Training for boys and girls should be different in content and in emphasis.
The usual course of study in commercial schools is suitable for girls and unsuitable for boys.
A girl needs, chiefly, specific training in some one line of work. She has a choice among stenography, bookkeeping and machine operating.
A boy needs, chiefly, general education, putting emphasis on writing, figuring, and spelling; general information; and the development of certain qualities and standards.
Boys’ training looks forward to both clerical work and business administration; but as clerical work is a preparation for business and is likely to occupy the first few years of wage-earning, training should aim especially to meet the needs of clerical positions.
Clerical positions for boys cover a variety of work which cannot be definitely anticipated and cannot therefore be specifically trained for. But certain fundamental needs are common to all.
Most of the specialized training for boys should be given in night continuation classes.
Girl stenographers need a full high school course for its educational value and for maturity. Girls going into other clerical positions can qualify with a year or two less of education; but immaturity in any case puts them at a disadvantage.
Boys’ training, for those who cannot remain in school, should be compressed into fewer than four years. Immaturity in the case of boys is not a great disadvantage.[58]
To many readers not prepared by a full consideration of the facts the above conclusions may seem untenable. A brief section of the argument will therefore be important in carrying conviction. This argument is presented in the following quotation:
If we wish to generalize broadly about the work of boys and girls we can say with truth that the majority of boys begin as messengers or office boys and subsequently become clerks or do bookkeeping work. As men they remain in these latter positions or, in at least an equal number of cases, pass on into the productive or administrative end of business. The majority of girls, first and last, are stenographers or to a less extent, assistants in bookkeeping or clerical work. There are of course boy stenographers and girl clerks, and there are women in general administrative work; but that these are a minority this report has several ways of showing.
Boys’ work may be expected to take on the characteristics of the business that employs them; girls’ work remains in essentials unchanged even in totally changed surroundings. For example, a boy who is clerk in a wholesale house will have work very unlike that of the boy who is clerk in a bank; but girl stenographers in both businesses will have an experience that is practically the same.
Boys’ work, within limits, is progressive; girls’ work in its general type—with individual exceptions—is static. Boys as a rule cannot stay at the same kind of work and advance; girls as a rule stay at the same kind of work whether or not they advance. Boys in any position are expected to be qualifying themselves for the “job ahead,” but for girls that is not the case. Boys may expect to make a readjustment with every step in advancement. Each new position brings them to a new situation and into a new relation to the business. Girls receive salary advancement for increasingly responsible work, but any change in work is likely to be so gradual as to be almost imperceptible if they remain in the same place of employment. If they change to another place those who are stenographers have a slight readjustment to make in getting accustomed to new terms and to the peculiarities of the new persons who dictate to them. Bookkeeping assistants may encounter different systems, but their part of the work will be so directed and planned that it cannot be said to necessitate difficult adaptation on their part. The work of clerical assistants is so simple and so nearly mechanical that the question of adjustment does not enter. These girl workers do not find that change of position or firm brings them necessarily into a new relation to the business.
Even moderate success is denied to a boy if he has not adaptability and the capacity to grasp business ideas and methods; but a comparatively high degree of success could be attained by a girl who possessed neither of these qualifications. A boy, however, who has no specific training which he can apply directly and definitely in work would be far more likely to obtain a good opening and promotion than a girl without it would be.
The range of a boy’s possible future in commercial occupations is as wide as the field of business. He cannot at first be trained specifically as a girl can be because he does not know what business will do with him or what he wants to do with business. The girl’s choice is limited by custom. She can prepare herself definitely for stenography, bookkeeping, or machine operating and be sure that she is preparing for just the opportunity—and the whole opportunity—that business offers to her. Her very limitation of opportunity makes preliminary choice and training definitely possible things.[59]
Household Arts as Extras
There is another respect in which the present-day training of girls differs from that of boys. Girls are being trained in the science of home-making. Where a girl intends to take up some vocation in the business world, her desire for courses in the household arts complicates the situation very seriously. The boy who is going into business wants a general education plus some business training. The girl wants all that the boy has plus household arts.
Demand for New Courses for Girls
The demand for the complete education of girls gives rise to many unsolved problems. For example, shall physics as at present taught be required as an introduction to cooking, or shall the cooking course be made to carry all the physics that the girl needs? The course in physics, be it remembered, contains many an example that is drawn from the boy’s sphere of interests in mechanics and does not appeal at all to the girl’s interests.
Or one may ask a similar question about economics. Shall the girl be given a special course in marketing in which examples are drawn from the daily activities of home life, or shall she wait until she can take the conventional course in political economy where the problems are often those of international trade and banking?
It would be impossible to secure anything like unanimity for any answer to these questions. The uncertainty in regard to the correct answer calls attention to the opportunity which is offered to the intelligent women of the teaching profession to solve a problem which is new and complicated, but all the more important because there are no guideposts to mark the way.