The coming of vacation invariably brings a great influx of boys to the State employment office, some looking for summer work, others for permanent employment. Most of them show lack of intelligent constructive thought on the matter in hand. Few of them have had any counsel, or any valuable counsel from their parents or others. To Mr. Sears and his assistants—and they have become very proficient at it—is left the task of vocational guidance, within such limitations as those of time and equipment. What can be done to get the boy and his sponsors to thinking intelligently about the question of an occupation for the boy, with proper regard to their mutual fitness?
Superintendent Sears has some suggestions to offer. In his opinion the subject of occupational choice should be debated thoroughly in the public schools. He favors the introduction of some plan embodying this idea in the upper grades of the grammar school, under conditions that would give each boy an opportunity to talk, and that would encourage him to consult his parents and teachers. The debates might be held monthly, and preparation should be required. Experts or successful men in various occupations might be called in to address the pupils and furnish authoritative information. The questions debated should involve the advisability of learning a trade and the choice of a trade, and the same considerations with respect to the professions, the mercantile pursuits, and so on. The pupils should be allowed to vote on the merits of each question debated. By such a method, thinks Mr. Sears, the boys would gain the valuable training which debating gives, would devote considerable thought to the question of their future employment, would acquire much information, and would get their parents more interested in the matter than many of them are.
(New York Evening Post)
Now it is that Many Coveys of Students are Headed toward Lake and Mountain—Just How it Pays
With the sudden plunge into a muggy heat, more suggestive of July than of the rare June weather of poets, there has begun the exodus of summer camp folk, those men and women who add to the slender salary of the teaching profession the additional income made by running camps for boys and girls during the long vacation. They stretch, these camps, in rapidly extending area from Canada through Maine and northern New England, into the Adirondacks and the Alleghenies, and then across toward the Northwest and the Rockies. It is quite safe to assert that there is not a private school of importance that does not take under its protection and support at least one such institution, while large numbers of teachers either own camps or assist in their management as instructors.
One group, unmistakably the advance guard of a girls' camp, assembled at the Grand Central Station on Wednesday. There were two alert, dignified women, evidently the co-principals; a younger woman, who, at least so the tired suburban shopper decided, was probably the athletic instructor; two neat colored women, and a small girl of twelve, on tiptoe with excitement, talking volubly about the fun she would have when they got to the lake and when all the other girls arrived. Her excited chatter also revealed the fact that father and mother had just sailed for Europe, and, while she thought of them with regret, there was only pleasure in prospect as she started northward. There was much baggage to be attended to, and consultation over express and freight bills, with interesting references to tents, canoes, and tennis nets.
Success is an excellent testimonial, and there is no longer any need to point out the advantages of such camps for boys and girls. They fill a real place for the delicate, the lazy, or the backward, who must needs do extra work to keep up with their school grade, for those who otherwise would be condemned to hotel life, or for the children whose parents, because of circumstances, are compelled to spend the summer in cities. Even the most jealously anxious of mothers are among the converts to the movement. As one said the other day of her only son, "Yes, David will go to Mr. D.'s camp again this summer. It will be his third year. I thought the first time that I simply could not part with him. I pictured him drowned or ill from poor food or severe colds. Indeed, there wasn't a single terror I didn't imagine. But he enjoyed it so, and came home so well and happy, that I've never worried since."
From the child's point of view, summer camps are a blessing, and, as such, they have come to stay. But there are those who doubt their benefits, even the financial ones, for the teachers, who mortgage their vacations to conduct them. Unfortunately, as every one knows, almost every teacher has to mortgage her spare time in one way or another in order to make a more than bare living. Call the roll of those whom you may know, and you will be surprised—no, scarcely surprised; merely interested—to find that nine-tenths of them do some additional work. It may be extra tutoring, hack writing, translating, the editing of school texts or the writing of text-books, taking agencies for this, that, or the other commodity, conducting travel parties, lecturing at educational institutes, running women's clubs, or organizing nature classes. Some outside vocation is necessary if the teacher is to enjoy the advantages her training makes almost imperative, or the comforts her tired, nervous organism demands. So, as one philosopher was heard to remark, it is perhaps best to run a summer camp, since in the doing of it there is at least the advantage of being in the open and of leading a wholesomely sane existence.