Chapter VII Organized Boy Power vs. Military Drill
The war has already brought about drastic economic changes in Europe. The recall of men from the trenches to perform a more useful professional and industrial service behind the lines has demonstrated the importance of the supporting civilian army. From the viewpoint of the individual, nothing can equal the supreme sacrifice of a life. “What good,” wailed a Yiddish woman on the East Side of New York City, “is a free country to me if my Abie is killed?” But in the judgment of the nation the garment worker, Abie, who is drafted into service in the army is of no greater value than his friend the skilled machinist who is allowed to remain in his present occupation. The military exemptions of men in European armies, the adoption of the selective draft in the United States, are acknowledgments of the equality of the military and the civilian occupations indispensable to military activity. To include in our educational law such a recognition, adopting a measure permitting the substitution of types of vocational training for military training, is but to follow the lead of the national government in declaring such exemptions a military necessity. New York State has made a beginning in this direction.
In 1916 the legislature enacted the so-called “Welsh-Slater” bills, making military and physical training compulsory in the secondary schools of the state for boys above 16 and under 19 years of age. Such military training is to aggregate not more than three hours each week between September first of each year and June fifteenth of the next. The law further provides, within the limits of appropriation, for the establishment of military camps with attendance of from two to four weeks. While the operation of these camps and, indeed, the introduction of military drill, have been imperfectly carried out, owing to the lack of suitable state appropriation to carry on the work on the necessary and large scale for a working-boy and schoolboy population of 240,000, it is the intention of the Military Training Commission to insist on the requirements of the law.
The law as passed in 1916 contained a significant clause relative to the excusing of boys exempted by the Military Training Commission. It was felt by the critics of the bill that, although the law requiring military and physical training was a movement in the right direction, it left much to be desired. The ambiguous word “exemptions” is one subject to fine distinctions. Furthermore, it was felt that the law was essentially one of discrimination. The schoolboy of 16 to 19 was in an exclusive military class, set apart, in his capacity to be trained for national service, from the employed boy of the same years.
It is not easy to justify the selection of the high-school pupils of the state as the only young people who shall be the recipients of military training. The report of the New Jersey commission appointed to study military training in its relation to high schools covers this point admirably.
The duty of the common defense is one which belongs properly to all who are physically capable, and none should be deprived of the opportunity of qualifying himself, if such opportunity is offered to any, to perform this duty effectively. It cannot be claimed that the boys of the high schools are exceptional, and that they are the only ones who can receive this instruction profitably. If there is any advantage in it, all boys equal in age and physique to high-school boys can receive it with equal probability of profit. If it is claimed that the reason for providing this instruction for the high schools is that the pupils can best afford the time for it, it must be answered that very many of these derive an income from labor out of school hours which enables them to attend school. These are as worthy of exemption from military instruction as those who leave school because they lack the ambition to continue their education, or because they are compelled to do so by circumstances. Whether this instruction is compulsory or optional with pupils of the high schools, if required or offered at all, it should apply to all boys, out of school as well as in school, of prescribed ages and strength.
Military training and service, if they are necessary, are obligations of citizenship, not of education alone.
It is difficult to contemplate with satisfaction or even complacency the social cleavage which is bound to result from a system of military instruction which is applied to high-school pupils and not to other boys. To assign or reserve the privilege, or duty, or obligation, however it is regarded, of preparing to fight for the country to the better-educated class is just as repugnant to democratic ideals as was the practice in days long gone by of leaving it to the nobility. To select high-school pupils for this training is open to the same objection as would be a plan of selecting adults for actual military service solely on the basis of their occupations or professions—a plan which would receive no consideration.
Military authorities admit that the fundamental aim of every form of military training must be to cultivate physical health and strength. As Dr. George Fisher, secretary of the Physical Department, International Committee, Y.M.C.A., and a member of the New York State Military Training Commission, puts it, “In the training camps in England it takes a full year to get the men in condition after they enlist. England’s experience in this war indicates that the big problem is not primarily the training of the men on military tactics or drill, but conditioning the men. Therefore the lesson to us should be to discover what methods can best be used to put and keep men in good physical condition.”
