Articulation of Elementary and High School. The main defect in our traditional education ladder is that, being left without landing-places, it has forced the children to improvise jumping-off places instead. In a number of high schools, however, the rigidity of this ladder scheme has been, fortunately, abandoned, and in its place has been substituted a structure more adjustable to facts. In the schools of Newton, Mass., for example, fourteen and fifteen year old children have been, for several years, transferred from the grammar grades to a special high school conducted by a capable teacher whose duty it is to fit them into flexible high school programmes of study. Effort is made to ascertain the future plans, special aptitudes, the home, and economic conditions of these special pupils, so that the secondary instruction may subserve their needs. In some other cities the department heads in the high schools have been required to prepare statements showing both the vocational and cultural bearing of each of the courses given. Such adjustments and such reinterpretations of the high school scheme make for a fresh sense of values in secondary education.

Causes of Elimination.-A sufficient number of investigations have been carried on through both public and private agencies in this country to establish the fact that only a small porportion of the children who drop out of the elementary school to go to work do so because of pressure of circumstances. Miss Eleanor Colleton, a Boston teacher, assigned to a vocational-guidance investigation in certain school districts of the city, tells of a girls' school in which the fourteenth birthday is regarded as the leaving signal. In the neighborhood of this school it seems to be a matter of course that a fourteen-year-old

girl should be working in a candy factory, tailoring shop, or department store. This is true with respect to boys also. Academic appeals to continue in school seem futile beside the lure of wage-earning independence, of mingling with sophisticated adults, of counting with older brothers and sisters, and of helping struggling parents who in their narrow field of livelihood probably represent even less economic value than do their blind-alley children. Pitiful necessity does, indeed, tear ambitious children out of school. Every teacher counts among her most pathetic experiences such separations and in moments of reflection must marvel at the supineness of society in the face of this continual shipwrecking of child ambition and capacity. When talent saving becomes a community duty we shall probably find scholarships provided for these children after the effective manner shown by the scholarship committee of the Henry Street Settlement of New York and the Schmiddlap Fund of Cincinnati. For these children we shall see, too, a system of continuation schools provided which shall assure to working youth an opportunity to develop into normal citizens.

A School Investigation. For that other and large mass of children who go and come as they please in the upper grades of the elementary school and in the high schools (children with no intention to go to college and no desire to prepare for a professional life), a large variety of experimental investigations will be necessary in order to work out a programme which can win their interest and fit them for a right start in life. One such highly instructive experiment has been in operation for three years at the North Bennett Street Industrial School, a philanthropic institution in the North End of Boston.

In September, 1909, a class of twenty-one boys about thirteen years of age, ranging from fifth to eighth grades, was received from the Eliot School, a neighboring public grammar-school, for instruction in a modified course including both academic and industrial work. Four pupils left during the year for sufficient reasons. The remaining seventeen were, many of them, poor boys. Previous to entering this class they had expressed their intention of leaving school as soon as possible. They were now of age to receive work papers, yet in September, 1910, all but one returned to the class. He had moved to Italy. Five new pupils were received.

Results of Prevocational Course. In a recent annual report of this institution, it is stated that the prevocational course had accomplished the following results:

1. Stimulated intelligent appreciation of industrial life and processes.

2. Developed habits of industry and a love for productive and constructive work.

3. Encouraged the spirit of co-operation on which depends not only the success of the modern shop but also the success of the individual life.

4. Brought the life and interests of the school more closely in touch with the working life to be lived after school-days are over.

5. Revealed to the pupils, to some extent, their peculiar bent, so that the choice of an occupation may be more intelligently made.

6. Given the ability to make and read simple working drawings.

7. Given facility in handling common tools and the ability to keep them in good working order.

8. Retained the pupils in school two years longer than would otherwise have been possible.

9. Secured from the entire class the voluntary promise to return in the fall for a second year.

The work during the second year was even more promising. One boy, formerly very troublesome, was only prevented from leaving by the fact that he was under fourteen; he took such interest in his work that he said. he would leave home rather than leave the school, as his family wished. As his family had no sufficient means of support, he worked on a milk wagon from two o'clock in the morning till school time. Boys bring many tools from home to have them sharpened-axes, knives, etc. A few boys have borrowed tools from the school over Sunday to do outside work for which they have been paid. Two boys took a job putting in a partition in a house and cutting a ticket window in a wall, while another roofed a piazza for his father. This experiment is suggestive of the adjustments which a high school will have to make in order to hold on to the children otherwise destined to dead-end employments.

If parents and teachers have been, as yet, only partially aware of what the high schools might actually do to advance the life-career interests of the children, they have been, on the whole, thoroughly ignorant as to the relative merits and disadvantages of the various employments. Vocational investigations have disclosed the fact that the jobs which give no training offer good wages to fourteen and fifteen year old boys and girls, while those in which there is real opportunity pay very little to beginners. Almost the smallest factor in the taking of a particular job is a desire to learn a trade or the business. Plan plays but a small part in the career of

most children. One of the most imperative duties of the high school, then, is to make sure that its pupils do not wander through the four years, or even through one year, in this planless way. It makes little difference whether such plans be permanent; but whether there is a guiding purpose does make very much difference in the child's attitude toward school and work.

For generations the schools have been literally eating out of the employer's hands. Social considerations demand that this situation be ended. The chief agency for social service in the future will be the public school. Within less than a generation school work has been transformed-text-books, curriculums, teaching methods and material, and even school architecture have been reconstructed in response to broadening community demands. More far-reaching changes are ahead and many of these are in the line of this far-reaching vocationalguidance movement.

The high school which respects the unlikenesses in its pupils and shapes its work in sensitive regard for their individualities, which gives its boys and girls a vital grasp on the present and a vision of the more fruitful future, and which augments with its large constructive influence the world-wide striving to free youth from untimely economic blight-that high school will be teaching with the strength of accomplishment and will be a power in the land.