The History of Education / Educational Practice and Progress Considered as a Phase of the Development and Spread of Western Civilization

by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

III. VOCATIONAL

WHAT IS VOCATIONAL EDUCATION? In a certain sense, all education is vocational, in that it aims to prepare one for some vocation in life. In Greece and Rome education was vocational, in that it prepared one to be a citizen in the State. During the Middle Ages education was to prepare for a vocation in the Church. Later the vocation of a scholar appeared, and still later that of a gentleman. In modern times a large range of state services have been opened up as vocations. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the extension of educational advantages to increasing numbers of the people, preparation for more intelligent living and citizenship have come to be new motives in education. To-day we no longer use the term vocational education in this rather general sense, but restrict its use to the specific training of individuals for some useful employment. Training for law, medicine, the ministry, teaching, engineering, scientific agriculture, nursing, and commerce are examples of vocational education in its higher ranges. The development of education along these lines has previously been described. In this division of this chapter we shall use the term in a still more common and still more restricted sense, as meaning the training of the younger people of a State to do well certain specific things, by teaching them processes and the practical applications of knowledge, chiefly science and art, to the work of the vocation they expect to follow to earn their living. The Report of the American Commission on National Aid to Vocational Education (1914) defined vocational education (p. 16) as follows:

Wherever the term "vocational education" is used in this Report, it will mean, unless otherwise explained, that form of education whose controlling purpose is to give training of a secondary grade to persons over fourteen years of age, for increased efficiency in useful employment in the trades and industries, in agriculture, in commerce and commercial pursuits, and in callings based upon a knowledge of home economics. The occupations included under these are almost endless in number and variety.

THE NEED FOR VOCATIONAL EDUCATION. Used in this sense vocational education is an application of technical knowledge, worked out in the higher schools, to the ordinary vocations of a modern industrial world. As such it is a product of the Industrial Revolution and the breakdown of the age- old system of apprenticeship training, [13] and represents another of the important recent extensions of educational advantages to the masses of the people who labor with their hands to earn their daily bread.

Besides further democratizing education by extending its advantages to those who work in the shop and the office and on the farm, vocational education tends to correct many of the evils of modern industrial life. It puts the worker in possession of a great body of scientific knowledge relating to his work which shops and offices cannot give, and it keeps him, for several years after he becomes a wage earner and at a very impressionable period of his life, under the directing care of the school. It thus tends "to counteract the specialization and routine of the workshop, which wears out his body before nature has completed its development in form and power, blunts the intelligence which the school had tried to awaken, shrivels up his heart and imagination, and destroys his spirit of work."

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION IN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES. For almost half a century the leading nations of western Europe, in an effort to readjust their age-old apprenticeship system of training to modern conditions of manufacture, and to develop new national prestige and strength, have given careful attention to the education of such of their children as were destined for the vocations of the industrial world. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and France have been leaders, with Germany most prominent of all. [14] No small part of the great progress made by that country in securing world-wide trade, [15] before the World War, was due to the extensive and thorough system of vocational education worked out for German youths (R. 371). In commercial education, too, the Germans, up to 1914, led the world. Even more, they were the only great national group which had done much to develop commercial training. Next to Germany probably came the United States. The marked economic progress of Switzerland during the past quarter-century has likewise been due in large part to that type of education which would enable her, by skillful artisanship, to make the most of her very limited resources France has profited greatly, during the past half-century also, from vocational education along the lines of agriculture and industrial art. In Denmark, agricultural education has remade the nation (R. 370), since the days of its humiliation and spoliation at the hands of Prussia. England, though keenly sensitive to German trade competition, made only very moderate efforts in the direction of vocational education until Germany plunged the world in war in an effort more quickly to dominate commercially. Now, in the Fisher Education Act of 1918 (p. 649), England has $t last laid foundations for a great national system of vocational education. Japan, also, recently laid large plans for a national system of vocational training.

[Illustration: FIG. 233. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TRADES IN MODERN INDUSTRY Under the old conditions of apprenticeship a boy learned all the processes and became a tailor. To-day, in a thoroughly organized clothing factory, thirty-nine different persons perform different specialized operations in the manufacture of a coat.]

In the United States but little attention was given to educating young people for the vocations of life until about 1905-10, though modern manufacturing conditions had before this largely destroyed the old apprenticeship type of training. Endowed with enormous natural resources; not being pressed for the means of subsistence by a rapidly expanding population on a limited land area; able to draw on Europe for both cheap manual labor and technically educated workers; largely isolated and self- sufficient as a nation; lacking a merchant marine; not being thrown into severe competition for international trade; and able to sell its products [16] to nations anxious to buy them and willing to come for them in their own ships; the people of the United States did not, up to recently, feel any particular need for anything other than a good common-school education or a general high-school education for their workers. The commercial course in the high school, the manual-training schools and courses, and some instruction in drawing and creative art were felt to be about all that it was necessary to provide.

