Vocational Training and Trade Teaching in the Public Schools

Abstract

Certain elements of difficulty present themselves in any discussion of vocational teaching, owing to the fact that the average school officer thinks in this connection of a boy of one age, while the employer or director of a trade school thinks of a boy of a different age. The latter has no suggestion to offer as to the vocational training of the boy before the sixteenth year, while the former is most concerned as to the future of that great army of boys who pass out from the schools at the age of fourteen, whether or not they have reached the highest grammar grade. The school officer is perturbed when he reflects on the two years which these boys must waste before they can, as apprentices, gain admission to any shop. The average trade school teacher looks with equanimity upon, and at times even commends, this state of affairs, urging that it shows the brightest boys that their advance must depend upon their obtaining more definite and valuable instruction than any they can secure through the indifferent training of the factory. Boys thus convinced of the necessity of trade teaching, and willing to make sacrifices of time and wages that they may spend a year or more in the trade school, form, in the judgment of trade teachers, those most likely to be benefited. Undoubtedly this is in large measure true, but the process is clearly a survival of the fittest, and one repugnant to every teacher genuinely interested in seeking to devise methods of instruction which will serve to promote the retention in school of as large a number of pupils as possible, to the end that each may be schooled to produce his best. In order to clarify the general discussion, it is therefore to be premised that, as students of various ages must be considered, no one type of school will meet all requirements. Second, it is to