Letter received is from an ex-private in the 13th Battalion. Before enlistment he was getting $12 a week as driver on a city milk round. "I always had a liking for drawing," he says, "and I felt that if I ever had the chance I would take up a course in mechanical drawing." This opportunity came to him at one of the commission's convalescent hospitals. After six weeks' application to the work there, he was able to secure an appointment beginning with $75 a month, with good prospects of advance.
A locomotive fireman had enlisted, was severely wounded, and had to have his left arm amputated. Under the commission's scheme of reëducation, which is offered to all men incapacitated for their former work by service, he received special training in telegraphy and railway routine. As a result he secured an appointment as station agent and dispatcher at $110 a month.
In England the high sheriff of Lancashire has formulated a scheme for listing the employments open to the disabled. First, the employer is asked, whenever possible, to give the returned soldier his old job. Next, certain employments are listed as being within the powers of partially disabled men, and with the help of labor exchanges and of other agencies, these are reserved for them.
It is for the economic interest of the State to make possible the employment of the disabled. The amount of a pension is not the measure of the cost of the pensioner. The nation cannot afford to let any human power go to waste or lie idle. To reëquip the maimed is to make him partly forget his infirmity,—an indispensable mental advantage. France is now discussing whether reëducation of one form or another shall be compulsory, as in the Anglo-Belgian hospital. "But obligatory or not," says A. L. Bittard,[7] "the industrial reëducation must be above all a national work. We should regard it as a debt owed to the wounded and as an effective preparation for the future of the nation.... The State alone is capable of giving all the mutilated the maximum equality of treatment, where private initiative would be totally incapable of realizing the minimum."
The war simply makes the question of reëducating and rehabilitating the disabled a striking one. But we must not forget that the problem of the injured is always with us. It may not be amiss to point out that 54,001 men and women were actually killed in the United States during the year 1913. This means one killed every ten minutes. Over 2,000,000 men and women are injured in the industries in the United States each year. This means one injured every sixteen seconds. The economic loss from accidental deaths and injuries is nearly $500,000,000 annually, and the loss from preventable accidents and diseases would more than pay the cost of maintaining all the public schools in the United States. These are appalling figures.
At present the great fear of every boy who goes to war and of every sister and mother of such a boy is that he may go through life maimed and dependent. But we never think of the ever-present danger to these boys of being handicapped physically by merely going to work; and yet there are more persons so disabled through accidents in industrial life in normal times than are disabled by war.
When our boys come back from the war, physically disabled, and through the government work in rehabilitation and reëducation are made self-supporting and self-respecting members of society, we shall begin to appreciate that we have been extremely negligent in the past in limiting our efforts to help the crippled and blinded to the good offices of charity and philanthropy. It is a public matter. It is a problem of education. It is an opportunity for service for the teachers of vocational training, for the experts in vocational guidance and direction, for the directors of placement and employment bureaus, and for the designers of special tools and machines for the handicapped. It is an immediate problem in this time of war; it is even more significant in time of peace.
CHAPTER X
FARM CADETS
We can afford only one fad in war time, and that fad is to be farming. It will be useless for little William Corning Smith, aged 12, of Kankakee, Illinois, to stick his little spade into his back yard before his admiring parent. Individual, unorganized work on land not properly prepared for agriculture may be worse than useless; it may be wasteful. Random efforts not coördinated in a general scheme for the utilization of school children in large units will be foolish, misdirected effort. State, county, and even national organization are required to make available this latent power. Purely isolated effort will be fruitless, both as aids to the nation and education for the child. Organized work will bring the greater moral advantages of developing the power of concentration along with the interest in national and community service. It will evoke an esprit de corps which may be capitalized for national use and shift the usual interest in gangs and athletics, both normal and natural, to work which opens the way to loyal industrial educational training.[8]
This was written by John Dewey early in the spring of 1917 in a message addressed to the principals and teachers of America on how school children may be so organized for farm service as to