XXIA POLICY IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION
Now that the passage of the Smith-Hughes bill is assured, interest moves to the distribution of this federal subsidy for vocational continuation and part-time schools. For the actual sums appropriated, even the maximum which will be available in nine years, are too small to be of constructive significance. Indeed there is something grotesque about the solemn and arduous study which went into the passage of this timid educational bill by a Congress which could appropriate a full third of a billion for armaments. The Smith-Hughes bill has all the aspect of a pious wish rather than the beginning of a thorough national policy in education. There was nothing revolutionary in this principle of federal aid. The principle was established by the Morrill act of 1862 and recently confirmed by the Smith-Lever bill for agricultural education. The halting character of this new legislation must be explained partly by thenovelty of vocational training in America and by the extremely confused condition of mind about it.
We scarcely know yet how to institute a vocational education that will make out of our youth effective workers and at the same time free and initiating citizens. The hopeless lack of coördination between industry and our educational system blocks and bewilders our efforts. In working towards a solution we meet two very real perils. When we attempt a coördination we run the risk of turning the public school into a mere preparatory school for factory, store and workshop, producing helpless workers riveted by their very training to a rigid and arbitrary industrial life. The better trained they are, or at least the more intense their specialization, the greater will be their subjection. Organized labor fears, and not unjustly, that a public vocational education might be the means of over-crowding the labor market and thereby “furnishing strike-breakers to industry.” This is always the danger when we attempt to adjust our training too tightly to existing industrial conditions. On the other hand, if we try to evade this danger and make the young worker’s training more general, so that a number of fieldsof industrial opportunity will be open to him, we may leave him more helpless than ever, for he has no assurance of being fit for the very concrete demands of skill that paying industry will make upon him.
This is the dilemma. If the organization of vocational training is left in charge of the representatives of the employers, educators fear, and fear rightly, that the first result will ensue. If it is left exclusively in the hands of educators, the employers fear the other danger. Vocational education in this country has, therefore, run its uncertain course through experiments in continuation schools, “pre-vocational” courses in the regular schools, trade courses, “coöperative” courses, until a certain skepticism has been aroused in the minds of professional educators and the interested public whether we can institute a workable system at all in our present public school. Skepticism has meant hesitation. In spite of the propaganda and survey work of an influential society of educators, employers and labor men—the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education—progress has been very slow. Only eight states have provided for the encouragement of vocational education and in only oneis continuation schooling compulsory. The whole movement has needed some very definite concentrated stimulus and some new, clear focusing of the issues.
This is the real value of the new federal bill. If it is negligible in its actual power for aid, its indirect effects should be of great importance in the way of stimulus. It will undoubtedly suggest to the majority of states the immediate establishment of a comprehensive system of continuation schools. The grants will be just large enough to make it seem possible. They are not nearly large enough to exempt the states from local appropriations. According to the federal bill these must duplicate the federal grants. The latter will therefore mean actual additional resources, an increment to local and state appropriations. If the states are wise, and appropriate this increment to the payment and training of teachers, then these small sums may be made to mean just the difference between the present hardly attained mediocrity of vocational teaching and a new and effective type of artisan-instructors.
The bill puts the distribution of the funds in the hands of such state boards as the legislatures shall designate. The latter may designatethe regular state board of education, or a special board of industrial education working under the direction of the regular board, or it may create a new and independent board to handle these funds. No state is likely to trifle with this now thoroughly discredited “dual” system originally sponsored in Illinois under the form of separate boards controlled wholly by employing interests. The practical choice will lie between the purely “educational” control and the mixed educational, industrial and labor control, such as exists in Wisconsin. The objection to the former grows persistently on the ground that the new vocational methods and work tend infallibly in the hands of the professional educator to drift back to the academic. Educators have too often shown a willingness either to divorce the “pre-vocational” work entirely from the regular school, or else to emasculate it of its realistic potency. Instead of seeing the new practical emphasis infusing and reinvigorating the regular primary and secondary school, the enthusiast for the “new” education has too often had to watch merely the slow reduction of the vocational work to the old unimaginative level of “manual training.” The question of control, therefore, which thenew bill puts indirectly to the states is of the greatest moment, both to the traditional type of school and to the new activities. The board that distributes the funds will in the last analysis control the policy. Certainly the conservatism of the professional educator is far less to be feared than the narrowness and self-interest of employers’ associations. In following the provisions of the federal bill that the aided schools shall be below college grade, for children over fourteen, the state board will control the standards of the individual schools. Whichever form of control is adopted, the trend towards state centralization of the school system is likely to be greatly strengthened.
In this development the states will be influenced largely by the experience of Wisconsin and Massachusetts, where the continuation schools, part-time schools, apprentice classes, which the bill encourages, have been longest in operation. The Wisconsin experience will be found particularly instructive. The state subsidizes its vocational schools by duplicating the funds raised by the community under an obligatory half-mill tax. The local schools are under the control of a special board of industrial education appointed by the local board of education,and consisting of the superintendent of schools with two labor representatives and two employers. The distribution of the state funds is in the hands of the regular state educational administration. There is an advisory industrial board of similar composition to the local boards. At present the situation is much confused owing to the reluctance of this state board of industrial education to remain merely advisory. A “developer” has been appointed as its secretary, an expert in the field, but without administrative power over the schools. His attempts at acceleration have produced their inevitable and intense resentment among the regular school officials. Obviously such a system, with two boards contending for mastery, creates an impossible situation. With the exception of this—and the actual effect of this very largely personal and political feud upon the local development seems to have been negligible—the Wisconsin system seems to be based on sound principles. The local industrial boards have worked with effectiveness and responsibility. In Milwaukee a remarkable system of continuation schools has been built up, which provides for no less than eight thousand children between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, childrenwhom the public and parochial schools have sloughed off into “blind-alley” work, and at whose education and guidance the city makes a last stab in the four-hour-a-week continuation school. One definite principle these Milwaukee schools seem to have established—that education must not be “preparatory” to work, that there is no real place for the merely “pre-vocational,” but that education should accompany work and do that just as long as there is anything to learn. The ideal vocational education will be a liberal “part-time” education, in which the school furnishes the background and the constant opening of new suggestions and possibilities, and the shop or trade or office provides the arena for acting skilfully on what is learned.
The Wisconsin system is particularly suggestive. For the local boards constitute one of our first American attempts at representation by interest instead of political parties or arbitrary geographical divisions. Their success is largely ascribed in Wisconsin to this fact, that they do accurately represent just the three classes most concerned in this form of education—organized labor, the employers, and the professional schoolman. The labor representatives are on the board to see that the policy does notswing over to narrow employing interests, the employers are on the board to see that the school is kept in touch with the practical demands of industry. The professional educator holds the balance of power between these two interests. With this administrative development to build on, with the improvement in teaching caliber that the new federal grants should bring, with the state centralization of the school system to which the new bill will give impetus, the future is good for a national system of education for work and with work, a free and democratic vocational training.