The ethical responsibility of the school on the social side must be interpreted in the broadest and freest spirit; it is equivalent to that training of the child which will give him such possession of himself that he may take charge of himself; may not only adapt himself to the changes that are going on, but have power to shape and direct them.

When we ask for coeducation on vocational lines, the question is sure to come up:  For how long is a girl likely to use her training in a wage-earning occupation?  It is continually asserted and assumed she will on the average remain in industry but a few years.  The mature woman as a wage-earner, say the woman over twenty-five, we have been pleased to term and to treat as an exception which may be ignored in great general plans.  Especially has this been so in laying out schemes for vocational training, and we find the girl being ignored, not only on the usual ground that she is a girl, but for the additional, and not-to-be-questioned reason that it will not pay to give her instruction in any variety of skilled trades, because she will be but a short time in any occupation of the sort.  Hence this serves to increase the already undue emphasis placed upon domestic training as all that a girl needs, and all that her parents or the community ought to expect her to have.  This is only one of the many cases when we try to solve our new problems by reasoning based upon conditions that have passed or that are passing away.

In this connection some startling facts have been brought forward by Dr. Leonard P. Ayres in the investigations conducted by him for the Russell Sage Foundation.  He tried to find the ages of all the women who are following seven selected occupations in cities of the United States of over 50,000 population.  The occupations chosen were those in which the number of women workers exceeds one for every thousand of the population.  The number of women covered was 857,743, and is just half of all the women engaged in gainful employment in those cities.  The seven occupations listed are housekeeper, nursemaid, laundress, saleswoman, teacher, dressmaker and servant.  No less than forty-four per cent. of the housekeepers are between twenty-five and forty-four.  Of dressmakers there are fifty-one per cent. between these two ages; of teachers fifty-eight per cent.; of laundresses forty-nine per cent., while the one occupation of which a little more than half are under twenty-five years is that of saleswoman, and even here there are barely sixty-one per cent., leaving the still considerable proportion of thirty-nine per cent. of saleswomen over the age of twenty-five.  It is pretty certain that these mature women have given more than the favorite seven years to their trade.  It is to be regretted that the investigation was not made on lines which would have included some of the factory occupations.  It is difficult to see why it did not.  Under any broad classification there must be more garment-workers, for instance, in New York or Chicago, than there are teachers.  However, we have reason to be grateful for the fine piece of work which Dr. Ayres has done here.