of equipment of the four trades advances. Thus it is evident that firstclass machinists are far more in demand than the artisans of any other manufacturing trade. Also it is evident that the equipment of the machine shop is the most costly. School-board directors in cities and municipalities must face this problem fairly and not evade it. A city can well afford to retrench along other lines in order to advance the cause of industrial education. The cost of installation for all the building trades is considerably less than that of the fundamental manufacturing industries. So the equipment of our trade schools should be of the best available tools and machinery. The right trade school should be, not only a source of education to the apprentice, but also to the manufacturer in many ways. The trade school should stand for the highest and best along every line.

Another problem to be met is how to dispose of the products of the school. The Milwaukee Board of School Directors, in endeavoring to solve this problem, passed the following resolution: "Resolved, That in accordance with chap. 122, secs. 926-27, Laws of 1907, State of Wisconsin, the products of the Milwaukee School of Trades may be sold in open market at prevailing market prices." When the average length of time of remaining in trade school is lengthened the quality of output of each student will be of higher and higher value, and the returns to the school correspondingly larger and the cost to the taxpayer smaller. In this school much of the output from some of the shops is used in the schools of the city.

The cost of the high-school student per year in Milwaukee is approximately $60.00, or $240.00 for his four-year course. The cost of the trade-school graduate is approximately twice this amount for two years, but the trade-school graduate is worth, on leaving school, between three and four times the amount of the high-school graduate who has not had special vocational training in his secondary-school work.

But there is another point from which the municipal trade school may be viewed-that of vocational inspiration. Perplexing as the problem of vocational training for the boy above sixteen years of age may prove to a city, much more difficult is the question to answer rightly what to do with the fourteen- to sixteen-year-old boy who wishes to leave school at fourteen or when completing the grammargrade work. There are few questions more vital for each boy and girl to answer ere they reach maturity than what their choice of vocation

will be. By rights it should not be necessary for any youth to make such a choice so far-reaching in its results until a good grasp of its import is known to him. And yet in spite of the individual and national gravity of the matter there is no problem which enters the individual life of a large majority of our youth that is given less serious thought by them, by many parents, by employers, and by boards of education. Just as long as the law permits the departments of education of our country to release their hold on our youth at the age of fourteen just so long will the youth, the nation's greatest asset, be exploited in many ways and all to the loss of the individual exploited.

Between hesitation on the part of boards of education to provide vocational training on the one hand and compelling statistics from the public schools on the other, we are filling the blind-alley occupations with a pitiful supply of what by a merciful interference would make an efficient and grateful CONSERVATION.

In European countries it is the rule rather than the exception that the son learns and follows the trade of his father. In this country the methods of keen competition between many private business colleges assist materially in making the reverse condition true. These private institutions compete with the excellent commercial courses offered free in the high schools of many of our cities. So keen is this competition for students that the addresses of the boys and girls in the eighth grade are paid for in order that the representatives of these private commercial colleges may call upon the parents to bring pressure upon them to send their sons or daughters to these schools. Positions are promised to graduates. By this means many of our boys and girls receive a wrong impression of the true value of an artisan's life simply because a position which permits of white collar and cuffs and clean clothes is made to appeal to them. I look, if not with suspicion, at least with anxious curiosity upon any system of education whereby those who offer it make their livelihood from struggling parents, who already pay taxes in order to offer the same instruction free and in a better way to their children. It is evident that a thorough commercial course in connection with a four-year high-school schedule, with its thorough drill in literature and composition, will make such a graduate of more intrinsic value to the employer than a hasty, crowded course of a year or so in a business college. This does not imply that there are not some good private business colleges or that they do not have their place, but school boards

should know their methods of procedure and take steps to meet their competition by educating both parents and pupils to an appreciation of what a complete high-school commercial course offers.

