A Troy corporation is engaged on a large contract with the government for uniforms. Its shops are taxed to the limit, and it has found it necessary to utilize every available shop in town for making various machines used in cutting cloth for this contract. It has entered into an arrangement whereby our complete machine-shop equipment is turned over to its use under the supervision of our own instructor. Our graduate boys are employed in the shop and are now at work perfecting twelve machines for use in different parts of the country on this contract.
The public vocational schools must face, sooner or later, the question of shop production on a commercial basis. They exist, primarily, to train producers and not to make products. Are the two inconsistent? Perhaps the war service of these schools will bring this debatable issue to a head.
Obviously the industries engaged in the making of automobiles, aëroplanes, machinery, and ammunition have for some time past absorbed the available supply of skilled help. With the emergency of war preparation upon us, we must find ways of pressing thousands of workers into lines of work with which they are almost altogether unfamiliar. Except with boys who are fourteen to sixteen years old, it will be of little avail to think of giving all-round trade training. The labor supply which we now need must be trained immediately and intensively. From what has already been stated it is clear that workers may be trained in three ways: first, in day industrial or technical schools; second, in industrial plants such as have been mentioned in the case of the Westinghouse Company; third, through part-time employment in industry, with part-time attendance in industrial or technical schools.
The industrial-school authorities should send into the factories capable instructors who have had trade experience, in order to learn the needs for trained help and to analyze the trade processes for which men need to be trained. In this way the school may determine whether it can best meet the situation by training the youth in its day schools to go to work in industrial plants upon leaving school--although this is not a very immediate way of meeting the emergency--or whether it would be better to move the classes, so to speak, over to the plant and have the instructors teach a group of unskilled workers on the group-instruction plan. Perhaps the school could perform its best service by giving trade extension courses to those already engaged in productive work. Anyhow, these alternatives must be fully considered.