[Footnote A:  As to how far this is the case, there is a difference of opinion among authorities.  Professor F.W.  Roman, who has made so exhaustive a comparative study of vocational training in the United States and Germany, writes:  “In Germany, there is very little local control of schools, or anything else.  The authority in all lines is highly centralized.” (The Industrial and Commercial Schools of the United States and Germany, 1915, p. 324.) Dr. Kerchensteiner is quoted by the Commercial Club of Chicago as saying, in a letter to Mr. Edwin G. Cooley, that the separate administrative school-boards of Munich form an essential part of the city’s school-system.]

5.  To maintain a system which shall reach that vast bulk of the population, who, because they need technical training most urgently, are usually the last to receive it.

Many of the most advanced educators in this country join issue with the usual German practice on some most important points.  These consider that it is not sufficient that there be a close interlocking of the technical school and class and the factory.  It is equally essential that vocational education, supported by public funds, shall be an integral part of the public-school system, of which it is indeed but a normal development, and therefore that we must have a unit and not a dual system.  Only thus can we insure that vocational education will remain education at all and not just provide a training-school for docile labor as an annex and a convenient entrance hall to the factory system.  Only thus can we insure democracy in the control of this new branch of public activity.  Only thus can the primary schools be kept in touch with the advanced classes, so that the teacher, from the very kindergarten up, may feel that she is a part of a complete whole.  Then indeed will all teachers begin to echo the cry of one whom I heard say:  “You ask us to fit the children for the industries.  Let us see if the industries are fit for the children.”

Another point in which we must somewhat modify any European model is in the limited training provided for girls.  A country which is frankly coeducational in its public schools, state universities and professional colleges, must continue to be so when installing a new educational department to meet the changed and changing conditions of our time.

The parliament of organized labor in the United States has taken a liberal view and laid down an advanced program on the subject of vocational training.  In 1908 the American Federation of Labor appointed a committee on industrial education consisting of nineteen members, of whom two were women, Agnes Nestor, International Secretary of the Glove Workers’ Union, and Mrs. Raymond Robins, President of the National Women’s Trade Union League of America.  Its very first report, made in 1909, recommended that the Federation should request the United States Department of Commerce and Labor to investigate the subject of industrial education in this country and abroad.