XXIIAN ISSUE IN VOCATIONAL EDUCATION
Nothing is more significant of the new spirit in public education than our use of the term “vocational training.” It strikes out at a blow the old antithesis between the cultural and the utilitarian. For a genuine vocation implies neither a life devoted to thought, nor a dull mechanical job to which personal and artistic and intellectual interests are mere trimmings—recreations which can be easily omitted by those who cannot afford to pay for them. A vocation is rather a nucleus of any kind of interesting activity by which one earns one’s living, and around which whatever else comes to one’s experience clusters to enhance its value and interest. It is not fantastic to hope that the very demands of modern industrial technique will make of most trades just such nuclei. When we justify trade-schools and industrial courses by the existence of law and medical and engineering schools, we are implyingthat the skilled worker in modern industry can and should lead a life as genuinely “professional” as the lawyer and doctor and engineer.
New York City has at the present time (June, 1915) a unique opportunity to meet these important issues. In no other city has the question been so squarely presented. New York has to choose between what is called the Ettinger plan, put into operation by a local superintendent to solve “part-time” and vocational training problems, and the Gary plan, as worked out by William Wirt and now on trial under his personal direction in several of the New York schools. In that choice may be indicated the tendencies and purposes of industrial education in this country.
The Ettinger plan emphasizes in the sharpest way the difference between “cultural” and “industrial” work. The child chooses between them in his sixth or seventh year of school. If economic pressure is going to force him into manual work, he is allowed to try a number of different trades in the school industrial shops in order to discover what he is best fitted for. This hasty experimentation has received the schoolman’s label of “prevocational.” Havingchosen his trade, the young worker specializes in the shop, under conditions as nearly as possible like the trade, continuing in trade-school or technical high school, or in the industry under a coöperative scheme, as in the German schools. His academic studies, as far as they are continued, are of a severely practical character, theory and science being used merely to explain the industrial processes which he is learning. The ideal is a specialized school, gradually breaking off from the traditional one and developing radically different methods and interests. The object of the industrial course is to turn out a competent workman who has escaped the blind occupations of those who leave school at the minimum age.
The school under this plan may give the child an elementary industrial training, with an intellectual orientation better than he could get under any system of apprenticeship, but it can scarcely be said to give a vocational training. The Ettinger plan treats the child solely as a potential workman who is to be absorbed as a permanent subordinate in one specialized trade of a rigidly organized industrial system. It makes of the school a mere downward extension of the staple trades and machine industries, asort of kindergarten where the employer gets his workmen trained, free of cost to himself. It quite ignores any other rôles the young worker may be called upon to play in society—as citizen or as member of an economic class. It makes an undemocratic class-division in the public school, and by divorcing the academic from the industrial work gives to both the wrong setting.
The Gary plan, on the other hand, prepares for a genuinely vocational life. It views the world outside the school not as a collection of trades but as a community, a network of occupations and interests, of interweaving services, intellectual, administrative, manual. It sees the individual as a citizen who contributes his share to the community and pays for the things he enjoys. The school itself is organized as a community, self-supporting industrially and as varied in its work, study and play as is the larger community. The industrial work is made an indispensable part of the maintenance and enhancement of this school community life. The Gary child begins in his third or fourth school year as helper in a shop or laboratory that interests him. If he is to work at a trade after he leaves school, he gets a long and thoroughtraining under real workmen in the school shops engaged in the repair and maintenance of the school-plant. He is at no time called upon to choose between the “academic” and the “industrial.” His work is a focusing of all the interests of the school, and the attitudes developed in the school are bound to be carried into productive life and to give a new setting to the business of making a livelihood. Science, apart from the light it throws upon the artisan’s trade, is bound to mean something to him, for in the Gary school it has answered his questions about the physical world around him. History and geography and sociology and economics are likely to mean something because they have answered questions about the social institutions and the relations of men. Art and music will continue to interest him because they have been an integral part of the school life. The Gary plan would tend to produce not only a skilled workman but a critical citizen, ready, like the energetic professional man, to affect the standards and endeavors of his profession and the community life.
The Ettinger plan is as economically unsound as it is pedagogically unsound. It requiresspecial teachers, and expensive shops which are unproductive. Without state or federal subsidies, the cost of any extensive or even adequate industrial training in trade-school or elementary school will continue to be prohibitive. The Gary plan, which connects the school shops directly with the repair and maintenance of the school-plant, demands and can afford a much greater variety of shops than the ordinary school. And since the workmen-teachers earn their salaries by their work, the children get their industrial training practically without cost to the community. By the Gary plan the vocational training features are only practicable if all the other liberally varied “cultural” features are put into operation at the same time. This effectually prevents that “exploitation” of the children which its opponents fear because the young workers get their training as “apprentices” in the school shops.
Many who admit the superior social aims of the Gary plan are inclined to feel that the practical results of the two plans will not be radically different. But the Gary plan and the Ettinger plan are not merely two different ways of reaching the same end. They not only involvedifferent conceptions of the school and of industrial society, but they are bound to turn out different kinds of people.
The Ettinger plan is dangerous because it is typical of most schemes now being put forward by the advocates of industrial education. These plans are concerned neither with genuine educational interests nor with genuine industrial interests, but only with the interest of the employer. No person who feels that the public schools should train critical citizens who will have something to say to the industrial system into which they go, and not mere docile workers, counting socially no more than their tools, will fail to realize the vast importance that the Gary plan should prevail over all these schemes.