The Greatest Works of John Dewey. Джон Дьюи
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vocational turn. The time for manual occupation is now all spent on intensive and useful work in some one kind of work or industry. These pupils are now less interested in games, so they spend less time playing and more time making things. The girl goes into the dressmaking department and learns to sew from the point of view of the worker who has to produce her own things. She is still too young to carry through a long, hard piece of work, so she goes for the first two years as a watcher and helper, listening to the lessons in theory that the seventh, eighth, or ninth grade pupils are taking, and helping them with their work. A girl may choose dressmaking for her first course, but at the end of three months she must change to some other department, perhaps helping cook the lunch for the school and learning about wholesome foods and food chemistry for the next three months. Or if she is fond of drawing, she may devote nearly all her time for shop work to developing her talent for that.
In the same way the boy chooses what shop he will go into for three months. In the carpenter shop he will be old enough really to make for himself some of the simpler things needed in the school building. If he choose the forging or casting shop he will have a chance to help at shoeing the horses for the use of the department of education, or to help an older boy make the mold for the iron stand to a school desk. In such ways he finds out something about the way iron is used for so many of our commonest things. In the fifth and sixth grades nearly all the boys try to get at least one course in store keeping. Here they go into the school storerooms with the janitor; and with the school lists at hand unpack and check up the material which comes in both from the workshops and from outside. Then as these things are needed through the building they take the requisitions from the office, distribute the material, and make the proper entries on the books. They are taught practical bookkeeping and are responsible for the smooth running of the supply department while they are working there. As they learn the cost of all the material as well as the method of caring for it and distributing it, they get a good idea of the way a city spends its taxes and of the general business methods in use in stores. Both boys and girls may take a beginners’ course in bookkeeping and office management. Here they go into what is called the school bank, and keep the records of the shop work of all the pupils in the school.
Before pupils can graduate from school they must have completed a certain number of hours of satisfactory work in the school shops. In order to fit the needs of every individual pupil, the amount of credit does not depend upon the mere attendance through a three months’ course, but each pupil is given credit by the shop teacher for so many hours of work for the piece of work he has done. The rate of work is standardized, and thus a more equal training is insured for all, for the slow worker will get credit for only so much completed work regardless of the time it has taken him, and the fast worker will get credit for all he does even if he outstrips the average. A fixed number of “standard hours” of work entitle the pupil to “one credit,” for which the pupil receives a credit certificate. When he has eight of these he has completed the work required by the vocational section of the Gary schools for graduation. All the work connected with keeping the records for these credit certificates is done by pupils under the direction of an advanced pupil.
From the seventh grade the pupils are the responsible workers in all the shops. A pupil who knows that he has to leave school when he has finished the eighth grade can now begin to specialize in the workrooms of some one department. If he wishes to become a printer he can work on the school presses for an entire year, or he can put in all his shop time in the bookkeeping department if he is attracted by office work. The girls begin to take charge of the lunch room, doing all the marketing and planning for the menus and keeping the books. Sewing work takes in more and more of the complications of the industry. The girls learn pattern drawing and designing, and may take a millinery course. The work for the students in office work is now extended to include stenography and typewriting and business methods. The art work also broadens to take in designing and hand metal work. There is no break between the work of the grades and the high school in the vocational department, except that as the pupil grows older he naturally tends to specialize toward what is to be his life work. The vocational department is on exactly the same level as the academic, and the school takes the wholesome attitude that the boy who intends to be a carpenter or painter needs to stay in school just as many years as the boy who is going to college. The result is the very high per cent. of pupils who go on to higher schools.
The ordinary view among children of laboring people in large cities is that only those who are going to be teachers need to continue at school after the age of fourteen; it does not make any difference that one is leaving to go into a factory or shop. But since the first day the Gary child began going to school he has seen boys and girls in their last year of high school still learning how to do the work that is being done where, perhaps, he expects ultimately to go to work. He knows that these pupils all have a tremendous advantage over him in the shop, that they will earn more, get a higher grade of work to do, and do it better. Through the theory lessons in the school shop he has a general idea of the scope and possibilities in his chosen trade, and what is more to the purpose, he knows how much more he has to learn about the work. He is familiar with the statistics of workers in that trade, knows the wages for the different degrees of skill and how far additional training can take a man. With all this information about, and outlook upon, his vocation it is not strange that so few, comparatively, of the pupils leave school, or that so many of those who have to leave come back for evening or Sunday classes.
The pupil who stays in a Gary school through the four years of high school knows the purpose of the work he is doing, whether he is going to college or not. If he wants to go into office work, he shapes his course to that end, even before he gets his grammar grades diploma perhaps. But he is not taking any short cut to mere earning capacity in the first steps of office work. He is doing all the work necessary to give him the widest possible outlook. His studies include, of course, lessons in typewriting and stenography, bookkeeping and accounting, filing, etc.; but they include as well sufficient practice in English, grammar, and spelling so that he will be able to do his work well. They include work in history, geography and science, so that he will find his work interesting, and will have a background of general knowledge which will enrich his whole life. The student preparing for college does the work necessary for his entrance examinations, and a great deal of manual work besides, which most high school pupils are not supposed to have time for. It is just as valuable for the man who works with his brain to know how to do some of the things that the factory worker is doing, as it is for the latter to know how the patterns for the machine he is making were drawn, and the principles that govern the power supply in the factory. In Gary the work is vocational in all of these senses. Before the pupil leaves school he has an opportunity to learn the specific processes for any one of a larger number of professions. But from the first day he went to school he has been doing work that teaches the motives and principles of the uses to which the material world is put by his social environment, so that whatever work he goes into will really be a vocation, a calling in life, and not a mere routine engaged in only for the sake of pay.
The value of the pupils’ training is greatly increased by the fact that all the work done is productive. All the shops are manufacturing plants for the Gary school; the business school finds a laboratory in the school office. In dressmaking or cooking the girls are making clothes which they need, or else cooking their own and other people’s lunches. The science laboratories use the work of the shops for the illustration of their theories. The chemistry is the chemistry of food; botany and zoölogy include the care of the school grounds and animals. Drawing includes dress designing and house decoration, or pattern drawing for the hand metal shop. Arithmetic classes do the problems for their carpentry class, and English classes put emphasis on the things which the pupils say they need to know to work in the printing shop: usually paragraphing, spelling, and punctuation. The result of this coöperation is to make the book work better than if they put in all their time on books. The practical world is the real world to most people; but the world of ideas becomes intensely interesting when its connection with the world of action is clear. Because the work is real work constant opportunities are furnished to carry out the school policy of meeting the needs of the individual pupil. The classification according to fast, slow, and average workers, both in the vocational and academic departments, has already been described. It enables the pupil to do his work when he is ready for it, without being pushed ahead or held back by his fellow pupils; the slow worker may learn as much as the