partially self-supporting youths, (3) many criminal youths and adults, and (4) defectives. All these except the feeble-minded would become self-supporting if properly trained during childhood, and the addition of their product would enormously increase the social wealth.

Not only would the social wealth be directly increased by greater productivity, but the wastes of crimes and the punishment of criminals would be largely eliminated. A great part of the cost of our jails, penitentiaries and police should be added to the school fund. I mean that criminality is largely chargeable to our present inadequate and unintelligent method of training the young and that good education would pay because it would eliminate much of the costs of criminality.

In such schools there would be ample opportunity for each child, under wise guidance, to find what calling suits his tastes and talents, and society would be saved the incalculable wastes due to misdirected efforts and the low productiveness of men in lines of work for which they are not fitted. The weakness of the apprenticeship system lies in its inflexibility. Too often the boy was bound to the trade of his father or uncle regardless of his own capacity or tastes. The weakness of the present system is that the child has no guidance. The school does not pretend to guide him and he has no practical contact with life in the home. The advantage of the proposed system is that the pupil would have ample opportunity to find the trade or vocation best suited to him while still under the tutelage of the state and before the need of winning his way ties him up to his mis-calling for life. In the passing of the apprenticeship system we lost an excellent educational method and gained a factory system whose division of labor rendered education unnecessary for economic efficiency. With our easy economic conditions and vast natural resources to exploit, men with self-confidence and self-assertion and a little schooling led in manufacturing, transportation and other enterprises; while the uneducated filled the ranks of common laborers and factory workers. Now that our natural resources are largely run through with and economic competition is becoming more intense both locally and internationally, we see that the factory system requires intelligent workmen and that leaders of industry must be trained for their undertakings. And not

The

only training but native ability must be taken into account. man must find that work for which his peculiar talents best fit him. Otherwise his efficiency is greatly reduced and his satisfaction in life lessened or destroyed. This is perhaps the greatest source of economic, moral and aesthetic loss in present society. The freedom to choose a vocation coupled with the lack of any adequate guidance are most wasteful of human talent, and productive of individual dissatisfaction and disappointment. We must regain the educational method of the apprenticeship and the skill of the craftsman. While retaining the freedom of choice of a vocation we must make that choice intelligent and so conserve and develop human powers. We must meet the harder conditions if life of future years with a better training and better organization in social and economic life, to the end that moral and aesthetic values may not be lost in the struggle for existence.

It remains to express more explicitly what has already been suggested, that the desired end is to be gained not by any revolution or period of anarchy in the schools but by the completion of the processes which are already at work. Half consciously the revolution has been carried on for several decades. The inevitable result of the introduction of the objective method, of scientific studies, of practical employment, is that these real things will replace merely formal and abstract studies. The pupil will learn arithmetic as a part of the processes of agriculture, handiwork and business dealings. He will learn to use good English because he is constantly under the charge of cultured persons who use good English. Every bit of writing done in connection with his practical work will serve as an exercise in English. He will study also the best writings as the products of man's work, and therefore of objective value. The child's school years will be spent in the present, as a factor in the social fabric of today. He will cease to spend the winter shut up in unhealthful school rooms and to spend the summer running riot. The summer with its sunshine and abounding life will be the time for agricultural pursuits, for excursions and nature study. The winter will be the time for manual and domestic employments. Because of the winter inroads upon the vitality, the hours of work will be shorter in winter than in summer and more attention will be given to

recreation. School life will cease to be a thing of horrid memory, a time of tiring tasks and of stupid sitting in rows of desks. The school occupations will include the most interesting and enjoyable things. The child's life will be chiefly a life of activity in making things, in cultivating plants, in seeking out the habits, food and growth of animals, in studying geography in the field, industrial processes in the factory, literature, music and art in the libraries and galleries which will become largely adjuncts of the schools. Once more children will be given a place in the family and society. They will no longer be shut up in school to pore over books every day. They will take part in the pursuits of the people around them and will grow up into the life of the community. They will do these things not just in the old way by which the boy succeeded to his father's trade or was apprenticed to the most available craftsman; but, with all the economic and cultural resources of society before them and under sympathetic guidance, they will try their hands at various occupations and will find their places in that work which most befits and attracts them.

Guardianship of the Working Child

BY M. EDITH CAMPBELL OF THE SCHMIDLAPP BUREAU,
CINCINNATI.

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N assailing vocational theories of education, critics seldom, if ever, literally face the task of providing for each boy and girl in that large group of children, which should be the chief concern of the Public School. Both the critic and the School are inclined to evade this unwelcome responsibility, because they find it easier to continue the stere

otyped courses in education than to face the puzling facts of this wage-earning group which averages 50% of all the school children, and which leaves the superficial guardianship of the school almost totally unequipped for the years to come.

One often wishes that authors of glib attacks on attempts toward solving these vocational problems, might be compelled to settle the question which each child of this group asks, as they go trooping past in a steady unending procession-some mentally handicapped, some physically disabled, many financially stranded, not a few educationally thwarted, and all of them demanding of their rightful guardian, protection against the misfortunes of the untrained. In such an event, the hasty critic might view with more consideration the obvious necessity some of us are feeling, to lay at least the foundation for a system of advice and supervision for the child who leaves school at an early age.

The obligation of the school toward this working child seems as apparent as that of the state and the community, and no logical reason can be advanced why the school should educate 10% of the children until the normal age for completing High school, and eighteen years, and abandon 50% to their own resources, at fourteen years of age, simply because they have passed outside the narrow confines of school walls. Concerning this obligation, Miss Breckinridge several years ago, made the statement:

"If work is recognized by the law as the alternative to school, it should be on the ground that the work will give the child the

needed training or preparation for that later period in the child's life in which the law wholly ceases to exercise control." The school, as the agent of the law, accepts the responsibility of sanctioning this alternative by officially granting the child's withdrawal. Therefore the school should also, as the agent of the law, become the guardian of the child during this period of preparation. This guardianship may be exercised by the school, in general terms, by a keen realization of the necessity for greater elasticity in the elementary grades which would meet this child's needs with the vocational motive; by a more intimate knowledge of the child's home and physical environment; and by constantly keeping in mind, as Professor Mead says, the "human fortunes" of the child before and after leaving the school room. As he so aptly shows, the school has wrapt itself in a snug satisfaction with its own system, losing the vital and enriching experience, as well as the absorbing interest, of following these "human fortunes"-which experience and interest alone insures its growth and progress.

The guardianship may be assumed in many specific ways. The one which the school has failed most signally to recognize as a potent opportunity is in the issuance of work certificates, and the greater part of what I have to say is based on the experiment which we have tried in this connection in Cincinnati under the leadership of Mrs. Helen T. Woolley. Six years ago Mr. Clopper of the Child Labor Committee, and I as the Director of the Schmidlapp Fund, secured permission of the Board of Education to issue age and school certificates a brief statement of which was written for the Survey a few years ago. We had no idea or plan for developing the use of this function beyond that of research for our particular purpose. Hence its growth into a Vocation or Guidance or Service Bureau, as it was variously christened by the community, surprised even those of us who felt the power of this factor in school organization. Mrs. Woolley has recently stated the opportunities for guardianship through this function in a brief paper in School and Society, and her suggestion to the Childrens Bureau that its development be further investigated has borne fruit in the volume on Connecticut and the one now in the writing on Ohio. In her words, we believe that: