mphasis
upon vocational education--for the disposition to make explicit and
deliberate vocational implications previously tacit. (i) In the first
place, there is an increased esteem, in democratic communities, of
whatever has to do with manual labor, commercial occupations, and the
rendering of tangible services to society. In theory, men and women are
now expected to do something in return for their support--intellectual
and economic--by society. Labor is extolled; service is a much-lauded
moral ideal. While there is still much admiration and envy of those who
can pursue lives of idle conspicuous display, better moral sentiment
condemns such lives. Social responsibility for the use of time and
personal capacity is more generally recognized than it used to be.

(ii) In the second place, those vocations which are specifically
industrial have gained tremendously in importance in the last century
and a half. Manufacturing and commerce are no longer domestic and local,
and consequently more or less incidental, but are world-wide. They
engage the best energies of an increasingly large number of persons. The
manufacturer, banker, and captain of industry have practically displaced
a hereditary landed gentry as the immediate directors of social affairs.
The problem of social readjustment is openly industrial, having to
do with the relations of capital and labor. The great increase in the
social importance of conspicuous industrial processes has inevitably
brought to the front questions having to do with the relationship of
schooling to industrial life. No such vast social readjustment could
occur without offering a challenge to an education inherited from
different social conditions, and without putting up to education new
problems.

(iii) In the third place, there is the fact already repeatedly
mentioned: Industry has ceased to be essentially an empirical,
rule-of-thumb procedure, handed down by custom. Its technique is now
technological: that is to say, based upon machinery resulting from
discoveries in mathematics, physics, chemistry, bacteriology, etc.
The economic revolution has stimulated science by setting problems
for solution, by producing greater intellectual respect for mechanical
appliances. And industry received back payment from science with
compound interest. As a consequence, industrial occupations have
infinitely greater intellectual content and infinitely larger cultural
possibilities than they used to posse