An important question that is always before a trade school is the effect the instruction may have on the working people. It is difficult for one not continually in the midst of the pressure of the actual trade to know the many ways that thoughtless advance in trade teaching may react to the disadvantage of the very ones that the school wishes to help. Injury may be done by preparing too many for certain occupations, filling places where a strike is on, replacing well-paid positions with trade school girls at a less price, placing the girls at too small a wage for their skill, doing order work at too low a price or when a strike is on, considering too closely the fitting of a worker for the employer's benefit rather than for the broadening of her own life, and like thoughtless actions. The difficulties of the situation are great and the solution frequently obscure, but a fair-minded school must be in touch with the effort the working woman herself has inaugurated to better her condition. The apparently unnecessary suspicion with which the laboring class regards the organization of trade instruction would have foundation if no thought were given to the trade conditions as the working girl sees them. A trade school for fourteen-year-old girls need not make a point of their immediate entrance into unions, but it should consider the subject simply and wisely in all its bearings, that the students may know the full aims and advantages of coöperation as well as the point of view and many difficulties of the employers.
Contact with Trade
The faculty of a trade school needs the coöperation and assistance of the working people and the employers of labor. Only through intimate interrelation with them can the best and most practical results be obtained. Auxiliaries and committees of employers and of wage-earners; visits of the staff of the school to trade, and of employers, forewomen, and workers to the school; the carrying out of orders for workrooms and assisting them at busy seasons, are some of the ways by which the Manhattan Trade School has tried to gain the help of the busy industrial world.
Problems of Financial Aid
The aid given to enable the poorest students to attend the school has brought its own questions, such as: the danger of pauperizing the recipients; the methods of selecting the beneficiaries; the best way to give the weekly aid; the development of a spirit of earnest work and regular attendance in the girls thus aided; the stimulation of a desire to return some equivalent in special helpfulness to the Manhattan Trade School or to its students, and the eliminating of this philanthropic effort from any apparent relation to school work.
FOOTNOTES:
[B] In order to explain these problems, it will be necessary to repeat some of the data in Part I.