It should also be the duty of the supervisor and of the individual instructors to keep watch of each student and see that no student be allowed to continue along certain lines of trade that he or she may not have a liking or talent for. In such cases these students should and must be transferred to other trades for which they may possess particular talent.

No person, man or woman, can ever become skilled or expert in any trade or profession if he is obliged to learn it against his will and natural inclinations. This phase of character and disposition should not be lost sight of, and the student should be changed from one trade to another until finally the correct and most natural vocation for him is discovered. So many boys and girls do not at first know themselves what they want to learn and follow thru life that this particular feature is most important.

Finally, I believe that every state in the Union should maintain, in connection with its universities, normal schools, or otherwise, a regular trade school. This school should be similar to the so-called Gewerbeschule in Germany. In it, at a slight cost, or, better yet, entirely free, all the mechanical trades and domestic sciences should be taught, so that skilled mechanics could be created. If this were done, and I firmly believe it will be done in the near future, then Germany, when it again sends an educational commission to this country, as it did in 1904 to study the school exhibits at the St. Louis exposition, will receive a different report. In 1904 the commission reported America to be abundant in resources, filled with energetic and exceedingly quick-witted and resourceful people, who would have to be reckoned with sooner or later in their commerce and trade relations with foreign countries, but that, for the present, Americans were so seriously handicapped in their vocational and educational institutions that Germany need have nothing to fear from them for some time to come.

Let us change this situation-I am glad to say that since 1904 there has been a change so that the next report will say that the time has come when Germany must sit up and give us attention. Now we are competing along trade lines in all foreign countries, and, with the completion of the Panama Canal, I believe Germany has seen its best day in all South American countries. Give us ten years more and we will have demonstrated that the American people are the most progressive people on earth.

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION-ITS SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS HELEN L. SUMNER, INDUSTRIAL EXPERT, CHILDREN'S BUREAU, WASHINGTON, D.C.

In considering the social relationships of vocational education, it is necessary to ask three questions. First, interpreting the word "social" to be the adjective formed from the word "society," What is or should be the

end and aim of society? Second, What is or should be the end and aim of vocational education? And third, What relation exists between the end and aim of society and that of the vocational education movement?

As for society, various words and phrases have been used by different writers in an effort to tell us what is or should be the end of our common efforts, the thing above and inclusive of all others that we should recognize as our goal. But probably no statement of the end and aim of society is so likely to obtain general agreement as that given by James MacKaye in The Economy of Happiness, which is that "society should seek to attain the maximum surplus of happiness"-not the happiness of individuals as such, but the greatest possible sum total of happiness of which living human beings are capable. This means, not the development of selfishness, but the development of the highest type of altruism. For, to attain "the maximum surplus of happiness," the individual must sink his interests wholly in those of his fellow-men, must give into the common pool all the results of his best endeavors, and be content to receive back only so much of individual happiness as it is to the interest of society as a whole that he should possess.

The happiness of society is obviously the sum total of the happiness of the human beings who constitute society. But, also obviously, the interests of individuals may be opposed to those of society as a whole. For example, it may be to the interest-possibly only to the apparent interest -of employers in certain classes of industries that we should have in this country a reservoir of ignorant, unskilled laborers who in busy seasons may be called upon to work with pick and shovel for long hours and low wages, and who, at other times, may be cast adrift to shift for themselves as best they can, falling back, whenever the struggle proves too hard, upon the community. But is it to the interest of society as a whole that industry should be carried on in this wasteful fashion? Is it to the interest of society that great masses of people should possess so little skill that their human labor force is cheaper in dollars and cents than the machinery that might be used to do their work?

On the other hand, society must support the various institutions, from lodging-houses thru hospitals to jails, which are necessitated, in large part at least, by this great surplus of low-skilled positions. Society, in other words, bears the burdens and certain individuals reap the profits of a cheap, inefficient labor supply. Moreover, if we lumped together the happiness of employers and employed, would not the total, and therefore the maximum happiness of society, be far greater if the productive efficiency of all had been so developed, thru a thoro system of vocational education, that each one would have been able to stand wholly upon his own feet?

Furthermore, society is deprived of the increased productivity which would result from developing in each and every one of its individuals the greatest amount of skill and efficiency of which he or she is capable; and

the scarcity of skilled workmen who can command good wages, together with the superabundance of unskilled workmen who can command only the lowest rate of wages, furnishes a continual handicap to the increase in efficiency of production. The result is twofold. First, the rate of production is kept down, and society is the loser. Second, thousands of human beings who might be useful and happy citizens live and die in poverty and misery, and again society is the loser.

To take another illustration. Society is also the loser from child labor. If our industries were placed upon a socially efficient basis, child labor could not exist. For it is certainly not to the interest of society that little children should exhaust their vitality at the most critical period of their lives and should be forced into production with no equipment which can possibly render their labor effective either as children or as adults. There is, indeed, probably no phase of business activity to which society, in its own interest, could apply scientific management with more telling effect than to the employment of children. If we mean to conserve "the most fruitful of all natural resources," human beings, we should take our children out of industry, where they are learning little or nothing but the road to inefficiency, and should so educate them that each one will attain, as an adult, the greatest possible degree of usefulness of which he is individually capable-usefulness both to himself and to society as a whole.

