VOCATIONAL SCHOOLS
To the Editor:
Recently the writer noticed several communications in The Survey, in reference to the proposition of establishing a separate system of vocational schools, distinct from the existing traditional public school system.
As a reason for the establishment of this so-called “dual” system of vocational education the claim is advanced that, since manual training had been emasculated by being in contact with the public school, so likewise would vocational and industrial education be emasculated if these forms of education were to be carried on side by side with the other schools under the old organization.
The writer having seen the retarding effects of such a “dual” system in one of our larger industrial cities, and Massachusetts having tried and abandoned it, and since the writer is firmly convinced that such a divided system of education will, before long, react injuriously upon the social and ethical life of a state and her communities, and will plague the industries with its uneconomic and unsocial consequences, he is decidedly opposed to such a separated system of vocational schools.
It is a shrewd move to get entire control of the education of the masses of industrial workers, a mentally narrowing, mind killing education which, in its effects, would pull the intelligence of a community down to a lower level, being re-enforced by the ossifying influences of extreme specialization, which are noticeable in shop, store and office in all our industrial centers even now.
Manufacturers and business men do not take kindly to the idea that they should be made responsible for the mental, moral and aesthetic development of their employes and under these circumstances industrial education would soon degenerate into a feudal appendage of our industrial system. Manufacturers, corporations and business men are certainly entitled to a share in the management of our educational system and industrial schools and it is highly desirable that they should claim their share.
But they can accomplish all they need either as members of school boards, or as advisory committees on industrial education.
As to the danger of vocational schools being emasculated there is no such danger. No one who understands anything about the matter expects to have vocational or industrial schools articulated with the elementary or high schools in the manner manual training has been and is articulated, but have these lower schools separate in just the same manner as manual training high schools or technical high schools are separate from the academic schools, yet are under the same organization and management without any detriment to their usefulness.
It is true that, if specific industrial education is yoked together with academic education in the high school, industrial education will be emasculated. But then it is due to a managerial blunder of trying to straddle two horses and there is no excuse to make such a managerial mistake the pretext for the creation of an expensive separate system of education. Manual training, as we understand it, was never emasculated because neither by the originators, and the writer is one of them, nor subsequently, was manual training in the elementary and high school considered anything else but an adjunct to academic schools for cultural purposes and down to the N. E. A. meeting at Boston in 1903, Professor Woodward, the father of the American system of manual training, disclaimed any other but cultural purpose for manual training, without any distinct vocational aim.
At the above meeting Dean Woodward, in referring to the manual training work done at St. Louis said: “The secondary school should enable a boy to discover the world and find himself. I use the word ‘discover’ in the sense of uncover—that is lay bare—the problems, the demands, the opportunities, the possibilities of the eternal world. A boy finds himself when he has taken a correct inventory of his inherited and acquired tastes and capacities”. While many friends of manual training were disappointed in finding it did not revolutionize trade education, it never intended to do that and therefore was not emasculated.
Paul Kreuzpointner.
[Chairman Committee on Industrial Education, American
Foundryman’s Association.]
Altoona, Pa.