THE VOCATIONAL COUNSELOR IN ACTION
MEYER BLOOMFIELD
DIRECTOR VOCATION BUREAU, BOSTON
LAURA F. WENTWORTH
SECRETARY VOCATIONAL INFORMATION DEPARTMENT, BOSTON PUBLIC SCHOOLS
[The philosophy of vocational guidance has been often written. But it is from the actual cases of boys and girls, influenced to this course of conduct or that, that the general public can best get an intimate notion of how this new function of the schools counts in the life of youth. The stories in the following article represent typical experiences and services of such teacher-counselors as Miss Wentworth, who was formerly vocational counselor in the High School of Practical Arts, and Eleanor M. Colleton, whose work among the Italians and other children of the North End in Boston has had merit of a high order.
The latter part of the article is a digest, telling of past performances and future plans, of a report which the Vocation Bureau will shortly make public, covering its work for the last three years.—Ed.]
In the morning mail of the Boston Vocation Bureau appeared, not long ago, an interesting letter. It came from a sixteen-year-old boy who had heard of the bureau, but was prevented by his job from coming to it for help. He wrote asking for a special appointment, which was granted.
At the interview following, the boy, Charles Lee, told of his position and of his home conditions. He was an only son, living with a widowed mother in Cambridge, and had been obliged to leave school and go to work, taking whatever place he could find. This was a position as assistant shipper in the sub-basement of a clothing store in Boston. The employer in the beginning had promised him promotion or transfer, but had failed to do anything for so long a time that it became clear nothing would be done as long as the boy was content to remain in the sub-basement at $3.00 a week.
Young Lee was a boy of attractive appearance, earnest manner, and evidently of more than average ability. He seemed well equipped for a business position and desired one with a good line of advancement.
The Vocation Bureau had just completed the investigation of a large and well known dry goods store in the city, and now sent Lee with a letter to its employment manager, who took him into the office at $6.00 a week. The boy has been followed up by the bureau, and has shown marked business ability in his new position. He is now in line for promotion to an executive position in the firm. The help given him was based upon his home and employment conditions, apparent abilities, and desire to find the right place in a mercantile occupation.
Mary Schenck confided to her teacher that she wanted to take up stenography and typewriting because she “knew a girl who had a good job in that line.” A vocational counselor called at her home and talked with her mother. During the visit it developed that Mary’s mother and grandmother were both successful dressmakers and that the girl herself had obtained very good marks in her sewing in the grammar school. In fact, she had made the dresses for her two little sisters for the past two years. As a result of this information the counselor talked again with Mary and suggested that she take up sewing in the school. Mary did so, even going out to work in a shop for a while. Then she started in business for herself. Today she is employing two assistants. Thus by a little common sense and thought a girl was prevented from entering the overcrowded field of stenography in which she probably would not have been very successful and started in a line of work for which she possessed natural ability and real love.
What is a vocational counselor? There are over a hundred of them in the public schools of Boston. They are regular teachers, designated by the school principals to advise and co-operate with boys and girls leaving school for work. Two years ago an agreement between the Boston School Committee and the Vocation Bureau called for their appointment and they have been meeting twice a month ever since to discuss the educational opportunities of the city, the vocational problems of the children and to confer with employers and others interested. Let us see just how their influence is made to count in the lives of children.
Vocational guidance in a school involves three definite objects:
Guiding the child while in the school.
Guiding the child after leaving school.
Following up the child, i.e., ascertaining what becomes of him after he goes into work.
Courtesy Massachusetts Child Labor Committee.
THEY NEVER KNEW A VOCATIONAL COUNSELOR.
There is a growing belief among those who are exploring the twilight zone between education and industry that what youngsters like these need is not more help in finding jobs but more and better training before they find them.
In the first place the ordinary high or vocational school offers a choice of several lines of work, and it is highly advisable to have the child make a wise choice as to the line he is to pursue. The best way is to have a general course offered at the beginning during the pursuit of which the vocational counselor studies the child and confers with the parents as to the child’s natural ability, etc. This combined judgment of counselor and parent is sure to result in a much wiser choice of work in the school than if the matter had been left to the discretion of the child, who is too immature to see the various occupations in their true relationship. Parents and counselor may meet at the school, or the counselor may go to the home. By going into the home discoveries are often made which could not have come from only seeing the child and parent at school.
