[3]. Twenty-fifth annual report of the Commissioner of Labor, 1910, p. 321.
In this connection it is interesting to note that General Armstrong, the founder of Hampton, was the son of Hawaii’s first Commissioner of Education, whose reports advocated this same training for Hawaiians in the early missionary days.
VOCATIONAL AND EMPLOYMENT BUREAU
The establishment and intelligent conduct of a vocational employment bureau goes far to help a community secure a comprehensive grasp of its industrial situation. Such a bureau is most efficient when officially connected with the department of public instruction. It may, however, be conducted by an unofficial body, as in Cincinnati, where it is under the management of the Charlotte Schmidlapp Foundation, and in Boston, where it had its inception, and is still philanthropically managed. There must, however, be a sound Compulsory Attendance School Law on which to base it. Hawaii’s Law requiring school attendance of all children from six to seventeen years of age is admirable; but it is weakened by the proviso: “If when a child has reached the age of twelve years and has not completed the fourth grade of the primary school he shall be eligible for instruction ONLY in an industrial school.”
While it is safe to assume that the child who has attended school from his sixth year until his twelfth, without reaching a higher grade than the fourth primary, should undoubtedly be trained for an industrial occupation; yet on the other hand the exemption from compulsory school attendance “if there is no school within four miles of a child’s home,” together with the known insufficient school accommodation in parts of the Hawaiian Islands makes it easily possible for hundreds of children to be prevented from entering school until their seventh or eighth year. In families who have come to Honolulu from rural districts, children have reached the age of ten without having been entered at school. It is obviously unfair, therefore, to deprive the child of an opportunity to receive an education because through no fault of his he may have been retarded in his studies.
Wherever there is large foreign element, or where for other reasons the normal rate of progress is likely to be departed from by any large number of pupils, the course favored generally by educators is the establishment of vacation schools, in which a child who fails of promotion may have instruction in the studies needed to bring him up with his class.
Study rooms in charge of teachers, in the evening, or after school, have also been opened in districts where non-English-speaking parents are unable to assist their children in preparing lessons.
Matters of retardation and the remedies therefor are at present receiving the most careful attention of progressive educators. The Russell Sage Foundation and the Bureau of Municipal Research in New York, two social investigating bodies, are seeking the best means for removing disabilities which may prevent a child from advancing in school and so of having an opportunity in life.
No sociological investigation of rural conditions has been made in Hawaii for the purpose of learning the exact extent to which children of the rural communities are prevented from attending school, and what actual bearing this has on plantation labor. It has been demonstrated beyond a doubt, however, that the negroes in the southern states have left the plantations mainly because their children either did not have any educational facilities, or because the schools they might or could attend were not up to the standard. In a number of instances they built and equipped their own schoolhouses.
A people that cannot see a bettering of conditions—not alone economic, but individually broadening for their children—is always prone to be dissatisfied.