Our Schools in War Time—and After

by Arthur D. Dean

Important as this farm-cadet service has been in the matter of looking toward increased production, a more significant work to be developed by the Bureau of Vocational Training is that of interpreting the spirit and purpose of the amendment already referred to, which states that provisions for the military-training requirement may be met in part by certain types of vocational training or vocational experience. The whole program of physical, military, and vocational training is most significant, wholesome, and far-reaching. It is a program of universal training which will be serviceable for war and peace alike—a program which will require every boy to prepare himself to offer some service in case of need, and which stamps that service as equally patriotic with the narrower military service in which most of the world's supreme valors have been recorded. As John Finley, Commissioner of Education in New York State and one of the members of its Military Training Commission, puts it:

In this amended law we have a program providing, on the one hand, for the defensive training of the soldier and, on the other hand, for the effective mobilization of the resources of the nation in training boys for vocations—which training of itself exalts and identifies as patriotic service all the effective activities of our everyday life. It is a constructive provision for what would have to be done otherwise in time of need through exemptions.

England has had to reach such a program through an exempting provision in her plan of coöperative service. France has had to come to it by taking men from the front for service behind the lines. Germany is finding it necessary, in the midst of war, to organize her entire man power.

It is most important that this vocational training or experience should be conscious service. The boy who offers it must clearly understand why it is accepted in part for the required military drill. To fail to inform him is to take from his military equivalent the educational value given it by the law.

Dr. Finley, in his inimitable way, expresses this conscious service as it might apply to an adult loyal citizenship:

I make this idea graphic to myself by thinking that every man has an imaginary uniform (as every German soldier and French soldier had in waiting his green-gray or his blue and red uniform), an imaginary uniform of his own measurements always in readiness in home or shop or office or in some public locker, that he may don at call of his community, state, or nation, or perhaps at world need, when under compulsion he goes to vote, to pay his taxes, to fight against dishonesty, inefficiency, or waste, to inform himself upon public questions, or upon his public duties, just as one studies tactics in order to help in his country's defense, or goes to school as an alien to learn the language and institutions of a new land, or joins his neighbors in promoting the health of his community, in conserving resources, in securing means of healthful recreation for children and youth, in improving the highways—when, in short, he performs any one of a hundred offices that are required of him as an efficient unit in an organized society.

Those who oppose military training in the schools will be less critical of its requirements when they are open to the broader interpretation suggested in the amendment of 1917. Those to whom the thought of training the young in the carrying of arms is repugnant may here see the educative value of universal service. Early in the war Germany discovered that the relation of industrial to military service is 2.7 per cent; that is, to keep one man in the field, nearly three men must work in those occupations, industrial and agricultural, which support the nation at war.[5] It is the work of the New York Military Training Commission to select as a partial military equivalent such vocational training or vocational experience as will, in the present or in the future, serve the nation.

What shall the nature of this work be? The decision is to be left to the state Military Training Commission. It is easy to weed out those occupations which have no national productive or defensive value, but there will be difficulty in selecting those vocations which may or may not be military equivalents, which under war conditions may belong to the work of an industrial or agricultural army, when in peace they seem entirely separate from national service. Such an occupation is that of a junior telegraph operator, which is not of a productive nature, and yet a very necessary factor in war equipment. The case of a printer's apprentice is less equivocal. Only in rare cases could his work be accepted as a partial substitute for the required service.

The problem is not to separate the useful from the useless occupations, but to discriminate between those which may be called upon to serve the state and those which have value only to the individual. All the productive and useful occupations are not socialized; and in selecting those which are partial equivalents for the required military drill, we have to make a distinction which has not been hitherto considered in economic classification of occupations.

To Ruskin's generation his suggestion that Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates should serve short periods as builders of roads for the empire seemed little short of fantastic. And yet the turn of time may even bring about the confirmation of this anomaly.

There is a parallel between the economic substitution for military drill and what William James in an astonishingly pertinent essay written in 1910 calls the "Moral Equivalent of War."