In view of such facts, how can anybody object to the steps which have been taken recently toward giving the women in the manufacturing trades, as well as the women in the commercial trades, some little preparation for the work in which they are likely to spend so many years?
In the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, in the last eighteen months of record, the enrollment was 1,169. More and more the girls in this school are willing to stay in it for a full year. They have finished at least five grades of the public school, and they are now learning to be milliners, to be dressmakers, to be operators of electric-power machines, to be workers in paste and glue in such occupations as candle-shade-making, to be workers with brush and pencil in furnishing the manufacturing trades with designs.
It is not only a matter of learning to do one particular thing in one particular department in one particular trade. That they could learn in a factory. It is a matter of getting some understanding of a whole trade, or getting some kind of a view of how the world is run. Nobody wants to make people into machines. The object of a good trade school is precisely the reverse. It is the common school which makes people into machines, when it sends them directly from books, which do not explain the working world, out into that world to become uncomprehending appendages to minute processes in infinitely subdivided manufacturing organizations.
A good trade school, besides teaching the technique of the machine, covers what Mrs. Woolman, the director of the Manhattan School, in her wonderful report of last year called the "middle ground" between general academic preparatory work on the one hand and practical trade training on the other. In this "middle ground" the pupil takes simple courses in, for instance, "Civics" and "Industries."
"Nothing to it," says an irritated manufacturer. "Nothing to it at all! I can't get a good office boy any more. I can't get anybody, boy or girl, who wants to do anything but just hold down a job and grab a pay-envelope. Too much schooling! Those inventors and pioneers who came out of New England and made this country from a hunting-ground into an empire—they didn't have all this monkey-business in technical schools and trade schools. They just went to work. That's all. I say send 'em to work young and let 'em sweat. That's what makes men and women."
My dear sir, those early New Englanders were in trade schools from the time they began to crawl on the floor among their mothers' looms and spinning-wheels. There was hardly a home in early New England that didn't give a large number of technical courses in which men and women were always teaching by doing, and the boys and girls were always learning by imitating.
The facts about this are so simple and so familiar that we don't stop to think of their meaning. When in the spring the wood-ashes from the winter fires were poured into the lye-barrel, and water was poured in with them, and the lye began to trickle out from the bottom of the barrel, and the winter's savings of grease were brought out, and the grease and the lye were boiled together in the big kettle, and mother had finished making the family's supply of soap for another year, the children had taken not only a little lesson in industriousness, by helping to make the soap, but a little lesson in industry, too, by observing the technique and organization of the soap business from start to finish. A boy from that family, even if he never learned to read or write, might some day have some IDEAS about soap.
The curriculum of an old New England home, so far as presided over by the wife, may be incompletely suggested as follows:
(N. B. The reader will note the inappropriateness of congratulating the daughters of that home on their not wanting a job. They had it.)