There is no progression
from apprenticeship to industrial control; no chance to use the
knowledge gained where opportunity for participation in administration
and reorganization of industry is cut off. The best of trades is a
blind alley, educationally speaking.
However abortive such an effort as Dean Schneider's might be in
giving workers opportunity to enrich their experience for their own
reconstructing purposes, it offered the pupils more content and better
training than the ordinary school drill in its colorless and vapid
subject matter. This fact is necessary to bear in mind, but it
should not obscure the even more significant fact that the blighting
character of industry is due to its motivation, which is wealth
exploitation and not wealth creation. All of the industrial
educational experiments have succumbed to the fatalism involved in the
adaptation of their experiments to that fact.
A staff of investigators, who made a year's survey of the industries
of Cleveland with a view of determining what measures should be
adopted by the school system of the city to prepare young people for
wage earning occupation and to provide supplementary trade training
for those already employed, concluded that the choice of occupations
should be governed primarily by economic considerations; that even
from the point of view of the school, educational factors could not
take precedence over economic. They said: "The primary considerations
in the intelligent selection of a vocation relate to wages,
steadiness of employment, health risks, opportunity for advancement,
apprenticeship conditions, union regulations and the number of chances
there are for getting into it.
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