During the school course it is often advisable to change a pupil from one course to another. For example, Clara Bartlett had been taking the millinery course with the intention of entering the trade on graduation. Owing to her mother’s death, she found that she must become her father’s housekeeper at the end of the school year. Accordingly, after talking the matter over with the vocational counselor, Clara changed from the millinery to the domestic science course and obtained a very good training in cooking and housewifery. The result was that when her school life was over she was able to enter upon her new work as housekeeper with a marked degree of success.
Sometimes it is necessary for a child to change from one school to another in order that he or she may receive the best training for a particular need. This implies a very close and cordial relationship between the various kinds of vocational schools in the city. Thus a girl who can give only one year to the preparation for a trade should spend that year in a school where she will get intensive work in that trade. If she is not advised, there is danger that she will spend her year in a school which offers a general course in preparation for the trade course, which will then follow in the next two or three years. In other words, it is necessary to take into consideration the girl’s outside obligations and adapt her school life to them as closely as possible.
Again, it is the duty of the vocational counselor to see that the graduates of the school are given the most auspicious start on life’s journey. This may imply definitely organized placement work or it may mean simply making recommendations. If the work of placement is definitely organized it should be done on a broad social basis, for it may mean finding a position for one girl in a millinery establishment and guiding another into a higher institution of learning.
Courtesy Massachusetts Child Labor Committee.
HE LEAPED BLINDLY
And his only school now is the school of hard knocks, his only teacher a factory boss.
If the work of placement is to be done by the vocational school, great insight into the true ability of the girl under actual business conditions may be obtained by “part time” work. For instance, Susan Williams, who is taking the course in dressmaking, was placed by the school in a near-by establishment where she spent her afternoons and Saturdays. Here she obtained a very definite idea of trade conditions, also earned a little money to help with her expenses and secured for herself by her own desirable personality and excellent workmanship a permanent position on graduation. In the same way Josephine Riley, who was taking a course in designing, was placed by the school in an embroidery shop where she did work in designing on Saturdays during the latter part of her course. She too worked herself into a permanent position for which she had demonstrated her qualifications.
Occasion often arises to provide a girl with an opportunity to earn enough money to keep her in school until graduation. Sometimes the work found is similar to that pursued by the girl in the school. Often it is not, however, for many times the girl can earn more money in some other kind of work. Frances Newton, who is taking designing, can earn more money by acting as assistant in an office on Saturdays than she possibly could in any designing establishment owing to her present limited knowledge of her trade. Thus she is tided over a financial crisis without being deprived of her school work.
Courtesy Massachusetts Child Labor Committee
ONE OF THE “BLIND ALLEY” TRADES
This group is declared to be typical of every city and town in Massachusetts.
The third line of work for the vocational counselor in a vocational school is that of “following up.” This is the only way of ascertaining whether schools are fitting the children for those walks of life for which they are attempting to train them. If the school is doing this satisfactorily we want to know it, and if it is not doing it we ought to know it. The child may be followed up by a regular system of reporting by mail, by visits to employes and by alumni meetings. Alumni meetings are particularly profitable when turned into experience meetings at which the children tell what they have been doing with especial emphasis on the relation of their training in the school and their work in the world. In this way schools can keep in touch with their graduates and create a spirit of friendly intercourse even after they leave. The best advertisement a school can have is an enthusiastic body of loyal graduates.
The work of the vocational assistant in a vocational or other school is thus one of adjustment; adjusting children to the right course in school; adjusting them to the right course after they leave school; and adjusting the relationship between the school and the home, and that between the school and the business life.
If this work is needed in a vocational school how much more it must be needed in a regular school! For it is an adjustment which tends always toward keeping the children in school, but if they must leave, insists upon seeing that they are at least given a helping hand toward that new life which is so different from school life and so bewildering to the youthful mind.