If any evidence of the accuracy of this opinion were needed, it is necessary only to consult the records of the United States War Department. The following table shows the number of applicants for enlistment in the United States army, furnished by the several recruiting districts, together with the number accepted or rejected in said districts, fiscal years ending June 30, 1911 to June 30, 1915:
| Total Number of Applicants | Accepted | Rejected | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number | Per cent of total applicants | Number | Per cent of total applicants | ||
| Total for five years | 747,704 | 157,043 | 21 | 590,661 | 79 |
In order, therefore, that all citizens may be properly trained and prepared to perform effectively all their duties, no matter what they may be, we recommend and strongly urge that the necessary steps be taken to provide for all the schools of the state a complete and thorough system of physical training. This system should be compulsory for all pupils, and should include carefully selected exercises adapted to the different ages of pupils, and designed to protect their health, stimulate bodily functions, and promote physical strength. It should apply to all girls as well as boys. It should aim to prevent bodily abnormalities or deformities, or to correct them if they are found to exist. It should include personal and community sanitation, first aid in emergencies, bandaging, and all forms of instruction in personal safety. It should encourage outdoor activities. It should provide abundant games for all pupils in which group activities are prominent, and in which appeal may be made to the spirit of competition. It may include those features of military drill which properly serve the purposes of physical training, but which must be regarded as subordinate to these purposes. It may even include practice with the miniature or the service rifle, if such practice is regarded as necessary to develop steadiness of nerve, bodily control, and accuracy of sight. In the case of such exercises the educational error does not lie in their use, but in the exaggerated military purpose which they are made to serve. All the features and exercises of the thorough course of physical training which we recommend should be intimately connected and interrelated, on the one hand with the moral or character-forming instruction of the schools and on the other with the complete provisions for medical inspection which have already been made compulsory by law.
Now boy service should be democratic. The exemptions, whatever they are, must be made on a basis of the equality of the schoolboy and the boy engaged in wage-earning. A boy should not be excused from his rightful preparedness training because he happens to be employed as a bell boy in a metropolitan hotel. Such work is not industrially productive, nor could any devised system of military equivalents make it a substitution for personal contribution to national preparedness.
In the spring of 1917 the legislature amended the law to include all boys—a drafting of the boy power of the state in much the same way that the European nations in conflict make provisions for the full utilization of man power. An additional amendment, as stated in chapter 49, Laws of 1917, reads:
Such requirement as to military training may, in the discretion of the commission, be met in part by such vocational training or vocational experience as will, in the opinion of the commission, specifically prepare boys of the ages named for service useful to the state, in the maintenance of defense, in the promotion of public safety, in the conservation and development of the state’s resources, or in the construction and maintenance of public improvement.
The commission was given power to establish a bureau of vocational training. This, through careful inspection of the work of boys of the ages named in industrial, commercial, and agricultural pursuits, will determine the types of vocational training or vocational experience which, in the opinion of the commission, specifically prepare boys for service useful to the state.
Such a bureau would, under normal conditions, appoint a few inspectors and investigators to study conditions in order that carefully laid plans might be made for carrying out the provisions of the amendment. But war emergency in the matter of food supply gave the Military Training Commission an opportunity to organize at short notice one branch of military-equivalent service, that is, the farm-cadet unit, and it extended an offer of assistance to the Food Supply Commission to organize farm-cadet bureaus in each of the six military zones of the state. Through these the Military Training Commission has been useful in placing boys upon farms, and in following up such farm service with a view not only to determining its merit as an equivalent or partial equivalent for military service but also (with the coöperation of church and business organizations, the Y.M.C.A., and the Boy Scouts) to giving the task which these boys have been doing on the farms its proper place in relation to the physical, mental, and social ideals which lie outside the hard and often unfamiliar round of field work.
