to develop and use the knowledge or training he received.  If, as Dean Schneider asserts, “we are rapidly dividing mankind into a staff of mental workers and an army of purely physical workers,” and if “we cannot reverse our present economic order of things,” then any apprenticeship, even this brave effort of his, is a pseudo-apprenticeship and even in the most energizing of the trades leads the pupil nowhere in particular.  Even the skilled trade of locomotive engineering, which Dean Schneider classes as the most highly energized of trades, does not escape.  As a spokesman for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers observes:  “The big electrical engines which are being introduced in the railroad system are rapidly eliminating the factors of judgment on the part of the engineer and transforming that highly skilled trade into an automatic exercise.”

The one-time value of a trade apprenticeship to a youth was that it furnished the background for mastery of machine processes; but apprenticeship under modern factory methods can do no more than make a youth a good servant to machines.  The Schneider system fills, as well as can be filled, a scheme of apprenticeship in conformity with the prevailing shop organization and requirements, but it is not a fulfillment for youth; it is not educational.  There is no progression from apprenticeship to industrial control; no chance to use the knowledge gained where opportunity for participation in administration and reorganization of industry is cut off.  The best of trades is a blind alley, educationally speaking.

However abortive such an effort as Dean Schneider’s might be in giving workers opportunity to enrich their experience for their own reconstructing purposes, it offered the pupils more content and better training than the ordinary school drill in its colorless and vapid subject matter.  This fact is necessary to bear in mind, but it should not obscure the even more significant fact that the blighting character of industry is due to its motivation, which is wealth exploitation and not wealth creation.  All of the industrial educational experiments have succumbed to the fatalism involved in the adaptation of their experiments to that fact.

A staff of investigators, who made a year’s survey of the industries of Cleveland with a view of determining what measures should be adopted by the school system of the city to prepare young people for wage earning occupation and to provide supplementary trade training for those already employed, concluded that the choice of occupations should be governed primarily by economic considerations; that even from the point of view of the school, educational factors could not take precedence over economic.  They said:  “The primary considerations in the intelligent selection of a vocation relate to wages, steadiness of employment, health risks, opportunity for advancement, apprenticeship conditions, union regulations and the number of chances there are for getting into it.  These things are fundamental, and any one of them may well take precedence over the matter of whether the tastes of the future wage earner run to wood, brick, stone or steel.”