Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/78

74 to-day is done by the aid of shorthand and the typewriter? What is the use of drilling a boy who has cost the community at least $4,000 into becoming a fairly accurate adding machine when one can buy an absolutely accurate metal one for a hundred dollars? Why lay so much stress upon errand running when the telephone is a far more efficient messenger? Why talk about learning all the ramifications of an industry, when the main hope of business success is in being a first-rate specialist? Why even specify that the boy shall know how to wield a broom, when the incorporated cleaning company will sweep the offices, and sweep them well, for far less money than the wages of the veriest greenhorn?

Should the present agitation over vocational education come to nothing—which is almost inconceivable—it will have been worth while if it forces teachers, boys and, eventually, employers to ask themselves straight questions and to face actual conditions. What does modern business really require of the average boy? How fully can the boy meet—or can he be trained to meet—those requirements? And, finally, what can the school do and how far can it go in bringing the boy into line with the reasonable demands of a rational, up-to-date mercantile or manufacturing concern?

Just now everybody is in a turmoil over all three of these problems; for all of us—business men, boys and schools—are in a transition state. Business itself is in the travail of readjustment—as witness the attempted regulation of it by the Congress and the states; and as witness, also, the vogue of anything that labels itself scientific management. The young man—still reading the old story-books about business—is finding out that those tales and the real conditions are not even fourth cousins to one another. While the schools, tired of putting boys through the treadmill work demanded by formal college entrance examinations, and looking for some better incentive to hold before the pupil, are turning (generally with more eagerness than knowledge) towards preparation for business as something at once tangible to them and interesting to the youth.

It is a tremendous point gained, however, that all three of them—business man, boy and pedagogue—are working at the same problem, each from his own angle of vision, but all seriously; the business man being desperately in earnest as he finds that profits are dependent upon securing really trained men; the boy being more and more driven, by modern competition, to weigh the problems of his after-school vocation; and the schools, as the educational tax gets heavier and heavier, feeling ever more keenly the need of showing tangible returns for the millions given every year to education.

No business man can presume to say, however, that those millions are thrown away so long as he is every day wasting much good material (both human and inanimate) through haphazard, antiquated and