Vocational training follows elementary instruction The American youth should be taught, whenever and so far as possible, to enter into and take hold of American life at a given point. Training for vocation will provide the "given point," but it must not be postponed to an age when only a handful of children will be able to profit by it. Vocational training ought not to be included in the six years that are sufficient for the elementary-school course, properly so-called. The child is then too young to enter wisely and economically upon vocational training, and, moreover, every hour of his school life is needed for instruction in the use of the elemental tools and facts of civilization. He can, however, and should, then receive that preliminary training of his motor or expressive powers which, as has already been pointed out, is useful afterward to build a vocational training upon. When once the six-year elementary-school course is completed, however, then vocational training should be given its place. While every possible avenue of advance should be kept open for the boy or girl who looks forward to completing a general secondary-school course, or to entering a college, vocational training should be provided for the vastly larger num ber who have no such purpose. They should be able to get the whole of a training intended for themselves, and not merely part of a training intended for some one else. schools This vocational training will, if wisely or- Special ganized, take on two distinct forms. There vocational will be special secondary schools of two, three, or four year courses for those boys and girls who are able to give their full time to school work and who choose one of these vocational secondary schools in preference to the general secondary-school course. There will also be continuation schools, with evening instruction, for those children who are compelled to become wage-earners as soon as the compulsoryeducation and child-labor laws will permit them to do so. It is important that these schools be genuine vocational schools and not merely schools with a smattering of vocational instruction. Training for vocation is a necessary part of education, and it must be done thoroughly. The more completely the vocational schools are adapted to workshops, and the more completely their organization and discipline conform to workshop conditions, the better. It is vital, too, that principles be taught with processes, and illustrated by them; for the Vocational liberal learning boy or girl who understands the principles underlying a given process, will be the most likely to rise to a position of superintendence or control. The German people have kept this point well in mind in developing their admirable vocational schools, and they are already reaping the practical advantages of it both as a nation and as individual workers. Both in the elementary and in the vocational schools, the teacher's duty is to sow the seed of ambition to participate in and to enjoy the intellectual life, and to keep insisting that there is a higher aim than industrial skill or success, for which those are to prepare the way. Through response to this stimulus, the individual pupil must do for himself what he can by reading, by conversation, and by study and love of the great public collections of art, history, and science which the museums of the large cities are rapidly bringing together for the benefit and enjoyment of the public. It is a grave error, therefore, and one which training and gives rise to many misconceptions and many mistakes of judgment, to set vocational training and liberal learning in sharp antagonism to each other. The purpose of the former is to pave the way to some appreciation of the latter and to provide an economic basis for it to rest upon. The equally grave error of the past has been to frame a school course on the hypothesis that every pupil was to go forward in the most deliberate and amplest fashion to the study of the products of the intellectual life, regardless of the basis of his own economic support. Something might be said, too, about the desirability of work for work's sake, because of its ethical value, and about the unwisdom of permitting the children of the well-to-do to escape the discipline and the advantage of labor, intellectual or physical. preparation The younger generation shows many signs True of being too impatient to prepare for life. The vocational old notion that a child should be so trained as to have the fullest and most complete possession of its faculties and its competences, in order to rise in efficiency, to gain larger rewards, and to render more complete service, is too often pushed aside by the new notion that it is quite enough if a child is trained in some aptitude to enable it to stay where it first finds itself. Of course, under the guise of progress, this is retrogression. Carried to its logical result, it would mean a static and a stratified social order. It would put an end to individual initiative and to individual op The Oxford training Discipline and self-discipline portunity. It is not difficult to foretell what results would follow both to civilization and to social order and comfort. The basis for any true vocational preparation is training to know a few things well and thoroughly, and in gaining such knowledge to form those habits of mind and of will that fit the individual to meet new duties and unforeseen emergencies. This is the real reason why the traditional training given at the University of Oxford has produced such stupendous results for generations. Of course, the Oxford training has had, to some extent at least, selected material to work upon; but it has done its work amazingly well. Whether in statesmanship or at the bar or in the army or in diplomacy or in large administrative undertakings in business, the man trained at Oxford has won first place by reason of the character and quality of his performance. No such result has been obtained, and no such result need be expected, from a school and college training which is a quick smattering of many things. At the bottom of the educational process lies discipline, and the purpose of discipline is to develop the power of self-discipline. When discipline is withdrawn, dawdling quickly enters, and the habit of dawdling is as corrupting to the intellect as |