The Theory of Separate Schools for Different Classes of People
Both writers above quoted are speaking of those learners who are to have large opportunities of higher education. What is to happen to the common masses, to whom the last writer grants the “opportunity of industrial or vocational training,” is still in doubt. There are, however, disputants who are trying to settle this question also. To illustrate we may borrow from a pamphlet issued by a great commercial organization in its campaign for legislation which should transform the school system of the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois.
STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLES
Definition: Vocational education includes all forms of specialized education, the controlling purposes of which are to fit for useful occupations, whether in agriculture, commerce, industry or the household arts.
1. State aid is necessary to stimulate and encourage communities to carry on work in vocational education, but local communities should be permitted to initiate and should partly maintain such courses or schools.
2. The vocational schools should not compete or interfere with the present public school system, but should supplement it by providing practical instruction in vocational lines for youth between fourteen and eighteen who have left the present schools. To guard against any competition with the public schools as now organized, a special tax should be levied for the support of vocational schools, which, with the State grant for their support, should not be taken from the funds now provided by law for the support of the public school system.
3. The proper expenditure of State moneys for vocational schools should be fully safeguarded, while at the same time the initiative in adapting measures to local conditions should be left with the local authorities. To secure these ends the general management and approval of these courses and schools should be left to a State commission, while the local initiative and direct control should be exercised by a local board composed of employers, skilled employees and local superintendents of schools.
4. An efficient system of vocational education requires different methods of administration, different courses of study, different qualifications of teachers, different equipment, different ways of meeting the needs of pupils and much greater flexibility in adapting means to ends than is possible under the ordinary system of public school administration. For these reasons these schools should be under a separate board of control, whether carried on in a separate building or under the same roof with a general school, so that they may be free to realize their dominant purpose of fitting for useful employment.[44]
If the last two quotations are stripped of their decorations, they reveal a demand for a distinct class system of education. Broad education is for the few. Specialized education is another matter,—let it be developed for the masses.