Our Schools in War Time—and After

by Arthur D. Dean

The College of the City of New York offered an emergency war course in bookkeeping and office practice to help fit men and women to fill the positions made necessary by the increased work of the national government, and to train people to take the places of those who responded to the call to arms. It also offered its regular winter courses during the summer in order to speed up the graduation of young men already enrolled in the college who might be drafted.

This college also placed in every armory and military headquarters in Greater New York a teacher of conversational French. This work was very popular and highly successful.

The University of Kentucky offered to women and civilians two special courses in its College of Electrical Engineering: a course in automobile engineering especially designed to teach women how to drive and take care of motor ambulances, and a course in wireless telegraphy.

The Pennsylvania State College offered a six weeks' course in storekeeping under the direction of the Quartermaster's Department.

In Massachusetts, through the extension department of the State Board of Education, lessons were given in conversational French in the armories and encampments. In one armory as many as five instructors were engaged in this service. The vocabulary of the soldier being quite unlike the French dictionary, the military terms and expressions actually used were emphasized. Necessary French slang and words used commonly for distances, rations, arms and equipment, money, measures, and military orders were dwelt upon. Spoken French for doctors and nurses who are going to the front has been given in coöperation with the Metropolitan Chapter of the American Red Cross.

A six months' course in wireless telegraphy for women was offered at Hunter College, New York City, the course of training being in three divisions: laboratory work, technical work, and the use of code. This course was given with the expectation not that women wireless operators will be placed on ships of war or on transports, but rather that they will be placed in land stations and on coastwise steamers, thus releasing men for more active service. It is understood that on the mechanical side the work is harder for the women, but that on the code work they are much quicker than men.

The field for service of a college is not necessarily limited to extending the usefulness of its vocational departments to meet the war-emergency demands. As has already been noted, the department of French may give courses in conversational French in armories and in cantonments. Sir Robert Blair writes:

We had this plan in England, and as volunteering grew to very considerable dimensions towards the close of 1914 and there were tens of thousands of soldiers grouped within the near neighborhood of London, an arrangement was made with the war-office authorities for the teaching of French.

Courses in mathematics applicable to war needs may be given. The college may send tutors to cantonments to give instruction to undergraduates who have not completed their college work and who would like to receive a college diploma. Colleges can coöperate with the Y.M.C.A., to which has been given the privilege of looking after the recreational features in cantonments. American college boys and others will not be satisfied with formal military training. They will want health talks, entertaining and educational lectures, and instruction as to many things helpful in civil as well as in military life.

There is a large opportunity, in a field as yet hardly touched, for departments of psychology in universities to help in selecting men for different branches of war service and to give vocational guidance to men who leave the service unfitted by war work to reënter their former occupations and perhaps untrained to enter a new service. A staff of psychologists is now at work in each of our cantonments applying intelligence ratings.