Important as this farm-cadet service has been in the matter of looking toward increased production, a more significant work to be developed by the Bureau of Vocational Training is that of interpreting the spirit and purpose of the amendment already referred to, which states that provisions for the military-training requirement may be met in part by certain types of vocational training or vocational experience. The whole program of physical, military, and vocational training is most significant, wholesome, and far-reaching. It is a program of universal training which will be serviceable for war and peace alike—a program which will require every boy to prepare himself to offer some service in case of need, and which stamps that service as equally patriotic with the narrower military service in which most of the world’s supreme valors have been recorded. As John Finley, Commissioner of Education in New York State and one of the members of its Military Training Commission, puts it:
In this amended law we have a program providing, on the one hand, for the defensive training of the soldier and, on the other hand, for the effective mobilization of the resources of the nation in training boys for vocations—which training of itself exalts and identifies as patriotic service all the effective activities of our everyday life. It is a constructive provision for what would have to be done otherwise in time of need through exemptions.
England has had to reach such a program through an exempting provision in her plan of coöperative service. France has had to come to it by taking men from the front for service behind the lines. Germany is finding it necessary, in the midst of war, to organize her entire man power.
It is most important that this vocational training or experience should be conscious service. The boy who offers it must clearly understand why it is accepted in part for the required military drill. To fail to inform him is to take from his military equivalent the educational value given it by the law.
Dr. Finley, in his inimitable way, expresses this conscious service as it might apply to an adult loyal citizenship:
I make this idea graphic to myself by thinking that every man has an imaginary uniform (as every German soldier and French soldier had in waiting his green-gray or his blue and red uniform), an imaginary uniform of his own measurements always in readiness in home or shop or office or in some public locker, that he may don at call of his community, state, or nation, or perhaps at world need, when under compulsion he goes to vote, to pay his taxes, to fight against dishonesty, inefficiency, or waste, to inform himself upon public questions, or upon his public duties, just as one studies tactics in order to help in his country’s defense, or goes to school as an alien to learn the language and institutions of a new land, or joins his neighbors in promoting the health of his community, in conserving resources, in securing means of healthful recreation for children and youth, in improving the highways—when, in short, he performs any one of a hundred offices that are required of him as an efficient unit in an organized society.
Those who oppose military training in the schools will be less critical of its requirements when they are open to the broader interpretation suggested in the amendment of 1917. Those to whom the thought of training the young in the carrying of arms is repugnant may here see the educative value of universal service. Early in the war Germany discovered that the relation of industrial to military service is 2.7 per cent; that is, to keep one man in the field, nearly three men must work in those occupations, industrial and agricultural, which support the nation at war.5 It is the work of the New York Military Training Commission to select as a partial military equivalent such vocational training or vocational experience as will, in the present or in the future, serve the nation.
What shall the nature of this work be? The decision is to be left to the state Military Training Commission. It is easy to weed out those occupations which have no national productive or defensive value, but there will be difficulty in selecting those vocations which may or may not be military equivalents, which under war conditions may belong to the work of an industrial or agricultural army, when in peace they seem entirely separate from national service. Such an occupation is that of a junior telegraph operator, which is not of a productive nature, and yet a very necessary factor in war equipment. The case of a printer’s apprentice is less equivocal. Only in rare cases could his work be accepted as a partial substitute for the required service.
The problem is not to separate the useful from the useless occupations, but to discriminate between those which may be called upon to serve the state and those which have value only to the individual. All the productive and useful occupations are not socialized; and in selecting those which are partial equivalents for the required military drill, we have to make a distinction which has not been hitherto considered in economic classification of occupations.
To Ruskin’s generation his suggestion that Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates should serve short periods as builders of roads for the empire seemed little short of fantastic. And yet the turn of time may even bring about the confirmation of this anomaly.
There is a parallel between the economic substitution for military drill and what William James in an astonishingly pertinent essay written in 1910 calls the “Moral Equivalent of War.”
If there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature,... the military ideals of hardihood and discipline would be wrought into the growing fiber of the people.... To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stokeholes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.... Such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would have required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would preserve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace.
Liberty Hyde Bailey, author and farmer, formerly director of the New York State College of Agriculture, in a chapter of a recent book on “Universal Service” expresses in concrete terms a similar thought from the angle of the open country.
