual skill...
...The machine is an iron brain...
...But he must not be kept on one machine...
...i How shall he get it...
...This, also, was inevitable, and, indeed, advantageous, for such professions are needed...
...One extreme is the academic or normal school graduate who knows only the intellectual forms of education, and does not know by experience the shop practice that those forms are to be applied to...
...These studies open up to him the Hne of promotion to foreman, superintendent, manager...
...It is made up of metals and it transforms raw material, that can be understood only by a glimpse into chemistry or biology...
...But it did not solve the problem of how to teach the millions of boys who must work with their hands for a living, also to work with their brains at the same time...
...Not until such a policy is adopted can we predict that industrial education will do much toward reducing the amount of dependency that, modern industry produces...
...The separation of brains from hands is a business necessity...
...Monotony and specialization terminate in mental degradation, irregular work, underpaid work, or pauperism, for the grown-up workmen of the state, although it is seemingly offset by the fallacious high wages for boys...
...It is expensive...
...first, to make the intellectual and artistic side of industry reaeh every boy and girl, instead of a few apprentices: and, second, to make the employer and the schoolmaster co-operate with and snpplement each other, instead of duplicating and controverting each other...
...Yet he cannot keep his hands...
...lag has found its place In the high school^ that lead to colk#es and ualversitiee, &«< Bot much in the *r*d, tftaelt tb»t fit«P where industry bef*& INDUSTRIAL education is one of the essential things needed to offset the monotony and specialization of modern industry, and to enable workmen to find and keep their jobs...
...he most become an intelligent worker, if- he would advance beyond tho dead-line of depend* ency on others...
...This applies to both boys and girls in all those subjects which the Wisconsin law includes under instruction in health, safety, citizenship, and business...
...Why is it that these boys do not look ahead...
...Most of them, indeed, are engaged in what is known as "blind-alley" jobs, that lead nowhere...
...In some places, with the right kind of teachers, employers are gladly making apprenticeship contracts, where formerly they refused them or had cancelled them...
...His idea of industrial education is the training of carpenters, plumbers, steam-fitters, and the other unionized trades that have not yet been broken up by the factory system, or else the training of hired girls for the kitchen...
...As you look at the panorama passing through the employment office, you see the human products of Wisconsin's prosperity...
Vol. 10 • April 1918 • No. 4
