Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/277

 WEATa IN A JOB 271

more careful next time. Girls may still hear all sorts of things over the telephone wires.

Again, what are the temptations peculiar to the conditions of a given occupation? What are the temptations of a young musician who can find steady employment chiefly in a ''music hall^^ or in some all- night eating place? What are the temptations of a person who is ex- posed to the receiying of tips ? What are the temptations of an occupa- tion that takes one away from home for long intervals, or at frequent intervalB?

Yet we must guard against wholesale condemnations. There are some occupations that are ahsolutely impossible. But in many occu- pations the moral difSculties are relative: that is, one type of person can overcome temptations that another should not be exposed to at all. In the same orchestra, one musician will climb to the top in the same time that another goes to the dogs. One man may become a pawn- broker because he sees in that calling an opportunity for greater service to his poor neighbors; another sees in it not only the main chance, but he sees that as a shark does.

The complaint is now continuous that our schools fail to do what the littie red school house did; that girls and boys leave school and in a few years lose all their intellectual interests. The facts can not be denied. The important question is to locate the determining factors in the situation. Again and again have investigators found that the monotonous, mechanical jobs have not only destroyed all in- tellectual iaterests, but have actually driven the ability to read from the minds of the young workers. These acquired arts of reading and writing are but superficial additions to the mental life, and can hold their place only through constant practise. Even more true is this of the habit of thinking. The nature of the work that the girls and boys are called upon to do plays a significant r81e in the mental develop- ment. Some kinds of routine work, while they do not call for mental exertion, at least permit quiet thought. Gobblers and tailors were formerly notorious as metaphysicians. But where you have to watch a machine constantly, to avoid damage to yourself or to the material, the attention is held while the operation does not add to the content of the mind. The tendency to standardize operations constantly reduces the opportunities for initiative and thought.

In other kinds of work there are many outside opportunities for mental enlargement. The salesman is obliged to meet human beings and to adjust himself to them at a thousand points, although what he can learn from his "line'* may be very narrowly limited. In a fac- tory for making electrical equipment or chemical products, an alert person will find suggestions for outside study, although he may be tied to a narrow round of operations within the da/s work. While a cook

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