Not of all persons will be required the same duty. What one is, that shall one give. Society will learn of every man and woman what these gifts may be. Some day it will be expected that every able person will report himself, at determined occasions, for definite service, without pay, in one or more of the following privileges, and other privileges, under orderly management and recognized public authority:
1. To clean up the earth and to keep it sweet,—streets, roads, paths, byways, vacant lots, stream banks, woods, fields, and all open, or public, properties and public works. The clean-up days now becoming popular are the beginnings. Of course this does not mean that the work of street-cleaning departments and the like is to be taken over or interfered with; but there are times for special house cleaning. If every person felt it devolving on him to help in keeping the earth decent, he would be likely to exercise a proper restraint in befouling it; and as charity begins at home, so should his restraint begin on his own premises, even extending to the parts out of sight of the public.
2. To take part in the construction of halls and premises for community activities.
3. To aid in the making of beautiful and public places accessible and to protect them. Every community with a rural environment, and practically every small city, has a near-by area that could be reserved and opened by coöperative action of the people,—days set aside when paths should be made, bridges built, retreats discovered, trees and streams put in shape, insects destroyed. Such reservations are not really public until the people volunteer to help in them.
The farther places, the real backgrounds of the race, will some day be opened as well as reserved, and made of much use to very many people besides casual visitors and sight-seers. We shall learn how to project whole counties and cities, and even larger units, into the making and keeping of them in a way that is not yet visioned. This can be accomplished as easily as armies can be sent into the field, but it will require a type of organization at which we have not yet arrived. It will be worth while to develop public-service armies.
4. To demand the freedom of the earth for its inhabitants, under proper recognition of vested rights. The conception of the freedom of the sea has had an interesting evolution,—the escape from the old sea fear, the long years of piracy, the buccaneers, letters of marque and reprisal, treaty ports, smuggling, and all the rest; finally has come the demand of equal opportunities for all and the open door. We must have the open door to fields and shores, to commanding hills that should not be exclusive property; find trails and walks and avenues to places the people ought to know. All this requires exploration, tramps far and near, maps, propaganda. All scenic parts will be marked. The public shall know all good places.
5. To protect the products of the earth; and to protect the earth itself. The products to which I now refer are those not the property of individuals,—the birds, the beasts, the fish, the vegetation. The bird sanctuaries now so well accepted are good beginnings, as also the wild-flower preservation societies, the nature-study groups, and many others; but the individual is not yet sufficiently impressed with this feeling in his own action.
To protect the earth is to save its fertility. This is the fundamental conservation. Not all persons can participate here, but every citizen can be mindful of the necessity of it and aid in creating public sentiment. I wait for the coming together of new organizations or societies that shall have for their purpose the conservation of fertility. These will be much more than agricultural and rural organizations, and their work need not be technical or occupational. They may include all persons, and the discussions and interests may run the range of man’s relation to land.
To leave his piece of earth more productive than when he took it is the obligation of the good farmer, for there are constantly more persons to be supported. In the large sense every one of us is a farmer, for the keeping of the earth is given to the human race. We begin to understand vaguely what relation the good keeping of the land bears to national questions.
6. To keep the public health,—to protect it by keeping one’s body well, by taking care to commit no nuisance, to contaminate no source of public infection, and to lend one’s self to participate in the correcting of abuses.
To be physically fit and uncomplaining is a public duty. Maybe we shall find ways to demand physical training of the people as effective as that afforded by military training but without its sinister intentions.
Society will take over unto itself the oversight not only of physical training and of providing that children shall be well born but also more and more the oversight of the treatment of disease, as a public necessity. We shall train the sound to care for the unsound.
7. To come with personal succor as well as with money and goods in time of flood and disaster, to visit the sick and the afflicted, to relieve the poor and unfortunate. We shall learn how to organize the vast resources in men and women who are willing but do not know how, who are undiscovered and untrained, yet who could be shaped into a great army of assistance.
8. To respond promptly to the call of societies or groups that act in the public interest; to participate in the many neighborhood coöperations.
