When the plan is further along the factories and stores will not be the only community institutions that will furnish laboratories for the school children of the city. The city college will begin its plan of having the domestic science pupils get their practice by working as nurses, cooks, housekeepers, or bookkeepers in the city hospital, and the engineering and architectural students will get theirs by working in the machine shops and draught-room of the city. As far as possible the departments of the city government will be used for the pupils’ workshops; where they can not furnish opportunities for the kind of work the pupil needs, he will go into an office, store, or factory where conditions reach the standard set by the board of education. So far this plan has been tested only with the boys and girls who are taking the technical course in the city high schools. The pupils who have finished the first two years of work, which corresponds to the work of any good technical high school, begin working alternate weeks in shop and school. The pupil chooses a kind of work in which he wishes to specialize, and is then given a position in one of the factories or shops which are coöperating with the schools. He receives pay for his work as any beginner would, and does the regular work of the place, under the direction of, and responsible to, the shop superintendent. One week he works here under trade conditions, meeting the requirements of the place, the next week he returns to school, and his place in the factory is taken by another pupil who has chosen the same line of work. The week in school is devoted entirely to theoretical work. The pupil continues his work in English, history, mathematics, drawing, and science, and enriches his trade experience by a thorough study of the industry, all its processes and the science they involve, the use, history, and distribution of the goods, and the history of the industry. This alternation between factory and shop is kept up for the last two years of the course, and also during the pupil’s college course, provided he goes on to a technical course in the city university.
From the standpoint of vocational guidance, this method has certain distinct advantages over having the pupil remain in the classroom until he goes into a shop permanently. His practical work in the factory is in the nature of an experiment. If his first choice proves a failure, the pupil does not get the moral setback that comes from a failure to the self-supporting person. The school takes the attitude that the pupil did not make the right choice; by coöperating with him, the effort is made to have his second factory experience correspond more nearly to his abilities and interest. A careful record of the pupil’s work in the factory is kept as well as of his classroom work, and these two records are studied, not as separate items, but as interacting and inseparable. If his class work is good and his factory record poor, it is evident that he is in the wrong factory; and the nature of the class work will often give a hint of the sort of work to which the pupil ought to change. If all the work is mediocre, a change to another kind of practical work will often result in a marked improvement in the theoretical work if the change has been the right one. The pupil has an opportunity to test his own interests and abilities, to find if his judgment of them is correct; if it is not, he has a scientific basis on which to form a more correct judgment.