You see, we have always had vocational education. The early New England girl was gradually inducted into her life-tasks by her mother. The modern girl will be gradually inducted into her life-tasks by her teachers.
You can observe the development toward this conclusion going on at any educational level you please.
Let’s look for a moment at the industrial level. Here’s a girl, in the north end of Boston, who is going to have to go to work young. She knows it. Her family knows it. Well, even for this girl, whose schooling will be brief, there are already three different periods of gradual induction into industry.
First, when she has completed the lowest grades of her regular public school, she may go for a while to the North Bennet Street Industrial School. Here she will give just about half her time to manual work such as machine- and hand-sewing. She will also study arithmetic, literature and composition, geography and history; but (or, rather, and) her interest in these subjects will be stimulated as powerfully as possible by their practical applications, as well as by their general relations, to the manual work she is doing and to the working world she is so soon to enter.
We are coming to admit the fact now that “pure” language and “pure” mathematics unapplied to actual problems are, for the mass of boys and girls, not only uninteresting but astonishingly unproductive of mental results. One of the first discoveries made by Mrs. Mary Schenck Woolman in her management of the Manhattan Trade School for Girls was that the public-school pupils who came to her after several years in the grades were “unable to utilize their public-school academic work in practical trade affairs.” Their progress, if it could be called so, 77 had been toward reception, not toward action. In the North Bennet Industrial School our Boston girl will make progress toward action.