In 1907 the public schools of Boston began experiments in various parts of the city looking toward special vocational courses in the sixth and seventh grades. The North Bennett Street school was chosen as one center for industrial work. A special building was set aside and furnished with class rooms for sewing, textiles and design and was also equipped with kitchen, dining room and bedroom, thus giving excellent opportunity for applied lessons in housekeeping and housefurnishing. Fifty girls from the Hancock school in the neighborhood are chosen and are divided into two groups. They alternate with each other in taking academic and industrial work, both morning and afternoon being utilized. They have six and a half hours of academic work to three and a half of industrial. The course of study recognizes woman’s relation to wage earning and to the home, and the culture and technical work are well interrelated. The movement, already showing success, aims to vitalize the regular school studies, to gain the interest of the girls so they will remain in school until graduation, to enable each girl to determine intelligently her life work and finally to direct her into higher grades of occupation.
New York City has also started similar work in the special classes organized to help pupils who while old enough to have their working papers have not met the educational requirements. Other cities have also begun experiments of a like character, handwork and connected academic study being features in all these schools. Some of our private schools also are making special investigation of the varied conditions and needs of the people and are trying to adapt their work to these needs, so that when boys and girls are forced to leave school they will have a usable education. Examples of such wise adaptation to conditions can be found in the Ethical Culture school and the Speyer school in New York City.
Perhaps the most significant work of this character at the present time is in Germany. Stadtschulrat Dr. Georg Kerschensteiner of Munich, realizing that both boys and girls were dropping out of the Volksschulen at the first opportunity possible, planned a new and excellent course of practical study elective in the eighth school year. The work was begun in 1896. Many children remained in school to try it and so valuable did the experiment prove that the course was later made compulsory. Dr. Kerschensteiner felt that girls will eventually fall into one of the following classes: housewives who take charge of affairs at home, domestic servants, workers in commercial or industrial positions, governesses, teachers or companions. After the seventh grade each girl chooses the field for which she would like to prepare, and in the eighth grade the foundation is laid for future success in her chosen occupation. The eighth-grade work is not professional but is broadly vocational. The pupils take the entire course, after which they are given a “leaving certificate” and can go to work; but formal education is not yet over, for they must attend a continuation school for one year at hours allowed by their employers. Each one is thus prepared for future usefulness, and German life and industries reap the benefit.
The curriculum of the eighth-grade class is as follows:
Religion (always given in German schools) 2 hours weekly; household management and cookery, 8 hours; needlework, such as is needed in the household, 4 hours; German, in business correspondence, moral and ethical training, reading lessons, including domestic subjects, hygiene and German family life, 6 hours.
Arithmetic, management of domestic accounts, elements of commercial arithmetic, cost of living and the maintenance of the home, 4 hours.
Gymnastics and singing are also included in the curriculum.
As a part of the training in household management there is instruction in clothing and housing which covers:
a. Study of the body.—Its functions and its care, breathing, circulation of the blood and properties of heat radiation and evaporation, and the preservation and regulation of heat through clothing.
b. The textile materials, raw and manufactured.—Their physical properties and use as clothing, hygienic rules, taste and suitability in dress, wet and dry cleansing of clothing, the bed and bedding.