That a department of vocational guidance be organized.
That, as an adjunct to the board of education, an advisory commission of 15 members, composed of employees, employers and educators, be established, whose duty it shall be to report changes in the demands of business and industry, and to advise modifications of the course of study to meet these new demands.
That a law should be enacted, making it mandatory that a boy shall be either in school or at work up to his eighteenth year, and that the department of vocational guidance be charged with the duty of enforcing such a provision.
This report has been reproduced at length because it furnishes a concrete example of the kind of demand which is being made on many sides for a complete remaking of the curriculum. The comments about school officers are also typical of much that is being laid at the door of the present-day pedagogue. Better than any theoretical answer to these critics is a careful study of the whole problem of reorganizing the curriculum.
TRADITIONAL NEGLECT OF INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION ON THE PART OF THE PUBLIC
The reasonableness of the demand that the schools prepare boys and girls for their work in the world raises at once the question: Why have the schools ever neglected this need? The answer to this question is supplied in part by the remoter history of schools which was touched on in an earlier chapter and in the early paragraphs of this chapter. European and American schools first dealt with professional and theological problems and have accordingly always had a strong leaning toward the literary subjects.
The early history of the American educational system throws light on this particular matter in a way which will help the reader to understand the present situation with regard to industrial education and traditional education.
At the same time that the New England colonies were passing laws establishing schools where children were to learn to read the Bible, they provided in such laws as the following for training in industrial lines. The Connecticut law of 1650 provides that “all parents and masters do breed and bring up their children and apprentices in some honest lawful labor, or employment, either in husbandry or some other trade profitable for themselves and the commonwealth, if they will not nor cannot train them up in learning, to fit them for higher employments, and if any of the selectmen, after admonition by them given to such masters of families, shall find them still negligent of their duty, ... the said selectmen, with the help of two magistrates, shall take such children or apprentices from them, and place them with some masters for years, boys until they come to be twenty-one, and girls to eighteen years of age complete.”