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But we should not allow ourselves to be so subject to words as to ignore and virtually deny his other callings when it comes to a consideration of the vocational phases of education. A person must have experience, he must live, if his artistry is to be more than a technical accomplishment.
Its discussion would lead us beyond the limits of our present inquiry, but it seems probable that the real psychological laboratory experiment in the service of vocational guidance does not belong in the schoolroom itself, but ought to be left to special municipal institutions. One point here must not be overlooked.
The teacher or vocational guide is fitted by the place of observation she holds to help the girl to study herself and the possibilities that life holds out to such as she thus finds herself to be. The final choice should be made by the girl. Marriage may, or may not, in these days, be the opening door into the homemaker's career. Many a young woman is a homemaker before she marries.
The kitchen and the dining-room have as much to gain from science as have the dairy and the orchard. The inspiration of vocational knowledge must be the possession of her who is the entrepreneur of the family, the home-maker.
There was enough money to give her a course in secretarial training in a women's vocational college in Boston and to support them all in economical comfort until she should be ready to begin her work.
Any scheme for vocational education which takes its point of departure from the industrial regime that now exists, is likely to assume and to perpetuate its divisions and weaknesses, and thus to become an instrument in accomplishing the feudal dogma of social predestination.
To be sure, this has the advantage that a failure in one vocation does not bring with it such a serious injury as in Europe, but it contributes much to the greater danger that any one may jump recklessly and without preparation into any vocational stream. It is fresh in every one's mind how during the last decade the economic conscience of the whole American nation became aroused.
Certain Phases of Training and Education Can Be Accomplished Better by the School Than by Any Other Agency. A National System of Industrial and Vocational Education Should Be Established The school is a social institution whose functions are becoming daily more widely understood and more clearly defined. In the history of civilization, the school, as we know it, is a very recent institution.
The mother institute in Boston, too, under its new direction emphasizes more the economic and hygienic side, and has set its centre of gravity in a systematic effort to propagate understanding of the problems of vocational guidance and to train professional vocational counselors in systematic courses, who are then to carry the interest over the land.
Public education in America is only beginning to respond to the need of intelligently connecting our educational product with the world's work. Trade schools for boys and girls, half-time schools, continuation schools, night schools, and in a few cities vocational bureaus are at work, but so are poverty and the helpless ignorance of the hard-pressed home.