scape into life with their place unsettled creates
confusion and makes calculations in serious things like industry
difficult. Therefore, unfaithful to the development of our own
concepts of life we are expected to emulate Germany and to determine
the destiny of the child. Germany undertakes to eliminate the chances
of the individual and the taking of chances by the state, while the
American ideal is to leave its people free to make the most of each
new exigency that life turns up.

At the age of fourteen it is decided in Germany what industry or trade
the children shall enter, that is, the children who at ten are told
off to industry. After they enter their trade, their special education
for their job is looked after in the continuation schools as well
as in the shop. Their attendance at the continuation schools
is compulsory. This compulsory attendance does not only insure
supplementary training for a particular job, but holds the children to
the industry which was chosen for them. That is, a boy is compelled,
if he works in the dining-room of a hotel, to attend the continuation
school for waiters, until he is eighteen. He may not go to a
continuation school for butchers if he decided at the end of a year
or so in his first job that he would rather be a butcher, or that he
would rather do anything than wait.

The continuation schools protect German manufacture and the national
industrial efficiency against indulgence in such vagaries. A butcher
would prefer to engage lads who have had experience in butcher shops
and butcher continuation classes. Avenues of escape from jobs just
because they are uncongenial are thus quite effectively closed
together with, the chance to experiment with life--the chance which
Americans take for granted. But it is just this element of waywardness
and the opportunity America leaves open for its indulgence among
working people that makes labor from the standpoint of American
manufacture so inefficient. For want of opportunity to put
individuality to some account we frequently fall back on waywardness
in an awkward and futile protest against domination.

While the German scheme of placing its workers is efficient in its own
way, so also is the training for each particular trade. A child is
trained first to be skillful and second, to quote Mr. Kerchensteiner,
"to be willing to carry out some function in the state ... so that
he may directly or indirectly further the aim of the state." "Hav