Let us turn now to the end and aim of vocational education. "The most fruitful of all natural resources in any nation," as has been well said, "are the human beings who compose it." Now all education is, or should be, directed toward the simultaneous conservation and development of these human resources, the conservation of health and happiness and the development of potentialities of usefulness-usefulness of individuals not only to themselves but to others. Every child, then, should be so educated that he will attain, as an adult, the greatest possible degree of usefulness of which he is individually capable-usefulness both to himself and to the community as a whole.

It has been said, however, that general education is primarily education for consumption. The unskilled workman resting on a park bench from his interminable hunt for a "job" may have been taught in school to read Longfellow and Whittier; but little good does such training for consumption of literature do him when his whole mind is atrophied by the desire of his stomach to consume food. The trouble is that, by ignoring education for production, we have, to a great extent, wasted the education for consumption which we have given.

In the past we have left training for specific vocations mainly to chance, and there have been very few chances, under modern industrial conditions, of children ever receiving any real training whatever. As early as 1825, a committee of the Massachusetts legislature, appointed to investigate the education of children employed in factories, recommended that an

institution be established "for the education of the laboring classes in the practical arts and sciences." Yet we are still working over the preliminary need for a terminology of vocational education.

Meanwhile the results of this lack of vocational training have been disastrous. Disregarding the past effects and all the train of evils which has been flowing along from generation to generation as a result of the neglect of this most necessary form of education, what are its present results? The average child who goes to work early, either because his parents have never been trained to fit into the industrial system or because the school does not give him the sort of education that he wants, drifts into the first "job" he can find, utterly regardless of whether or not he has any inclination or aptitude for the work and utterly regardless of whether the work offers any future to him as an adult. Having no preparation for any kind of work and no skill to lose, he drifts out of an occupation or an industry as easily as he drifted into it. Sometimes by absorbing all the information and valuable experiences he can get from a number of different occupations, positions, or employers, he acquires a smattering of an education which enables him to "find himself" industrially. More often he simply continues to drift aimlessly, giving up a job on the most trivial pretext and taking the next that happens to offer. In Chicago, a boy left a good job with a good firm and became a telegraph messenger because he did not like the shape of the packages that he was asked to carry. In Cincinnati, a boy employed in a department store "thought work would be too heavy during the Christmas holidays," so he quit his job—in June. More often the child gives as a reason for leaving, "boss is too cranky" or "didn't like the forelady." A Meriden, Conn., boy not yet sixteen years of age has held and lost or given up fifteen positions since he was fourteen. And a Baltimore girl had fourteen positions in exactly fourteen months. Having no training for any occupation whatever, no knowledge of the opportunities offered by the various industries, and no pride or pleasure in their work, children employed in our industries drift along with almost no aid or guidance from the higher agencies of civilization. Some of them, unusually endowed or unusually fortunate, are able to swim upstream. Some of them are drawn into the rapids of crime. A recent investigation made by the physician who was for years in charge of the hospital at the Wisconsin state penitentiary has shown that, out of 269 murderers in that institution, over 90 per cent went to work before they were fifteen. The vast majority of untrained working children, however, simply drift downstream into the ocean of unskilled labor.

A recent investigation made by Mr. Speek, of the Federal Industrial Relations Commission, shows that nearly all casual laborers began their industrial careers young, with no training for any specific vocation. Practically the only exceptions to this rule were a few foreigners who found, on

coming to this country, that the skill they had acquired in their native land was useless here owing to different methods of production. Thus, for individuals, vocational education necessarily tends to decrease the probabilities of misery and to increase the likelihood of happiness.

The end and aim of vocational education, however, is not merely to increase the income of individuals and so to increase their opportunities of utilizing their general education. Fundamentally the end and aim of vocational education is so to utilize the forces inhering in human beings as natural resources as to secure the maximum benefits for them and for society as a whole. The advantage to society of making a boy into a skilled mechanic instead of into a casual laborer is not merely that the mechanic receives higher wages than the laborer, but that the potentialities of productive efficiency are more thoroly developed in the mechanic than they are in the casual laborer-the mechanic not only gets more but actually makes more. To society as a whole, as well as to himself, the man who can build a chimney is more useful than the man who can only dig a hole.

Those to whom our schools give no training for self-support cannot, in this day of social consciousness, be blamed when they fail to support themselves. There is no use in trying to classify such people into “unfortunate" on the one hand, and "unemployable" on the other. Most of them are simply uneducated, and for that we who call them names are responsible, because, out of our wisdom, we have provided them with a little training for the consumption of poetry, but with none for the production of utilities which would yield to them a bread-and-butter income and to society a surplus of consumption goods.

Vocational education cannot do everything, but the wastefulness of our modern society is without doubt due in large part to the lack of such education. It is, therefore, distinctly in the interest of society that the unskilled laborer shall be abolished, and that all men and women, not too defective either physically or mentally, shall be trained to be self-supporting in some useful occupation.

In still another way, moreover, vocational education is calculated to increase the happiness of individuals and thru them the happiness of society. For the joy of work which results from the consciousness of efficiency is the highest form of individual happiness. The value of vocational education as a means of enriching the life of the individual and of the community by developing pleasure in good workmanship, originality, critical judgment, and respect for one's self and for one's occupation cannot possibly be overestimated.

Ultimately, therefore, vocational education is designed to make the individual more efficient in producing happiness, both for himself and for society as a whole. Years ago, after a long and bitter struggle, the principle was established that education was not merely a private affair but was of vital importance to society, and should, therefore, be furnished at