design and stencil curtains for the dining-and sewing-rooms and will make designs for doilies for the table.  They will plan attractive spacing for tucks, ruffles and embroidery for underwear.’  Women have entered nearly three hundred different occupations and trades in America within the past quarter of a century, three hundred trades and occupations, and they are to qualify for these by learning to space tucks attractively.”

In the very valuable Twenty-fifth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, published in 1910, which is devoted to industrial education, there is but one chapter dealing with girls’ industrial schools, in itself a commentary upon the backwardness of the movement for industrial education where girls are affected.  It is true that the schools included under this heading do not account for all the school trade-training given to girls in this country, for the classification of industrial schools, where there is no general system, is very difficult, and under no plan of tabulation can there be an all-inclusive heading for any one type.  For instance a school for colored girls might be classified either as a school for Negroes or as a school for girls, as a public school, a philanthropic school, or an evening school, and a school giving trade-training to boys might also include girls.  The writer of this most exhaustive report, however, states definitely that “trade schools for girls are rare, and even schools offering them industrial courses as a part of their work are not common.”

It is impossible to consider vocational training without bearing in mind the example of Germany.  Germany has been the pioneer in this work and has laid down for the rest of us certain broad principles, even if there are in the German systems some elements which are unsuitable to this country.  These general principles are most clearly exemplified in the schools of the city of Munich.  Indeed, when people talk of the German plan, they nearly always mean the Munich plan.  What it aims at is: 

1.  To deal in a more satisfactory way with the eighty or ninety per cent. of children who leave school for work at fourteen, and to bridge over with profit alike to the child, the employer and the community the gap between fourteen and sixteen which is the unsolved riddle of educators everywhere today.

2.  To retain the best elements of the old apprenticeship system, though in form so unlike it.  The boy (for it mainly touches boys) is learning his trade and he is also working at his trade, and he has cultural as well as industrial training, and this teaching he receives during his working hours and in his employer’s time.

3.  To provide teachers who combine ability to teach, with technical skill.

4.  To insure, through joint boards on which both employers and workmen are represented, even if these boards are generally advisory, only an interlocking of the technical class and the factory, without which any system of vocational instruction must fall down.[A]