est in the schools and a more intelligent appreciation of
their work and their needs.

VOCATIONAL GUIDANCE

Much has been said in recent years about vocational education. The
schools have been severely criticised for not teaching trades. Many have
demanded that that be the dominating motive in all our schools,
especially in the high schools. The educational press, for the last
decade, has kept the matter in the limelight. Books have been written
calling attention to the heavy dropping out of school of pupils even
before reaching high school age wholly unfitted to do anything above the
most menial and lowest-paid work. They have argued strenuously and
sometimes logically for better things. To this program the objection has
been raised that children in these early years are not yet ready to
choose their work of life; that they do not yet sufficiently know
themselves--their own tastes and capacities for such serious choice; it
has also been urged that to place before children such attractive
objective features would result in swerving many from the normal pathway
of their development and check it midway. The result has been what might
be called a compromise, and the firing-line activities have been
somewhat modified. Not vocational education but vocational guidance is
now more nearly the thought. And this has a much larger content, a
background, a more scientific basis, and one organically connected with
the larger movement of which I have already spoken--the social motive
in education supplemented by the individual involving the discovery and
development of taste and capacity.

I have already called attention to the high mortality of high school
students. The reasons I have given are the lack of sympathy that the
teacher has with the adolescent and the lack of meaning found in the
work being done. The same facts account for the heavy elimination that
takes place in the upper grades of the elementary school. But both are
being remedied to some extent. The first thru the child-study movement
and the second thru the matter of vocational guidance. And the two are
very closely connected as one can see at a glance. Thru the child-study
movement the teacher comes to know child nature so well that direct
application can be made to the individual child and an intimate
knowledge gained of his tastes, capacities, ambitions, and dominant
interests. This will enable her to give the subject matter definite
meaning in the early yea