"May not required courses be added to the college curriculum to inculcate business power and sense in all women?"
This philosophy seems to aim at making the modern school as informative about modern industry as the primitive home was about primitive industry. It seems to be the same educational philosophy which produced the course on Chicago in the Chicago elementary schools, which produced the Manhattan Trade School in New York, which produced the School of Salesmanship at the Women's Educational and Industrial Union in Boston.
At that Women's Educational and Industrial Union, at 264 Boylston Street, you may see the evolution toward the age of trained women proceeding at all levels of educational equipment.
There, before you, at one level, are the Trade School Shops—a shop in hand-work and a shop in millinery. The pupils are graduates of the Boston Trade School for Girls. They have had one year of training. They are now taking another.
Florence Marshall made the Boston Trade School, with a committee of women to help her. It has now been taken over by the public authorities and merged into the public-school system. What looked like a private fad has become a public function. The training of women for self-support has been recognized as a duty of the state.
The Trade School Shops at the Women's Educational and Industrial Union were started for the express purpose of supplementing the work of the Boston Trade School for Girls. One year was not enough.
In the Trade School the prospective milliner had spent four months on plain sewing, four months on summer hats, four months on winter hats. She had also taken short courses in Personal Hygiene, Business Forms, Spelling, Business English, Color Design, Textiles, Industrial Conditions. These latter courses were not, strictly speaking, "technical." They were "vocational." They were in the "middle ground" between general and technical training. They went beyond the general training of the elementary schools and furnished the girl with the background of her future vocation. But she often needed a little more of the foreground, a little more of actual trade technique.
Thus does her education divide itself up into periods:—general, vocational, technical.
The Trade School Shops are designed to give the girl her final technical finish. They are really more like a factory than like a school. Although the object of them is to convey a broad instruction, the pupil gets wages, the stuff she makes is sold, and the organization is that of a commercial establishment.
So, at the end of two years from the time she left the elementary school, the young milliner is ready to go out into the world organization. She is better fitted for her world than many a college girl is for hers.