ith the shop.
The working staff of the Toy Shop will include forty young people
(twenty at work at a time in the shop) from 14 to 17 years who have
received their working certificates and have left school with the
intention of going to work. It will include also six or seven adults
who will do the work on machines too heavy or unsafe for children to
handle and who will help to supervise and direct the children in
their tasks. The shop itself will equal the best of shops in point of
equipment, safety and sanitation. It will not, however, like many of
the best, elaborate these basic features in ornamental expenditures.
The shop will present itself to the young workers as sustaining the
best and most essential standards in use, but like all other problems
connected with the shop, the best will always be presented as a
temporary achievement which with sufficient attention can be improved.
An important source from which improvements may be expected is the
staff of workers who are in constant contact with the plant. In other
words, nothing will be offered the workers in the spirit of final
achievement, and the suggestion of completeness will be avoided. The
opportunity to test out and appreciate the standards will occur in the
shop experience, and the chance to achieve or experiment with other
standards will be reserved, as I shall show presently, for the school
hours. This will be the case with methods of work and with shop
organization. During the hours in the shop the workers will be
occupied wholly with their special tasks as they would be in any other
shop, that is in any shop which had due consideration for the labor
force; as much consideration as it usually has for the economy and the
protection of the mechanical force would be considerable.
The workers may acquire the technique of all or of several of the
processes. Their general facility in technique may contribute to their
productive value in the shop or their mastery over several processes
may have its educational value for them in relation to the industry as
a whole; they may to advantage shift from one process to another to
relieve the strain of routine work. For the sake of production and for
the sake of the educational value to the workers, the shifting of the
workers from one process to another will be a matter of experiment.
But the workers will not be shifted from one construction process to
another for the sake of learning all the processes because skil
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