ways more important than its composition. All the latest photomicroscopic instruments are available to the students. They make pictures of minute cross-sections of steel invisible to the human eye. The results show irregularities and imperfections, if they exist. Geography is made vivid by a description of the Ford sales and distributive organization throughout the world.

Each subject lives in the consciousness of the boy because he has to make a practical application of it two thirds of his time. Shop arithmetic, geometry, and trigonometry, instead of being abstract subjects, are necessary tools for the next two weeks of adventure. The classroom work becomes almost as exciting as learning signals in football practice. Furthermore, each boy realizes that he is being paid while he learns, yet is earning his own way and owes no one anything. At the end of the first year he would normally receive twentyfour cents an hour, by the close of the second year thirty-two cents an hour, and at the end of the third year forty cents an hour. When he is seventeen years of age a student should be earning forty-five cents. It must be remembered that he is also getting extras in the way of money for savings, lunches, and vacations. The school estimates that the boy produces one thousand dollars a year in useful material. This covers the upkeep of the school, but does not pay any interest on the enormous investment in buildings, machinery, and other equipment.

We pass from the classroom to the shop. Here the boys are even more alert. We see them making Ford tools. Indeed, so expert do they become that they turn out precision gauges which must have an accuracy of approximately 1/100,000 of an inch. Nearly all the cut-away motors used for demonstration purposes in the salesrooms are produced here. A large

chart shows exactly the time which the boys take for a given process over skilled tool mechanics. In 1924 the students were using forty per cent more time. In 1925 this had been cut to thirty per cent. By September 1926 it was down to thirteen per cent. It must be remembered, however, that on the average each new boy starts by taking sixty per cent more time than the mechanical expert. The boys also spoil four per cent of their material. In the old days it used to cost thousands of dollars to paint the machines in the school department. To-day the boys put on all the surface coats. They handle all pump repairs and all of the smaller broken instruments. Formerly when tools had become badly worn they were scrapped. Now the Trade School repairs or rebuilds them and turns back fifty thousand dollars' worth of tools each month.

One can hardly appreciate what it means to maintain a school which is applying its theoretical knowledge unless one spends a day in the laboratory. The Trade School alone covers one hundred and twenty-two thousand square feet of space, with an additional thirty thousand square feet for classrooms. The equipment alone cost over a million dollars. Every bit of it is in constant use, turning out practical things. Here is one of the key differences between the Ford plan and the ordinary trade school. Mr. Ford insists that everything which is produced shall have a practical value. There is nothing done which the students might feel is useless. The result is that there is a creative joy in the work. On the other hand, to give experience to boys many tasks have to be provided which might not be necessary otherwise or which could be done differently. For example, worn-out automobiles are taken apart and rebuilt, although the cost is somewhat greater than to produce a new car.

In other words, the jobs are fitted to the needs of the boys, not the boys to the needs of the machines. Fundamental in the principle of the school is the idea that, so far as possible, the boy is to be given a sense of responsibility by being trained on articles which are to be actually used. A careful record is kept of every boy's grade in each of his theoretical subjects, and of his industry in the classroom and in the shop.

It must not be thought that the boys do nothing but work. In the past they have had football and other forms of sport. Recently all forms of athletics have been discontinued at Mr. Ford's specific request. He feels the boys get exercise while at work. They also publish their own school paper, which maintains a higher standard of literary excellence than most of our newspapers.

III

Besides making a trip through the Trade School one should study concrete cases. A boy of fourteen started in 1923 at a wage of eighteen cents an hour. Two months later he had advanced to nineteen cents, and in another two months he went to twenty. Then for five successive months his pay was increased until at a year from the time he entered he was receiving twenty-seven cents. A year later he was receiving thirty-seven cents, and at the end of two years and ten months he was getting fortyfive cents an hour. During that time he had thoroughly learned nearly all the important processes in making car parts, grinders, gauges, and sheet metal, and had been initiated into the intricacies of bench work, which includes filing, stamping, drilling, tapping, and hand reaming, also lathe work and machine construction. Thus at seventeen years of age he was already an expert mechanic and would be

in a position to rise high in the Ford plant. He had, moreover, been drilled in the following basic school ideals: cleanliness, safety, accuracy, speed, and ingenuity. The student is taught that if he is satisfied with what the instructor can show him he can never know the satisfaction of helping to produce something better.

There is no insistence that all the boys shall become expert technicians. They have the opportunity of entering other occupational lines, according to their inclination and ability. Ten per cent of the boys go to night school. Two are now at the University of Michigan; one is at Annapolis. Eleven go to high school during the day and work in the afternoon shift.

So carefully have the boys been safeguarded that the only serious accident in the entire history of the school was the loss of one eye. Considering the number of serious if not fatal accidents in high-school football alone, and the fact that the ordinary school shelters students from all contact with our machine world, this is a remarkable record. Thirty per cent of those who finish the Ford School stay with the company, but there is no pressure brought to bear upon them. They have paid their own way, and they can go wherever they desire.

Some of the more brilliant boys have made discoveries which have resulted in vast economies for the company. Perhaps the most remarkable was an invention which saved a pound of copper for each car, thus effecting a saving of one thousand dollars a day.

