Courtesy Massachusetts Child Labor Committee
ONE OF THE “BLIND ALLEY” TRADES
This group is declared to be typical of every city and town in Massachusetts.
The third line of work for the vocational counselor in a vocational school is that of “following up.” This is the only way of ascertaining whether schools are fitting the children for those walks of life for which they are attempting to train them. If the school is doing this satisfactorily we want to know it, and if it is not doing it we ought to know it. The child may be followed up by a regular system of reporting by mail, by visits to employes and by alumni meetings. Alumni meetings are particularly profitable when turned into experience meetings at which the children tell what they have been doing with especial emphasis on the relation of their training in the school and their work in the world. In this way schools can keep in touch with their graduates and create a spirit of friendly intercourse even after they leave. The best advertisement a school can have is an enthusiastic body of loyal graduates.
The work of the vocational assistant in a vocational or other school is thus one of adjustment; adjusting children to the right course in school; adjusting them to the right course after they leave school; and adjusting the relationship between the school and the home, and that between the school and the business life.
If this work is needed in a vocational school how much more it must be needed in a regular school! For it is an adjustment which tends always toward keeping the children in school, but if they must leave, insists upon seeing that they are at least given a helping hand toward that new life which is so different from school life and so bewildering to the youthful mind.
There is plentiful testimony that fathers and mothers now turn to the Boston schools as never before for advice and help in their perplexities concerning their children’s future. It has been most pathetic in the past to see how little parents knew of real industrial conditions, and of what educational and vocational opportunities existed in Boston, entirely within their reach. Our experience has been that the vast majority of parents have heretofore known nothing about the various high schools and their specialties, except what they have learned through the vocational work of the school itself. The attitude of the parents when visited in the homes, makes it appear only too clear that practically all welcome such guidance and are anxious to avail themselves of it.
These, then, are pictures of the vocational counselor at work. What is the machinery behind her? Every school in the city has at least one teacher who has given her time freely to this service. In some schools committees of teachers have formed voluntarily to take thought over the dropping out of boys and girls, and to organize that assistance which a school can give to parents and children in administering to the life-career motive. The work of the vocational counselors has been a labor of love. Nobody has expected that the occupational talks to which they have listened twice a month would equip them for effective vocational guidance. But no group of persons can listen to intimate discussions of the shoe industry, department stores, machine industries, stenography and typewriting, mechanical and civil engineering, building trades and needle trades—which have been actual subjects in these meetings—without being better fitted than before to advise and guide those who are making hit-or-miss guesses at work in the fond hope that it will pay well and that it is suited to their particular capacities.
The Vocation Bureau, through whose influence the Boston schools were induced to introduce vocational guidance, does not aim at the placing of individual boys and girls in particular jobs. It endeavors to study the causes of the waste which attends the passing of unguided and untrained young people from school to work, and to assist by experiments to prevent this waste. It aims to work out the problem of co-operation between schools and occupations, for the purpose of enabling both to make a more socially profitable use of human talents and opportunities. It publishes studies of vocations from the viewpoint of their educational and other efficiency requirements. It conducts a training course for qualified men and women who desire to prepare themselves for vocational guidance in the public school system, philanthropic institutions, and business establishments. Its interests therefore lie both in the direction of personal service to the individual and of constructive experiment and research in the field of education and employment.
A capable investigator spends his entire time in studying occupations open to boys and young men, what these occupations require, and what they lead to. From three months to a year is devoted to each study. The result of these inquiries is published in tentative pamphlet form. Such pamphlets have already been published on the machinist, banking, the baker, confectionery manufacture, the architect, the landscape architect, the grocer, the department store, and the profession of law.
In each of these studies it is sought to supply parents, teachers and others interested with the material necessary to an intelligent conception of the occupation, its needs, demands, opportunities, relative desirability and its training, requirements and possibilities. It is further sought to analyze the relation of aptitudes, interests and habits to modern industrial demands, and thus to lay an adequate foundation for a system of training that regards social as well as economic needs.
The Vocation Bureau has constantly borne in mind that a sound development of vocational guidance requires that contact with the employments be more than mere onlooking. To leave the employer out of such a plan, to fail to profit by his criticism and point of view, is to omit one of the most important elements in such guidance. The bureau has therefore been in close touch with a large number of industrial and commercial concerns in sympathy with its purposes. Manufacturers have approved its methods, and have even supported its demands for more thorough-going protection and opportunity for the young worker.