The city which is fortunate enough to have a municipal trade school in its public-school system can hold before every boy, ere he reaches the age of fourteen, the incentive to remain in school and make the most of himself while he has the opportunity. This can be done by having properly organized and conducted inspection trips for all the boys under fourteen in the public and other schools of the city under the supervision of their respective principals to the trade-school classes while under working conditions. Before leaving the trade school they should be reminded that they must soon leave the school which has been their school home for eight years. Where are they going to? What do they plan to do? What would they like to become? Some have been thinking about the matter, some have never given it a thought. Since they must all make some choice in a few months it is vitally important that they be informed of the heritage which is theirs. They may go on to the high school and choose any of the courses offered there, one of them being a thorough commercial course; they may go on from the high school to the normal school and fit themselves for educational work; or to the university and prepare for a professional life; or they may take the preparatory course at the trade school and afterward the regular trade-school course and prepare for the life of a skilled artisan. They are reminded that it makes little difference what one chooses for his lifework providing he chooses the thing which he feels born to do and that something requires STUDY and TRAINING to reach its highest plane. All must work at something. They are also reminded that a very small percentage of the thousands whom they pass daily, going to and from work, are going to and from a work which they were born, or which they were especially trained, to do. If they prefer the life of an artisan, employers much prefer to hire the trade-school graduate than to try to train him in their shops. Their attention can be called, for instanceto use an illustration given in Milwaukee Trade School during such seventh- and eighth-grade inspection trips-to a modern gear-cutter, made of cast iron and steel and weighing about one ton. The bulk of raw material from which this machine was made was worth about fifty dollars. The machine cost the school one thousand and thirty-five dollars. The difference in price between fifty dollars for the raw material

and the one thousand and thirty-five dollars for the finished tool represented the work and skill required to change the crude stock into an efficient machine. The value of the skilled mechanic, the trained business man, the experienced educator, or the successful professional man over the untrained worker in any walk of life is the amount of selfeffort exerted by the individual in trying to reach some goal or ideal. This illustration hits the desired mark, for they have just seen these ingenious workings of the costly tool. The raw material of this highpriced machine might have been melted into rough window weights and sold for but little more than the price of pig iron, or it could be worked into a valuable, useful tool. Do these boys wish to remain practically raw material by beginning as messenger boys and ending by becoming automatons who offer for sale the muscles of their arms and legs, or do they wish to make out of themselves skilled, efficient citizens?

For the boy of fourteen who has completed the eighth grade and who wishes to learn a trade there should be a preparatory department of the trade school where he could learn many things helpful to the skilled artisan while waiting until he can with profit to himself and the community begin upon his regular trade-school course.

The influence of the trade school should also reach out to help a certain class of boys who perhaps cannot for various reasons complete the eighth grade, but who, if saved from employments which will lead them nowhere, would make good artisans at some chosen trade. The best place for trade schools is in the public-school system, and its specific place in that system is where it can help directly and indirectly the boys and girls who feel the desire or need to go to work, and its influence should be available when that desire or need presents itself. Its opportunities should be flexible and not only teach a thorough apprenticeship but also assist in continuation work, and part time instruction if necessary. Its strategic position can be used as a power for vocational inspiration equal to, if not greater than, its opportunity for actual trade teaching.

VI. THE PART-TIME CO-OPERATIVE PLAN OF

INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION

ADELBERT L. SAFFORD

Originator of the Beverly (Mass.) Co-operative, Half-time Public Industrial School; now Superintendent of Schools, Chelsea, Mass.

The co-operative plan of industrial education is primarily an attempt to co-ordinate and correlate agencies already existing, at least potentially, in the factory and the school in order to make better workmen and better citizens from the young recruits to the industries. Because the co-operative plan can be undertaken with very little initial investment, maintained at a minimum cost, and adapted to a great variety of conditions, it is the form of industrial education most widely available for immediate realization. Some entertain doubts of the adequacy of the co-operative school in comparison with the independent trade school on the one hand and the manufacturer's apprenticeship school on the other. The co-operative school with shop practice under factory conditions is more practical than the independent school, dependent on its own shops, but the co-operative school runs the risk of having the shopwork subordinated to other interests not consistent with the greatest thoroughness and progress in learning the trade. The co-operative school with its schoolroom work carried on in an efficient school with established standards of its own in equipment, administration, and pedagogical efficiency has a great advantage over the manufacturer's apprenticeship school carried on wholly within the factory; but on the other hand, there is danger that the school work of the co-operative school may not be made to correlate closely with the factory work. The principal difficulty seems to be in securing the right kind of co-operation. It has been shown that the half-time co-operative schools under favorable conditions may become very efficient and possess many advantages over schools of other forms. The short-time co-operative school having less than half-time, usually four hours a week for school work, is less ambitious in its aims than the half-time school and serves a somewhat different purpose.