There is great need of the extension of this work. The regular teachers do not have the time and strength to do the visiting that is requisite for successful teaching. Women understand women well enough to know that. They understand teaching of little folks well enough to know that, to keep fit for the classroom, the teacher must have her play time too; and the whole visiting teacher movement which women are fostering is based on their appreciation of the significance of the regular teacher and their realization of the need of her 100 per cent. efficiency for the sake of the child, for the sake of the teacher, for the sake of the taxpayer even, and for the sake of the future.
Not quite as comprehensive in her function as the visiting teacher, but extremely valuable, is the teacher-counselor or vocational guidance visitor. To be able to advise a child intelligently about a preparation for a later vocation, the advisor must know something at least of the family history of the child. Visitors therefore are engaged by those organizations interested primarily in vocational guidance. Miss Marshal, director of the Boston Trades School for Girls and agent of the Industrial Commission, in a paper read before the National Society for Industrial Education, set forth the idea of community responsibility for letting boys and girls drift into low-paid, mechanical and often degrading or health-endangering work. She said: “What happens to girls who must earn their living when they go out from the grammar schools untrained for any trade? They inevitably drift into low-paid, mechanical, wearing, or even into dangerous work as packers in factories, as errand girls in stores, with little chance of rising and less chance of real life. The trade-school training for girls—definite preparation for a trade—rapidly increases a girl’s wages and makes her at once self-supporting and self-respecting.”
There are over one hundred vocational counselors in the public schools of Boston whose duty it is to guide the child while in school, after leaving school, and to follow-up the child to ascertain what becomes of him after he goes to work.
Important work for vocational guidance and education has been done in Boston by the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union and by the Women’s Municipal League. The latter supervised the investigations made by college students into employments for boys and girls in different districts in Boston as a preparation for the dissemination of knowledge of educational possibilities in occupations. It also prepared a complete city directory of vocational schools and classes which is of great value to teachers, parents, vocational counselors, employers, business directors, social workers, and to organizations for vocational guidance. This association has moreover financed research workers like Mr. McCracken who investigated for it all commercial schools maintained for profit in Boston.