As an illustration of the manner in which a military equivalent may be determined, an illustration has been taken from some agricultural activities. Before considering the military equivalent in farm work it is necessary to give a brief description of the basis upon which the Military Training Commission will probably work in this matter. The basis, in brief, is the “man work unit” idea as developed by Dr. George F. Warren, Professor of Farm Management, New York State College of Agriculture.
A man work unit is the average amount of work accomplished by a man in ten hours. A horse work unit is the average amount of work accomplished by a horse in ten hours. For New York conditions, an acre of the following crops represents the man and horse units indicated below. In a majority of cases the numbers which follow are based upon cost accounts. In some instances, where data were limited, the results are more or less an estimate.
| Man Units | Horse Units | Crops |
|---|---|---|
| 6 | 6 | Corn for grain husked from shock (New York method) |
| 3 | 5 | Corn for grain husked from standing stalks (Western method) |
| 5 | 6 | Corn for silage |
| 3 | 5 | Fodder corn |
| 6 | 6 | Sweet corn |
| 10 | 10 | Potatoes |
| 4 | 5 | Field beans |
| 10 | 10 | Cabbage |
| 20 | 7 | Tobacco |
| 15 | 12 | Roots (field beets, mangels, etc.) |
| 2 | 3 | Buckwheat, oats, barley, wheat, spelt, rye, field peas, and mixtures of these |
| 1 | 1 | Hay for cutting, alfalfa, clover, timothy |
| 2 | 3 | Oat hay, millet, and other grains cured for hay |
| 15 | 5 | Apples, bearing, when cared for in a commercial way |
| 3 | 1 | Apples, bearing, when little or no care is given |
| 15 | 5 | Other tree fruits, bearing |
| 2 | 1 | Fruit not of bearing age |
| 20 | 5 | Berries |
| 3 | 5 | Peas for canning factory |
| 1 | 1 | Seeds (alfalfa, clover, timothy) |
| 3 | 5 | Sorghum |
| 12 | 6 | Cotton |
| 10 to 35 | 2 to 10 | Truck crops |
For live stock listed below, the man units and horse units are as indicated.
| Man Units | Horse Units | Crops |
|---|---|---|
| 15 | 2 | Cows, ordinary dairy (majority grades) |
| 20 | 2 | Cows, pure-bred dairy (majority pure-bred) |
| 15 | 15 | To be added per cow when milk is retailed |
| 2 | 0.1 | Heifers, calves, bulls, steers, and colts when running loose |
| 2 | 0.1 | Steers or other cattle, fattened or only wintered |
| 0.5 | 0.05 | Breeding ewes and bucks (covers work on lambs) |
| 0.2 | 0.02 | Other sheep or lambs, fattened or only wintered |
| 3 | 0.05 | Brood sows (covers work on pigs till weaned) |
| 0.5 | 0.1 | Boars |
| 0.5 | 0.1 | Other hogs raised during the year |
| 0.15 | 0.02 | Hens and other poultry |
| 0.15 | 0.02 | Pullets, etc., raised during the year (covers work on cockerels) |
| 1.0 | 0.05 | Bees, per hive |
| 6 | 0.0 | Day-old chicks per 1000 |
In order to interpret the man-work-unit idea in terms of the military requirements of New York State that 16-year-, 17-year-, and 18-year-old boys are to participate in such military training or as a partial equivalent may offer farm experience or farm training, it is necessary to translate the number of hours required for such military instruction into crop values or, to use the term already understood, man work units.
Since there are 288 days or 41.1 weeks in the required military-training period (September first to the fifteenth day of June next ensuing), a boy must drill 123.3 hours. This represents on the average 12.33 man work units.
For example, if a boy grows 1.2 acres of potatoes or takes entire charge of.6 acres of berries, including cultivation, picking, marketing, etc., for a period of one year, he has spent in productive agricultural work the number of hours required for military drill.
Man Units Military Equivalent
6 2.05 acres corn for grain husked from shock (New York method)
5 2.46 acres corn for silage
6 2.05 acres sweet corn
10 1.233 acres potatoes
4 3.08 acres field beans
10 1.233 acres cabbage
20.616 acres tobacco
50.246 acres hops
15.822 acres roots (field beets, mangels, etc.)
