Gives the Young Wage-Earner a Fair Working Chance
BY MARY E. TITZEL
The Jones School, the oldest public school building in Chicago, is at Harrison Street and Plymouth Court. When it was new, it was surrounded by "brown-stone fronts," and boys and girls who to-day are among the city's most influential citizens learned their A-B-C's within its walls. Now, the office-buildings and printing-houses and cheap hotels and burlesque shows that mark the noisy, grimy district south of the "loop" crowd in upon it; and only an occasional shabby brown-stone front survives in the neighborhood as a tenement house. But in the Jones School, the process of making influential citizens is still going on. For there the "Job Lady" has her office, her sanctum.
Job Lady is a generic term that includes Miss Anne Davis, director of the Bureau of Vocational Supervision, and her four assistants. The Bureau—which is the newest department of Chicago's school system—is really an employment agency, but one that is different from any other employment agency in the United States. It is concerned solely with a much-neglected class of wage-earners—children from fourteen to sixteen years of age; and its chief purpose is, not to find positions for its "patrons," but to keep them in school.
It was founded as a result of the discovery that there were not nearly enough jobs in Chicago to go around among the twelve or fifteen thousand children under sixteen years of age who left school each year to go to work; also that, though a statute of the State required a child either to work or to go to school, there were about twenty-three thousand youngsters in the city who were doing neither. The law had made no provision for keeping track of the children once they had left school. No one knew what had become of them. So Miss Davis, acting as special investigator for the School of Civics and Philanthropy and the Chicago Women's Club, set to work to find out.
She discovered—and she can show you statistics to prove it—that "bummin'" around, looking aimlessly for work, brought many a boy and girl, unable to withstand the temptations of the street, into the Juvenile Court. And she found, as other statistics bear witness, that the fate of the children who found jobs was scarcely better than that of their idle brothers and sisters. Undirected, they took the first positions that offered, with the result that most of them were engaged in "blind-alley" occupations, unskilled industries that offered little, if any, chance for advancement and that gave no training for the future. The pay was poor; it averaged two dollars a week. Working conditions were frequently unhealthful. Moral influences of shop and factory and office were often bad. For the most part, the industries that employed children were seasonal; and many boys and girls were forced into long periods of inactivity between positions. This state of affairs, combined with a natural tendency to vary the monotony of life by shifting, on the slightest pretext, from one job to another, was making of many children that bane of modern industry, the "casual" laborer.
The Bureau—started informally in the course of initial investigations and kept alive through the grace of the Women's Club, until the Board of Education was ready to adopt it—has been able to do much in amelioration of the lot of the fourteen-to-sixteen-year-old worker. But no statistics it can produce are as telling as the sight of the Bureau in operation. Sit with your eyes and ears open, in a corner of the office in the Jones School and you will make the acquaintance of one of the humanest employment agencies in the world; also you will learn more about such grave subjects as the needs of our educational system and the underlying causes of poverty than you can learn out of fat treatises in a year.
"Why do you want to leave school?" That is the first question the Job Lady asks of each new applicant who comes to the Bureau for work. Perhaps the child has heard that question before; for in those schools from which the greatest numbers of children go out at the age of fourteen, Miss Davis and her assistants hold office hours and interview each boy or girl who shows signs of restlessness. They give informal talks to the pupils of the sixth and seventh grades about the opportunities open to boys and girls under sixteen; they discuss the special training offered by the schools and show the advisability of remaining in school as long as possible; they try to find an opportunity of talking over the future with each member of the graduating class.
But even when the way has been paved for it, the question, "Why do you want to leave school?" brings to light the most trivial of reasons. In very few cases is it economic necessity that drives a child to work.
"I ain't int'rusted," explained one boy to Miss Davis. "I jest sits."