Social legislation and social activity

by American Academy of Political and Social Science

While children here are children still, yet I know not of an equal number of young people gathered together with an equal standard in present character and ability and promise of future success and usefulness. As would be supposed, such care in the early training of the young people necessarily and naturally carries with it the advancing of these people as the years go on, so that what is practically a system of civil service promotion has resulted, and the higher positions are continually filling with those who have grown up in the business from childhood.

To be sure, it often happens that a young man, having made himself fit for a larger position than is open to him at the time in this his business home, goes out with our approval to some other establishment which needs a chief and bids for him, but, on the other hand, it is true that no young man or woman, having won a foothold in the regular store service and continuing faithfully to do his or her best, need look elsewhere for advancement or a business future.

Sometimes these changes to other service are invited before we think the young man or woman fully qualified, and in any case much is risked in the search elsewhere for sudden and uncertain advancement.

From these conditions develop three important features of modern business life: First: A fair equivalent for the apprentice system still so strong in the Old World, and for want of which our young business men and mechanics have suffered in comparison with Old World competitors, in point of thoroughness and detail knowledge; second: civil service promotion; and third: service and disability pension.

May I presume further upon your patience with an additional question or two? Are we prepared to say that better results than these I have tried to indicate are observable in those trained solely in academic courses? It is too large a question for me to attempt to answer. An answer is, however, suggested by R. T. Crane in a pamphlet issued in 1901 in Chicago, entitled “An Investigation as to the Utility of Academic Education for Young Men Who Have to Earn Their Own Living and Who Expect to Pursue a Commercial Life.” Mr. Crane comes, among other conclusions, to this: “The truth of the matter is that, when it comes to considering an applicant for a position, few of these gentlemen (employers in various lines) will be found to pay any attention to the amount of knowledge he may have of Greek, Latin, literature, etc., or care a straw about the mental drill and discipline or the well-rounded character that he may have acquired through a course at college. What they are particularly interested in knowing is whether he understands their business and can promote it. This is all that has any weight with them in the selection of help.”

And further, “The great majority of our strongest and most successful men in the country to-day came from farms and villages and obtained very little education.... In my opinion, few of them would have been anywhere near so successful in business had they gone to college, for their success was largely due to the fact, which was impressed upon them in the early part of their career, that they would have to struggle if they expected to succeed.

“I feel quite sure that if the men who have been successful in business were asked whether they regretted starting in business at the time they did, in place of going to college and taking the chances of afterward being able to gain the success which they have achieved, all would answer in the negative.... I think it can be safely said that the great men at the head of our railroads are the strongest business men the world has ever produced, and so far as I have been able to ascertain, not one of them is a consistent believer in college education.

“Certainly none of them have expressed in their letters any regret on account of not having received such education themselves.

“On the contrary, Mr. Roswell Miller remarks that he spent one year in college, and considers it fortunate that he did not spend more.”

Without depreciating the value of a college course, our business experience tends to the conclusion that men and women trained up from youth in the business are the most successful; that length of service, with its unconscious absorption of and self-adjustment to the principles and needs of the business, will carry a given degree of natural capacity to a higher point of efficiency and success than an originally greater degree of capacity will be likely to reach by the shorter road of business training begun in maturer years.