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the city factories.
When the plan is further along the factories and stores will not be the only community institutions that will furnish laboratories for the school children of the city. The city college will begin its plan of having the domestic science pupils get their practice by working as nurses, cooks, housekeepers, or bookkeepers in the city hospital, and the engineering and architectural students will get theirs by working in the machine shops and draught-room of the city. As far as possible the departments of the city government will be used for the pupils’ workshops; where they can not furnish opportunities for the kind of work the pupil needs, he will go into an office, store, or factory where conditions reach the standard set by the board of education. So far this plan has been tested only with the boys and girls who are taking the technical course in the city high schools. The pupils who have finished the first two years of work, which corresponds to the work of any good technical high school, begin working alternate weeks in shop and school. The pupil chooses a kind of work in which he wishes to specialize, and is then given a position in one of the factories or shops which are coöperating with the schools. He receives pay for his work as any beginner would, and does the regular work of the place, under the direction of, and responsible to, the shop superintendent. One week he works here under trade conditions, meeting the requirements of the place, the next week he returns to school, and his place in the factory is taken by another pupil who has chosen the same line of work. The week in school is devoted entirely to theoretical work. The pupil continues his work in English, history, mathematics, drawing, and science, and enriches his trade experience by a thorough study of the industry, all its processes and the science they involve, the use, history, and distribution of the goods, and the history of the industry. This alternation between factory and shop is kept up for the last two years of the course, and also during the pupil’s college course, provided he goes on to a technical course in the city university.
From the standpoint of vocational guidance, this method has certain distinct advantages over having the pupil remain in the classroom until he goes into a shop permanently. His practical work in the factory is in the nature of an experiment. If his first choice proves a failure, the pupil does not get the moral setback that comes from a failure to the self-supporting person. The school takes the attitude that the pupil did not make the right choice; by coöperating with him, the effort is made to have his second factory experience correspond more nearly to his abilities and interest. A careful record of the pupil’s work in the factory is kept as well as of his classroom work, and these two records are studied, not as separate items, but as interacting and inseparable. If his class work is good and his factory record poor, it is evident that he is in the wrong factory; and the nature of the class work will often give a hint of the sort of work to which the pupil ought to change. If all the work is mediocre, a change to another kind of practical work will often result in a marked improvement in the theoretical work if the change has been the right one. The pupil has an opportunity to test his own interests and abilities, to find if his judgment of them is correct; if it is not, he has a scientific basis on which to form a more correct judgment.
Children are interested in the things they need to know about. (Gary, Ind.)
Making their own clothes in sewing class. (Gary, Ind.)
The work is not approached from the trade point of view; that is, the schools do not aim to turn out workers who have finished a two years’ apprenticeship in a trade and are to that extent qualified as skilled workmen for that particular thing. The aim is to give the pupil some knowledge of the actual conditions in trade and industry so that he will have standards from which to make a final intelligent choice. The school work forms a necessary part of the training for this choice, for it is just as much a guide to the interests and bent of the boy as would be his success in any one shop. And it lifts his judgments from the plane of mere likes and dislikes to that of knowledge based on theory as well as practice. For the exceptional pupil who really knows what he wants, and is eager to go ahead with it, this plan offers distinct advantages. The boy’s desire to get to work is satisfied by his weeks in the shop, and in his classroom he is learning enough of the larger aspects and possibilities of the trade to make him realize the value of additional theoretical training for the satisfaction of his own practical purposes.
As a result of the first year of working on this plan a large number of factories, at first indifferent to the plan, have asked to receive apprentices in this way, and a number of pupils have decided to go to college who, when they were spending all their time in school, had no such intention. The technical course for girls includes only those occupations that are traditionally supposed to belong to women because they are connected with home-making. They may continue for the four years working in school, which is made practical by having the pupils trim hats to wear, make their own clothes, do some commercial cooking, with the buying, selling, and bookkeeping connected with it; or they may specialize during the last two years as the boys do, by working alternate weeks in shop and school. So far girls have gone only into millinery or sewing establishments, where they work just as do the boys under actual trade conditions. The aim of the work for the girl, just as it is for the boy, is to help her find her life work, to fit herself for it mentally and morally, and to give her an intelligent attitude toward her profession and her community, using the shop experience not as an end in itself but a means to these larger ends.
Chapter XI
Democracy And Education
The schools that have been described were selected not because of any conviction that they represent all of the best work that is being done in this country, but simply because they illustrate the general trend of education at the present time, and because they seem fairly representative of different types of schools. Of necessity a great deal of material that would undoubtedly prove just as suggestive as what has been given, has been omitted. No attempt has been made to touch upon the important movement for the vitalization of rural education: a movement that is just as far reaching in its scope and wholesome in its aims as anything that is being done, since it purposes to overcome the disadvantages of isolation that have handicapped the country schoolteacher, and to make use of the natural environment of the child to give him a vocational education, in the same way that the city schools use their artificial environment. And except as their work illustrates a larger educational principle, very little attention has been given to the work of individual teachers or schools in their attempt to teach the conventional curriculum in the most efficient way. While devices and ingenious methods for getting results from pupils often seem most suggestive and even inspiring to the teacher, they do not fit into the plan of this book when they have to do simply with the better use of the usual material of the traditional education.
We have been concerned with the more fundamental changes in education, with the awakening of the schools to a realization of the fact that their work ought to prepare children for the life they are to lead in the world. The pupils who will pass this life in intellectual pursuits, and who get the necessary training for the practical side of their lives from their home environment, are such a small factor numerically that the schools are not acting wisely to shape all the work for them. The schools we have been discussing are all working away from a curriculum adapted to a small and specialized class towards one which shall be truly representive of the needs and conditions of a democratic society.
While these schools are all alike in that they reflect the new spirit in education, they differ greatly in the methods that have been developed to bring about the desired results; their surroundings and the class of pupils dealt with are varied enough to suggest the influence that local conditions must exercise over methods even when the aim is identical. To the educator for whom the problems of democracy are at all real, the vital necessity appears to be that of making the connection between the child and his environment as complete and intelligent as possible, both for the welfare of the child and for the sake of the community. The way this is to be accomplished will, of course, vary according