Commercial Courses in High Schools

High schools in all parts of the country are giving commercial courses in increasing degree. The first type of industrial education to be extensively cultivated in the United States was commercial education. This consisted in training for clerical positions and was carried on for the most part in private “business colleges.” The reason for the early demand for this particular kind of training is to be sought in the fact that America has for years been a country devoted on a vast scale to exporting raw materials. Commercial training, which has to do with the shipping of goods, was accordingly the first to grow here. The extent of the demand for commercial training is vividly set forth in a report of the City Club of Chicago published in 1912, which contains the following chart:

ENROLLMENT IN PRIVATE VOCATIONAL SCHOOLS AND IN PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOLS OF CHICAGO[45]

There are at least There are only
19,000 STUDENTS 17,781 STUDENTS
inin all
Private Commercial SchoolsPublic High Schools
and 800 in
Private Industrial Schoolsin Chicago
in Chicago, and at leastand only
$1,485,000$1,114,526
is paid foris expended for
TUITIONMAINTENANCE

Fig. 12

The high schools of the country entered into competition with the private commercial schools, and for some years the competition has been running high. The private schools solicit and get a large patronage on the ground that they do not teach anything that is useless. They give short, compact courses fitted to pupils’ needs. The high schools point out that the short courses leave the stenographer with a meager vocabulary and the clerk with no outlook on life.

The public schools are gradually pulling ahead of their competitors because they are employing a higher grade of teachers than formerly and are doing the work in a fashion which is technically more complete. In the meantime the commercial courses are becoming more “respectable” and are being taken by a better grade of students. The effect of the election of commercial courses by a better grade of students is such as to modify the whole program of the school in the direction of more attention to the needs and practices of business life.