Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/439

Rh of technical experts who shall do for us what the graduates of German schools have done for the German chemical and textile industries.

Training for Office Work has remained in the hands of private institutions for the most part in this country. These schools,usually known as 'commercial colleges,' aim to fit young people of both sexes for clerical positions in offices and for employment as bookkeepers or stenographers. The chief subjects taught are penmanship, correspondence, stenography, typewriting, commercial arithmetic, bookkeeping and 'business practice.' The demand for persons to fill clerical positions has steadily increased for many years owing to the development of systems of stenography and to the invention of the typewriter and to the more elaborate form in which the record of business transactions is now kept. As the size of the individual business has increased and the territory covered by its operations has widened and the period of time involved in its calculations has lengthened, the need of carefully kept records has become apparent. The growth of the corporate form of business organization, furthermore, has made it necessary to protect the interest of shareholders by complex systems of accounting, involving sufficient checks and balances and frequent audits.

The 'commercial college' has responded in a more or less unsatisfactory manner to the calls made upon it. This is due in part to the fact that they are private institutions, run as money-making businesses, and without any uniformly enforced standards such as they might have attained for themselves through organization, or such as are enforced upon preparatory schools and high schools by university requirements for admission. Studies may be pursued in them in a wholly elective manner, as fees are paid, and so it has happened that they have been used as an educational short-cut by scholars of every variety of ability and education from the high school graduate, who may spend a year or more in them, to the youth from the country district school, who may study for two or three months. In accounting for the unsatisfactory work of this system of schools as a whole two other circumstances should be taken into account. One is that the business community has been expecting a kind of education from them which they were not organized to give and are not in a position to give, and the other is that educators who are capable of giving assistance have, for the most part, not assumed a helpful attitude toward the problem presented by them.

The aggregate of interests represented by these schools in this country is enormous, and the problems connected with them are serious and merit attention. It. has been estimated that there are now 2,000 'commercial colleges' in the United States, employing 15,000 teachers, and having an attendance of 160,000 pupils. The best of these establishments in the large cities are handsomely equipped for the work they set out to do and amount practically to private commercial high schools.

In recent years this problem of education for office work has been