Although there has been little time since the school was started in 1916 for boys to advance to positions of responsibility and leadership, one boy is already sales manager for a million-dollar business. Many are getting ten dollars a day.

There is little need for discipline,

quite in contrast to the ordinary high school. It must be remembered also that the management has accepted boys from poor homes and an unfavorable environment. One hundred came even with the handicap of a juvenile court record. One of the instructors, who happens to be a graduate of a university, emphasized the fact that there are more boys in this school who have had bad heredity than perhaps in all the public schools of Detroit put together, and they have all had bad environments, yet the school pulls them through. The combination of learning and earning does the trick.

Such punishments as are used are novel. A boy may be required to take a shower bath every day for ten days straight. The worst sentence is sitting in the office for eight hours instead of working in the shop. No boy can stand that long.

There is no distinction of race, nationality, or creed. All are on an equality. Here is a Polish boy named Mauszewski. His father is dead, but he has a mother and two sisters. He came at fourteen, just three years ago. To-day nearly all his grades are A's.

Another boy, Ernest Blank, comes from a foreign family. In the days before prohibition his father was in the back room of a saloon, drinking. Brooding for a while at a table, he was heard to remark, 'What is life? Life is nothing more than a puff of smoke.' No one noticed him leave the room, but the quick report of a gun outside soon told the tragic story of suicide. Ernest was left with three sisters. As a result of his work at the Ford Trade School he is now getting over four hundred dollars a month, although only just twenty-two years of age. He told the Superintendent, 'In my first year in the school one boy wanted me to quit and get twenty-five dollars a week, which was more than I was getting at

the time, but I would not do it. Now that boy is running an elevator for me, and is still getting the twenty-five dollars a week. He is just as bright as I am, too, only he did n't use his time right.'

A colored boy, one of the fourteen children of a man in the Ford employ, had been brought up in such a fanatical religious environment that his father for a long time refused to have the boy's hair cut. He feared that, just as Samson suffered harm, so would his boy. As a preliminary requirement for entrance into the Ford School, the boy had to be taken to the barber shop. To-day nearly half his grades are A a remarkable achievement.

Another boy was the son of a man who came to his wife's funeral so drunk that he would have dumped the mother's body out of the coffin if it had not been for the officers. The son was taught by his father that stealing was good, but that getting caught was bad. As long as he had personal supervision in the Ford School he was exemplary, but the temptations of other employment were too great and he finally ended up in the penitentiary.

On my last visit to Detroit I talked with the man in charge of the experimental tool room, and found that he was a product of the school. When he was in grammer school, his father died, leaving three children. He had not only carried his work at the Trade School, but had used his evenings to finish a course at Detroit University. He now owns his own home and is supporting his brother and sister in school.

Perhaps the greatest satisfaction to Mr. Ford is to see the success of his boys, and thousands of them are going out over the country into positions of responsibility.

One especially interesting case is that of a Filipino who ran away from the Islands in order to come to the

can compensate in some degree for the four-year liberal college it seems destined to supplant. This problem Professor Palmer has not touched partly from preoccupation with other issues, partly from unfamiliarity with actual conditions. Yet this is a matter of the greatest urgency, since the outlook for higher education in America is desperate indeed if a change in junior-college control is not effected before the movement reaches its final stage.

In itself, the junior-college idea has much to recommend it. To many students who could not otherwise go to college it offers, at slight expense and without leaving home, two years of further schooling. As junior colleges are usually situated in large towns where opportunities for employment abound, self-supporting students easily secure these two college years. More over, many young men and women who could afford only two years at the university are enabled, by first attending a local junior college, to go away for the more valuable final years and obtain an otherwise impossible degree. Furthermore, parents who consider their children too young to send away can keep them at home for two added years, seemingly without impeding their educational progress.

But only seemingly. For the location, administration, and instructional methods of these junior colleges as at present conducted often nullify their educational effectiveness.

The average junior-college student still lives at home under close parental surveillance, and so misses the maturing experience of fending for himself. Moreover, the nonresident junior college can never impress its students so deeply as a university community that absorbs not only their class time but the whole of its students' life. The junior-college boy goes back from

his classes to the family circle, whose point of view continues to dominate his mind, so that his resistance to new ideas is stiffened and he misses the mental loosening up that comes from transplantation into new surroundings.

But alas! The average junior college has few new ideas to impart even to the receptive learner. Usually these colleges are offshoots of the public high-school system. They begin in a small way through postgraduate courses, and after they have attained some size are still frequently housed under the same roof with the high school and taught by instructors who also handle high-school classes. Even when they are housed separately they continue to be administered by persons whose whole past experience has been in high-school work, and their faculties and executive staffs are manned by promotion from the high-school ranks. This is true in practically every city where the junior college is part of the public-school system - even in so large an institution as Crane Junior College in Chicago. The boards of education which control these junior colleges are likewise experienced mainly in high-school and grade-school problems, and, being often composed of men who themselves lack university training, are ill equipped to build up an institution on collegiate lines. In short, the junior college is to all intents and purposes a mere extension of the high-school course; and the inevitable result is that its students still receive the treatment and instruction adapted perhaps to the high-school age, but little calculated to stimulate the independent thought, the methods of original research, and the rational selfcontrol which college life teaches and demands.

For instance, most junior-college courses are based upon textbooks, and not on library reading and research.