XXVCONTINUATION SCHOOLS
The movement for vocational education has done nothing more valuable than to show us how far we are still from realizing the public school as a child-community, first of all as a quickening life and only secondarily as an educational institution. The rapidly extending “continuation school” is perhaps the most obvious symptom of this failure. The term itself is unfortunate, for it drags along with it the old separation of education from living. It suggests something in the way of a surplus, of extension schooling beyond an allotted time, as if its pupils were getting an educational largess out of some great social bounty. Actually the “continuation school” represents educational deficit; the necessity for it registers our failure to provide an earlier school-community life for children which would have kept them out of industry. Also it registers our failure to providechild-labor laws which would have protected them.
The continuation school is officially a “school for employed minors fourteen to sixteen years of age,” and is intended to hold, by the tenuous thread of four to six hours a week school attendance, those boys and girls who have gotten their employment certificates at the earliest legal age and are floundering about in low-paid occupations, mostly unskilled. New York City alone has 58,000 such children, fourteen and fifteen years of age, two-thirds of whom have never completed the elementary school. Stores, offices, shops, domestic service, messenger service absorb these boys and girls, untrained and unfocused, and the truly formidable burden is placed upon them of making their skilful way in the world. Popular tradition tries to make us glow with the belief that this world is a ladder up which virtue and industry will automatically ascend. But unfortunately the ladder of opportunity rarely reaches down so far. The lowest rung is beyond their reach. The gap between it and the ground is often too great even for initiative and character to bridge. The “employed minors fourteen to sixteen years of age” become the nucleus for thatpartly employed, sodden and anemic mass of drifters which drags down labor everywhere and clogs social progress.
The education which these children have had has in most cases barely fitted them to remain upright on the ground, not to speak of reaching for the ladder. The acquirement of literacy, a more or less uncertain skill in figuring, the exposure to some miscellaneous historical and geographical information—this has been the real substance of their five or six years’ schooling. To most of these children it is probable that the world of printed symbols will never mean very much. A real school would have striven to awaken their concrete and constructive intelligence, given play to all the non-intellectual impulses. It is just the tedium and artificiality of the old school which has sentenced them now to stand at the bottom of the occupational scale. Without class-prestige, economic advantages, manners, extraordinary initiative or intelligence, most of these children are handicapped from the start. Literate, they are perhaps fitted to compete on equal terms with each other for work. But for the passing into better-paid, more interesting, more responsible and skilful activity, their schooling,though it came at the most plastic and active time of childhood, has done nothing whatever.
We try, therefore, through the “continuation school” to make up bravely to these children what they have lost. We try to lift them so that they can clutch at the lowest rung of the ladder. We find it easier to make stabs at repairing the damage than to reorganize the elementary school so as to prevent it. In Wisconsin cities a boy or girl leaving school at fourteen to go to work is required to attend day continuation school four or five hours a week for three years. In Boston the children must attend for four hours a week for two years. In Pennsylvania cities they must attend eight hours a week for two years. Continuation schools for 20,000 children are in process of formation by the New York City Board of Education. Wisconsin’s forty-five industrial and continuation schools are compulsory, while in the other states which have permissive laws the schools may be made locally compulsory. Employers are required to dismiss their child employees on working days and within working hours, the school time being reckoned as part of the time that minors are permitted by law to work.
Such laws obviously follow the line of leastresistance. They add to the school system without revitalizing it. At the same time, a scheme like the Massachusetts plan suggests that the continuation school may be developed into a real stimulus of incentive. This plan provides for three kinds of classes. For those “employed minors” who are already in semi-skilled work, it provides some training and background for the trade or occupation chosen. There are also trade preparatory classes for pupils who have definitely chosen the trade for which they wish training, but have not yet found placement in the trade. Then there are “pre-vocational” classes for those who are ambitious to make some intelligent choice of an occupation. These pupils are given varied shopwork, visits to shops and factories, and personal consultation with teachers and employers. Classes are small, and intensive work can be done. The other pupils, employed in unskilled labor and without definite vocational leanings, go into “general improvement courses,” where half the time is spent in regular school subjects continuing the elementary school work; a quarter of the time is devoted to “the discovery and development of dominant interests and powers,” and the rest of the time to what isquaintly called “civics, hygiene, recreation and culture.” In this latter activity one-quarter of the time of the “pre-vocational” and trade courses is similarly spent. Pupils may transfer from one class to another when they are ready. If the purpose of the continuation school is to bridge that gap between the ground and the level where opportunity can at all begin to mean anything, this Massachusetts plan would seem to do it in an easily graduated and flexible way. The untrained and unfocused worker has at least a chance to have his imagination stimulated and to learn the rudiments of some better work.
The sanguine advocates of the continuation school, however, are apt to assume that this chance is equivalent to an effective vocational training. They forget that of the 10,000 or more children whom Wisconsin provides with compulsory continuation schooling a majority must necessarily remain in the general improvement classes or else get only a rudimentary training. And five hours a week for education against fifty for routine labor is not likely to make over the boys and girls who are pulled into the school for a brief respite from the department stores, messenger and domesticservice, mills and factories, millinery and dressmaking shops. Even in the stimulating Massachusetts atmosphere one hour a week for “civics, hygiene, recreation and culture” seems hardly availing. In the light of the kind of school-community life which every progressive state now knows enough to provide and could afford to provide, the continuation school seems a pathetic if necessary palliative for our educational sins. Already loud complaints are heard against “allowing the public school to pass on its failures for some one else to bury.” The first lesson of the continuation school is that it should not be needed. Even employers repeatedly declare that to industry children under sixteen are of no real value as workers. The states are one after another jacking up their child-labor limit to sixteen years. We are rapidly coming to the public conviction that the school should care for all children’s activity up to that age. What the continuation school does now for four hours a week, we are insisting that the regular school shall do for thirty or even forty hours a week.
But this means that we shall have to have a reinvigorated school. It must not be a prison where children are kept when they long for thefreedom of outside work. It must be a place where full opportunity for expression is provided for each child in a varied life of study and work and play. It must be an organic life and not an institution. No system of industrial and continuation schools piled on at the top will effect this. The evening school has largely failed because it demanded an impossible concentration and perseverance from the over-fatigued and excitement-craving worker. The continuation school, dealing with restless and unintegrated children, will be ineffective for the same reason. The vocational movement goes blundering on in amazing disregard of the psychology of the worker. Even the docile German child, it is said, must be coerced into his admirable continuation school where he gets a thorough orientation in his relations to his work, the community and his comrades. What are admirable trades and studies going to mean to boys and girls who are doing the most rudimentary work, their impulses undirected, their minds filled with sex-fantasy, personal mirages, and all the cheap and feeble excitements of the city streets? The groping and desiring spirit of youth is going indomitably to resist your most thoughtful schemes until you have a schoolwhich from the earliest years, by its freedom, its expressive life, its broad communal and personal excitements, its contact with real things, provides a child-life which meets these inner needs. Our best American public schools already begin to show that such a child-community life is not at all impossible. Until we achieve it generally, our continuation school will be one of the stop-gaps, and a lusty warning of what we have failed to achieve.