1. The apprentice method.—First, historically there has been the apprentice method, the youth being “bound out to learn a trade.” The chief faults of this traditional way of teaching the boy to be self-supporting were these: it made no allowance for intellectual development, and it gave the father too much authority to choose the calling for the boy.
A modern offshoot of the old-time apprentice course is the trade school which flourishes in many of the big cities to-day. This new institution has one great advantage over its prototype. It offers such a great variety of forms of training that the youth may exercise much free choice. But it preserves one of the serious defects of apprenticeship in its neglect of the intellect of the learner. The modern trade school can never hope to do more than prepare young men and women to make a good living. It is a get-ready-quick institution, and can never be expected to give the student breadth of view and depth of insight into the great problems of human life.
2. The cultural method.—The second-oldest method of preparing men for a vocation is what has been called the cultural method. It has aimed at high advancement in book learning with the thought of finally enabling the student to enter a professional class comparatively few in numbers and supposed to possess a superior advantage over the great mass of human kind. One fault of this method has been to emphasize learning for its own sake and to defer too long the training of the individual in the material and practical side of his calling.
But the chief fault of this cultural method has been its contempt for common labor and ordinary industry, its theory being that true education prepares one to avoid such practices. If the young man wished to prepare for law or medicine or teaching or the ministry,—one of the “learned professions,”—then the old classical school was at his service. But if he would become a mere artisan or industrial worker, there was no advanced course of schooling available.
3. The developmental method.—The third and newest method of preparing the young person for his vocational life is in reality a compromise between the first and second. It provides that the learner shall have book instruction and industrial training at the same time, and that both of these are to be regarded as cultural, since taken together they prepare for independence of thought and action, and for the vocation, as well. This new method of preparing young people for their life work would call nothing mean or low. It aims to serve all impartially in their struggle for self-improvement and vocational success. But its motto is the development of head and hand together. It seeks to produce cultured handicraftsmen as well as cultured artists and professional men.
The farmer fortunate
Our justification for the foregoing somewhat lengthy discussion of the different theories of education is that of wishing to be certain of bespeaking the father’s patience and forbearance in the preparation of his son for the vocational life. The farmer is most fortunate in having ready at hand a large amount and variety of industrial practice to supplement the boy’s book lessons. In this respect he probably has a superior advantage over all other classes.
But in guiding his boy gradually toward the vocational life the farm father can easily mistake what is merely a passing interest on the former’s part for a permanent one. The carefully kept records of farm boys show that they take up many different lines of work with great enthusiasm, and yet soon tire of them and drop them. These serial and transitory interests are usually mere juvenile responses to the awakening of some new nerve centers. They are not much different in nature from the brief passing interest which the child has in his various playthings.
Now, the chief function of these transitory interests in special forms of work and learning as shown by the young growing boy is this: to furnish the occasions for a great variety of activities and practices for trying him out on all the possible sides of his nature. Not one of these intense boyish interests is necessarily very directly preparatory to his final choice of a vocation, while all are indirectly so. Therefore, if the fifteen-year-old son chances to win in a corn-raising contest, or at a live-stock exhibition, or if he manifests unusual interest in arithmethic, declamation, or nature study, do not regard any of these as necessarily pointing to his best possible vocational work. Presumably, at such an undeveloped age, he is still in possession of some latent interests and aptitudes, one of which may far outweigh any such thing hitherto awakened in his life. Give him time to mature and, if at all practicable, send him on to college.