Two of the most precious years of life are gone.  The little workers are not promoted from performing one process to another more difficult.  They are as far as ever from any prospect of learning a trade in any intelligent fashion.  The slack season comes on.  The little fingers, the quick feet are not required any longer.  Once more there is a scurrying round to look for a job, less cheerfully this time, the same haphazard applying at another factory for some other job, that like the first needs no training, like the first, leads nowhere, but also like the first, brings in three or four dollars a week, perhaps less.  A teacher at a public-school social center inquired of a group of fifty girls, cracker-packers, garment-workers and bindery girls, how long each had been in her present situation.  Only one had held hers eighteen months.  No other had reached a year in the same place.  The average appeared to be about three or four months.

Worse still is another class of blind-alley occupation.  These are the street trades.  The newsboy, the messenger and the telegraph boy often make good money to begin with.  Girls, too, are being employed by some of the messenger companies.  These are all trades, that apart from the many dangers inseparable from their pursuit, spell dismissal after two or three years at most, or as soon as the boy reaches the awkward age.  The experience gained is of no use in any other employment, and the unusual freedom makes the messenger who has outgrown his calling averse to the discipline of more regular occupations.

What a normal vocational education can be, and a normal development of occupation, is seen in the professions, such as law and medicine.  The lawyer and the doctor are, it is true, confining themselves more and more to particular branches of their respective callings, and more and more are they becoming experts in the branch of law or medicine selected.  The lawyer specializes in criminal cases or in damage suits, in commercial or constitutional law; he is a pleader or a consultant.  The doctor may decide to be a surgeon, or an oculist, an anesthetist or a laboratory worker.  And the public reap the benefit in more expert advice and treatment.  But the likeness between such professional specialization and the dehumanizing and brain-deadening industrial specialization, which is the outgrowth of the factory system, is one in name only as was admirably put by Samuel Gompers, when presiding over the Convention of the American Federation of Labor at Toronto in 1909.

“It must be recognized that specialists in industry are vastly different from specialists in the professions.  In the professions, specialists develop from all the elements of the science of the profession.  Specialists in industry are those who know but one part of a trade, and absolutely nothing of any other part of it.  In the professions specialists are possessed of all the learning of their art; in industry they are denied the opportunity of learning the commonest elementary rudiments of industry other than the same infinitesimal part performed by them perhaps thousands of times over each day.”