Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/271

 WHATS IN A JOB 265

Erery year thonsandB upon thousands of girls and boys leave school and begin to ''look for worf In contemplating a proposed job, or oocnpation, or industry, every young person, as well as his or her parents or sponsor, should be able to consider carefully the conditions and the possibilities of the work.

First of all, it would be obviously foolish to prepare for a job that may be obsolete by the time the worker has achieved a fair degree of skill at the work. Since the introduction of power machinery into practically all industries^ rapid changes in the character of the work required of the individual have been going on. An unimaginative boy who decides that he will do the same work as his father is now doing is likely to find when he gets to the working age that the job isn^t there any more, or that it has become an entirely different thing from what it was in his father's time. There is no use in training children to become candle-dippers or flint-chippers, for example. Candles are used comparatively little now-a-days, and are likely to be used still less in the future; and, besides, they are practically all made by machinery. Flintlocks are used only on the stage, and there they can be just as effective without the flints ; besides, not enough would be used to keep a full-sized person busy for a life time. The first question about an industry or an occupation is therefore a statistical one : is it a growing or a declining industry? Then, how many people does it employ, what are the chances of getting a start in it? And what does it mean, quan- titatively, for a given locality? In parts of Bussia, platinum mining offers openings for yoimg men; but what we want to know is, what are the prospective openings for our sons and daughters near home?

However, one can change his locality, so that it might be reasonable, under certain circumstances, for a city girl to prepare herself for the business of scientific chicken expert, or for a farm lad to become a wire- less operator. But we can not very well live at a time very different from that in which we happen to live. Without regard to localily, then, government statistics are to be consulted first of all. From these we can find that the business of the carriage builder is going down (and every schoolboy knows the reason why), whereas the chemical manu- facture is going up; private practise of medicine is going down, whereas the number of health officers and medical inspectors and hospital sur- geons and nurses is going up. We have too many lawyers, but we have not enough scientifically trained specialists on com or cabbage or cotton or insects or bacteria.

A second important question to consider is that of possible restric- tions as to race or color, for example. In the city of TSew York one of the public schools is in charge of a negro principal, who has under him a number of white teachers, and white as well as colored pupils. This may be interpreted to mean that there is here in the teaching business

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