VOCATIONAL EDUCATION
The schools and courses now most needed are partly known, partly to be conceived. Vocational education has come to stay, but its various forms and alliances have yet to be completely determined. The fear that vocational training will materialize and lower education is groundless, even in theory. To train carpenters and printers in schools instead of by apprenticeship is not a threatening educational revolution; doctors, lawyers, and engineers were once trained by personal tuition under practitioners. Vocational training has long existed in the higher professions; its establishment for industry and business is the result of social changes which have undermined apprenticeship; and the fact that this training is now given at public expense shows a new sense of the social importance of labor. In the life of the modern world artisans are no more to be neglected than artists, farmers than philosophers. Vocational education is a mighty step in advance, which offers inspiring opportunities for the extension of general education, as an accompaniment of technical training, to those who might otherwise have secured neither. Ought we not to rejoice at the retention of boys and girls in schools, where they can be under the disinterested influence of teachers, whereas they might have drifted from one shabby and depressing experience to another until they had been able, perhaps, to “pick up a trade,” acquiring their views of life and their ethical principles and habits who knows how? The pressing problem of vocational training is not the problem of justification and defense, but of organization and extension.
The kind and number of vocational schools to be established must be settled partly by the economic return for special forms of vocational efficiency. In the long run the social need for efficiency in a trade or profession determines the legitimate rewards of success in that calling. The fact that people will pay well for medical skill is an indication of social need for it. It cannot be said, of course, that schools should be established to train men for every calling in which they may earn a good living. A school may be established as much to teach men the value of training for knowledge and power in a special form of service as to prepare individuals to profit by rendering that service; for it is only in the end that economic demand justly reflects true social need. Accordingly, the public interest calls upon the educator to define social need and correct social demand, no less than to meet it. To plan a system of schools requires vision of a new and better order, in which the wants of men, and their consequent willingness to pay for the satisfaction of them, are more reasonably founded in the general welfare. Yet in discussing the advisability of training for any occupation, the possibility of earning a living in it cannot be ignored. If agriculture could not be made to pay we should not have agricultural high schools or agricultural colleges. Even a school of philanthropy finds added sanction in the fact that trained social workers are paid for their services. In vocational education, then, there is at least an obvious basis for discussion concerning schools, courses, and curricula. The state must train its workers, and work for which there is fundamental need is work which pays. Vocational education presents problems of the most vexing sort, but its rationale is clear.