There is plentiful testimony that fathers and mothers now turn to the Boston schools as never before for advice and help in their perplexities concerning their children’s future. It has been most pathetic in the past to see how little parents knew of real industrial conditions, and of what educational and vocational opportunities existed in Boston, entirely within their reach. Our experience has been that the vast majority of parents have heretofore known nothing about the various high schools and their specialties, except what they have learned through the vocational work of the school itself. The attitude of the parents when visited in the homes, makes it appear only too clear that practically all welcome such guidance and are anxious to avail themselves of it.
These, then, are pictures of the vocational counselor at work. What is the machinery behind her? Every school in the city has at least one teacher who has given her time freely to this service. In some schools committees of teachers have formed voluntarily to take thought over the dropping out of boys and girls, and to organize that assistance which a school can give to parents and children in administering to the life-career motive. The work of the vocational counselors has been a labor of love. Nobody has expected that the occupational talks to which they have listened twice a month would equip them for effective vocational guidance. But no group of persons can listen to intimate discussions of the shoe industry, department stores, machine industries, stenography and typewriting, mechanical and civil engineering, building trades and needle trades—which have been actual subjects in these meetings—without being better fitted than before to advise and guide those who are making hit-or-miss guesses at work in the fond hope that it will pay well and that it is suited to their particular capacities.
The Vocation Bureau, through whose influence the Boston schools were induced to introduce vocational guidance, does not aim at the placing of individual boys and girls in particular jobs. It endeavors to study the causes of the waste which attends the passing of unguided and untrained young people from school to work, and to assist by experiments to prevent this waste. It aims to work out the problem of co-operation between schools and occupations, for the purpose of enabling both to make a more socially profitable use of human talents and opportunities. It publishes studies of vocations from the viewpoint of their educational and other efficiency requirements. It conducts a training course for qualified men and women who desire to prepare themselves for vocational guidance in the public school system, philanthropic institutions, and business establishments. Its interests therefore lie both in the direction of personal service to the individual and of constructive experiment and research in the field of education and employment.
A capable investigator spends his entire time in studying occupations open to boys and young men, what these occupations require, and what they lead to. From three months to a year is devoted to each study. The result of these inquiries is published in tentative pamphlet form. Such pamphlets have already been published on the machinist, banking, the baker, confectionery manufacture, the architect, the landscape architect, the grocer, the department store, and the profession of law.
In each of these studies it is sought to supply parents, teachers and others interested with the material necessary to an intelligent conception of the occupation, its needs, demands, opportunities, relative desirability and its training, requirements and possibilities. It is further sought to analyze the relation of aptitudes, interests and habits to modern industrial demands, and thus to lay an adequate foundation for a system of training that regards social as well as economic needs.
The Vocation Bureau has constantly borne in mind that a sound development of vocational guidance requires that contact with the employments be more than mere onlooking. To leave the employer out of such a plan, to fail to profit by his criticism and point of view, is to omit one of the most important elements in such guidance. The bureau has therefore been in close touch with a large number of industrial and commercial concerns in sympathy with its purposes. Manufacturers have approved its methods, and have even supported its demands for more thorough-going protection and opportunity for the young worker.
To understand better the employer’s relation to vocational guidance, the bureau organized last year a conference of employment managers. Men representing a score or more of important manufacturing and business establishments have met regularly for informal discussions. In December an employment managers’ association was formed. One of the most important fruits of this close contact is the possibility of formulating plans for organizing the generally chaotic entrance into occupations. It is now planned to undertake some experiments in placement work in co-operation with several social agencies and a group of employers. The bureau believes that the country is ready to undertake through responsible agencies, having in mind primarily the needs of young workers, experiments to point the way to some less wasteful and costly method of bringing together what has been called “the manless job and the jobless man.”
Persons of constructive imagination throughout the country, alert to the needs of coming generations of workers, and interested in the reforms which must succeed if our future citizens are to enter into their inheritance, have come to recognize that a new co-ordinating agency is needed—an agency which shall secure team play in home, school and occupation, to the end that a richer vocational life of all the workers may be realized. It is likely that in the near future there will not only be for the work in the public schools a specially trained vocational counselor, but that there will also be in business and manufacturing establishments a new type of employment manager, especially trained and empowered to develop in the worker not only the efficiency which the employer requires, but also that efficiency which society requires. Through the working together of such employment managers and school counselors, society will gain an important factor in making for its progress.