At the age of fourteen it is decided in Germany what industry or trade the children shall enter, that is, the children who at ten are told off to industry.  After they enter their trade, their special education for their job is looked after in the continuation schools as well as in the shop.  Their attendance at the continuation schools is compulsory.  This compulsory attendance does not only insure supplementary training for a particular job, but holds the children to the industry which was chosen for them.  That is, a boy is compelled, if he works in the dining-room of a hotel, to attend the continuation school for waiters, until he is eighteen.  He may not go to a continuation school for butchers if he decided at the end of a year or so in his first job that he would rather be a butcher, or that he would rather do anything than wait.

The continuation schools protect German manufacture and the national industrial efficiency against indulgence in such vagaries.  A butcher would prefer to engage lads who have had experience in butcher shops and butcher continuation classes.  Avenues of escape from jobs just because they are uncongenial are thus quite effectively closed together with, the chance to experiment with life—­the chance which Americans take for granted.  But it is just this element of waywardness and the opportunity America leaves open for its indulgence among working people that makes labor from the standpoint of American manufacture so inefficient.  For want of opportunity to put individuality to some account we frequently fall back on waywardness in an awkward and futile protest against domination.

While the German scheme of placing its workers is efficient in its own way, so also is the training for each particular trade.  A child is trained first to be skillful and second, to quote Mr. Kerchensteiner, “to be willing to carry out some function in the state ... so that he may directly or indirectly further the aim of the state.”  “Having accomplished this,” he says “the next duty of the schools is to accustom the individual to look at his vocation as a duty which he must carry out not merely in the interest of his own material and moral welfare but also in the interest of the state.”  From this, he says, follows the next and “greatest educational duty of the public school.  The school must develop in its pupils the desire and strength ... through their vocation, to contribute their share so that the development of the state to which they belong, may progress in the direction of the ideal of the community.”

His assumption in defining the “greatest duty” is that the members of the state are free to evolve and will evolve a progressive ethical community.  But after a child has passed through the hands of a competent teaching force which fits him successfully into a ready-made place, after he has accepted this ready-made place on the authority of modern technology and business, on the authority of the state and religion, that the place given him is his to fill; to fill in accordance with the standards determined by the schools and by industry—­after all this, it is difficult to imagine what else a child could do but conform.  He could do no more, thus trained, than go forward in the direction he is pushed and in the direction determined before he was born.  This is not our idea of a progressive life.