2 6.16 acres buckwheat, oats, barley, wheat, spelt, rye (field peas and mixtures of these)
1 12.33 acres hay per cutting (alfalfa, clover, timothy)
2 6.16 acres oat hay, millet, and other grains cured for hay
15.822 acres apples, bearing, when cared for in commercial way
3 4.11 acres apples, bearing, when little or no care is given
15.822 acres other tree fruits, bearing
2 6.16 acres fruit not of bearing age
20.616 acres berries
3 4.11 acres peas for canning factory
1 12.33 acres seed (alfalfa, clover, timothy)
3 4.11 acres sorghum
10 to 35 1.233 aces truck crops
In the case of live stock a boy can do all the man work necessary in caring for 6 heifers or 82 hens or approximately one ordinary cow in the time which another boy may be giving to military training.
The exact military equivalents are shown in the second column.
| Man Units | Military Equivalent |
|---|---|
| 15 | .82 cows, ordinary dairy (majority grades) |
| 20 | .616 cows, pure-bred dairy (majority pure-bred) |
| 2 | 6.16 heifer, calves, bulls, steers, and colts |
| 2 | 6.16 steers or other cattle, fattened or only wintered |
| 0.5 | 24.66 breeding ewes and bucks (covers work on lambs) |
| 0.2 | 61.6 other sheep or lambs, fattened or only wintered |
| 3 | 4.11 brood sows (covers work on pigs till weaned) |
| 0.5 | 24.66 other hogs raised during year |
| 0.5 | 24.66 boars |
| 0.15 | 82 hens and other poultry |
| 0.15 | 82 pullets, etc, raised during the year (covers work on cockerels) |
| 0.3 | 41.1 hives of bees |
| 6 | 2.05 thousand day-old chicks |
Military equivalents as related to farm training or farm experience appear to be much easier to develop than those concerning mechanical training and experience, especially where the work of 16-year-old to 19-year-old boys is concerned.
At the present writing there seems to be on the part of the public no very clear understanding of the government’s policy relative to exemption for persons who are performing industrial and farm service. If it is difficult to determine an exemption policy for drafted men, it is very evident that when boys of 16, 17, and 18 years of age have become industrial drifters and have not decided upon a vocational career, the determination of a military-equivalent policy for them is a problem much harder of solution.
Again, a study of boys’ occupations reveals the fact that only a very small proportion of those “above the age of 16 years and not over the age of 19 years” who are at work in our cities are engaged in occupations that will specifically prepare them for service that has productive or defensive value. Under the auspices of the Committee on Vocational Help to Minors the Bureau of Attendance of New York City made an extended survey, during the summer of 1915, of 5000 children who had left school between the ages of 14 and 16 and entered industry. Because of the vast amount of labor involved in tabulating the data that were collected, a random sampling was made of 150 boys and the same number of girls from each of 5 attendance districts. The 5 districts were selected to represent as nearly as possible the general character of the city. Each of these 1500 cases, 750 boys and 750 girls, was given a key number so that when the information was tabulated it would be possible to identify each case and verify the information. Of the 750 boys 546 were within the ages designated by this statute, 188 were under 16 years of age and 16 of the boys were 19 years old.
Half of the boys were either errand-messengers, clerks, or office boys. There were 213 in the errand-messenger service, 107 clerks, and 55 office boys. Another 100 were either stock boys, wagon boys, or packers and wrappers. The largest trade group was made up of 14 boys who were classed as machinists’ apprentices, and the second largest trade group, that of electricians, had but 5 boys.
The departments in which these 750 boys were working indicate the nature of the employment. There were 265 in offices, 134 in the shop departments of factories, 165 in shipping and delivery departments, 92 in salesrooms, 35 in stock rooms, 31 in other departments, and 28 cases where the investigator had failed to secure this information.