THE NATIONAL COMMISSION ON VOCATIONAL EDUCATION. Largely since 1910, due in part to expanding world commerce and increasing competition in world trade; in part to a national realization that the battles of the future are to be largely commercial battles; and in part to the dawning upon the American people of the conception, first thought out and put into practice by Imperial Germany (R. 371), that that nation will triumph in foreign trade, with all that such triumph means to-day in terms of the happiness and welfare of its citizenship (R. 372), which puts the greatest amount of skill and brains into what it produces and sells.

After a number of sporadic efforts in different parts of the country, [17] and the introduction of a number of bills into Congress which failed to secure passage, the favorite English plan was followed and a Presidential Commission was appointed (1913) to inquire into the matter, and to report on the desirability and feasibility of some form of national aid to stimulate the development of vocational education. The Commission made its report in 1914, and submitted a plan for gradually increasing national aid to the States to assist them in developing and maintaining what will virtually become a national system of agricultural, trade, commercial, and home-economics education.

THE COMMISSION'S FINDINGS. The Commission found that there were, in 1910, in round numbers, 12,500,000 persons engaged in agriculture in the United States, of whom not over one per cent had had any adequate preparation for farming; and that there were 14,250,000 persons engaged in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits, not one per cent of whom had had any opportunity for adequate training. [18] In the whole United States there were fewer trade schools, of all kinds, than existed in the little German kingdom of Bavaria, a State about the size of South Carolina; while the one Bavarian city of Munich, a city about the size of Pittsburgh, had more trade schools than were to be found in all the larger cities of the United States, put together. The Commission further found that there were 25,000,000 persons in the nation, eighteen years of age or over, engaged in farming, mining, manufacturing, and mechanical pursuits, and in trade and transportation, and of these the Report said:

If we assume that a system of vocational education, pursued through the years of the past, would have increased the wage-earning capacity of each of these persons to the extent of only ten cents a day, this would have made an increase of wages for the group of $2,500,000 a day, or $750,000,000 a year, with all that this would mean to the wealth and life of the nation.

This is a very moderate estimate, and the facts would probably show a difference between the earning power of the vocationally trained and the vocationally untrained of at least twenty-five cents a day. This would indicate a waste of wages, through lack of training, amounting to $6,250,000 every day, or $1,875,000,000 for the year.

[Illustration: FIG. 234. SCHOOL ATTENDANCE OF AMERICAN CHILDREN, FOURTEEN TO TWENTY YEARS or AGE Based on an estimate made by the United States Bureau of Education in 1907 (Bulletin No. 1, p. 29), and based on conditions then existing, but probably still approximately true. In evening schools all classes were counted—public, private, Y.M.C.A., Y.W.C.A., etc. Public and private day schools, both elementary and secondary, also were counted.]

The Commission estimated that a million new young people were required annually by our industries, and that it would need three years of vocational education, beyond the elementary-school age, to prepare them for efficient service. This would require that three million young people of elementary-school age be continually enrolled in schools offering some form of vocational training. This was approximately three times the number of young people then enrolled in all public and private high schools in the United States, and following any kind of a course of study. In addition, the untrained adult workers then in farming and industry also needed some form of adult or extension education to enable them to do more effective work. The Commission further pointed out that there were in the United States, in 1910, 7,220,298 young people between the ages of fourteen and eighteen years, only 1,032,461 of whom were enrolled in a high school of any type, public or private, day or evening (Fig. 234), and few of those enrolled were pursuing studies of a technical type.

AMERICAN BEGINNINGS; MEANING OF THE WORK. In 1917 the American Congress made the beginnings of what is destined to develop rapidly into a truly national system of vocational education for the boys and girls of secondary-school age in the United States. This new addition to the systems of public instruction now provided is one which in time will bring returns out of all proportion to its costs. Without it the national prosperity and happiness would be at stake, and the position the United States has attained in the markets of the world could not possibly be maintained (R. 372).

This new American legislation is based on the best continental European experience, and is somewhat typical of recent national legislation for similar objects elsewhere. It is to include vocational training for agriculture, the trades and industries, commerce, and home economics. [19] A certain portion of the money appropriated annually by the national government is to be used for making or coöperating in studies and investigations as to needs and courses in agriculture, home economics, trades, industries, and commerce. The courses must be given in the public schools; must be for those over fourteen years of age and of less than college grade; and must be primarily intended for those who are preparing to enter or who have entered (part-time classes) a trade or a useful industrial pursuit.

As nation after nation becomes industrialized, as all except the smallest and poorest nations are bound to become in time, vocational education for its workers in the field, shop, and office will be found to be another state necessity. Only the State can adequately provide this, for only the State can finance or properly organize and integrate the work of so large and so important an undertaking. Though costly, this new extension of state educational effort will be found to be a wise business investment for every industrial and commercial nation. Considered nationally, the workers of any nation not provided with vocational education will find themselves unable to compete with the workers of other nations which do provide such specialized training.