A careful study of the work done by each of the 750 boys resulted in the selection of 32 who seemed to be doing work that might give them the specific training indicated as essential. The result of this study can be summarized under the headings of the trades the boys were learning.
Blacksmith. The one boy apprenticed to this trade had been working in the shop for seventeen months, was earning $13 a week, and was perfectly satisfied with his work. So he was likely to continue until he learned the trade.
Brass worker. Of the two boys of this group, one had served twelve months and the other twenty-four months at the trade. They earned respectively $5 and $6.50 a week and both intended to remain at the trade until it was learned.
Carpenter. There were two boys serving as carpenter’s helpers. With one it was simply a temporary position. The other had been working at the trade for a year, and although he was receiving but $4 a week, he intended to remain at the trade.
Electrician. Three of the five boys working at this trade had been employed for over eighteen months as electricians’ helpers. The other two had had four months and two months respectively of such experience. The five all expressed a determination to remain long enough to learn the trade.
Ship fitter. The one boy in this group, although out of school over a year, had been working at the navy yard but two months.
Locksmith. With only ten days’ experience this boy was ready to quit.
Machinist. The average time spent by the 14 boys classified as machinists was less than three and one-half months, and not one of the group had worked as long as a year. Three were running drill presses, 1 was cleaning the wheels and pipes of a feather-bone machine, 2 were not employed. Most of these were dissatisfied and looking for other work. A boy who had been working eleven months on a screwing machine, 1 who had worked nine months repairing autos, and 1 who had worked eight months as a machinist’s helper—3 out of the 14—had worked long enough at the trade to know that they liked it, and expressed the intention of learning the trade.
Plumber. Three of the four boys classified as plumbers’ helpers had worked over a year and a half at the trade, liked the work, and expected to follow it. The fourth boy was using it as a temporary job.
Solderer. The one boy in this line was dissatisfied with the job and with his pay.
Sheet-metal worker. The one boy serving as a tin-roofer’s helper had worked for the firm for a year and was perfectly satisfied with all conditions.
There seem to be 14 of the 750 boys who had been working long enough at a trade and were sufficiently pleased with the prospects for the future to make one safe in saying that they would probably complete their apprenticeship—although this conclusion may not be justified. These 14 were distributed as follows:
| Blacksmith | 1 |
| Brass worker | 2 |
| Carpenter | 1 |
| Electrician | 3 |
| Machinist | 3 |
| Plumber | 3 |
| Sheet-metal worker | 1 |
| —— | |
| Total | 14 |
This study of Mr. Chatfield’s shows that not only were very few of the boys between the ages of 16 and 19 receiving vocational experience that would train them to be useful to the state in the maintenance of defense or in the other interests of the state as outlined in the bill, but also boys of these ages are likely to change their work rather frequently. There were 184 of these 750 boys who had been out of school between three and four years when this study was made. Of these 184 boys 41 were still working at the job they first had when they left school, 47 were on the second job, 41 were on the third job, and 13 had made eight or more changes.
I know of no study which more clearly points out the “blind alleyness” of the employment of children. However, some of us, including Dr. David Snedden of Columbia University, feel that a better term than “blind-alley occupations” would be “occupations involving juvenile employment.” To us the evil of errand-messenger, clerk, or office-boy service is not that boys wander into or are thrust into a line of work which may be a blind alley, but rather that no provision is made in the public-school system for giving the boys a short preparatory training helpful to them in this temporary service, and that no training which would help them to get out of such work is given them in the office, store, or factory. If society would frankly recognize that there are juvenile employments and that boys might well work in them while they are juveniles and yet be trained through such work, and apart from such work in continuation schools, to discover themselves and to prepare themselves for other work, we might develop a constructive educational program.
This study certainly shows the waste of the boy power of the state and proves conclusively that there is need for the state to grapple consciously with the problem of conserving its youth; and when one reads this summary of an accurate and previously unpublished report, one is led to believe that William James, John Dewey, Liberty Hyde Bailey, and John Finley are right in their contention that there should be a mobilization of the boy force of the state looking toward conservation of the boy power that it may lead into training for skilled work, into citizenship, into sturdy health, and into right living.