Thousands of young men and women are encouraged, every year, to enroll in schools where they will spend time and money preparing themselves for professions already overcrowded and for which a large majority of them have no natural aptitudes.  A prominent physician tells us that of the forty-eight who were graduated from medical school with him, he considers only three safe to consult upon medical subjects.  Indeed, so great is the need and so increasingly serious is it becoming, as our industrial and commercial life grows more complex and the demand for conservation and efficiency more exacting, that progressive men and women in our universities and schools and elsewhere have undertaken a study of the vocational problem and are earnestly working toward a solution of it in vocational bureaus, vocational schools, and other ways, all together comprising the vocational movement.

Roger W. Babson, in his book, “The Future of the Working Classes:  Economic Facts for Employers and Wage Earners,” says:  “The crowning work of an economic educational system will be vocational guidance.  One of the greatest handicaps to all classes to-day is that 90 per cent of the people have entered their present employment blindly and by chance, irrespective of their fitness or opportunities.  Of course, the law of supply and demand is continually correcting these errors, but this readjusting causes most of the world’s disappointments and losses.  Some day the schools of the nation will be organized into a great reporting bureau on employment opportunities and trade conditions, directing the youths of the nation—­so far as their qualifications warrant—­into lines of work which then offer the greatest opportunity.  Only by such a system will each worker receive the greatest income possible for himself, and also the greatest benefits possible from the labors of all, thus continually increasing production and yet avoiding overproduction in any single line.”  That the main features of the system suggested by Mr. Babson are being made the basis of the vocational movement is one of the most hopeful signs of the times.

Dr. George W. Jacoby, the neurologist, says:  “It is scarcely too much to say that the entire future happiness of a child depends upon the successful bringing out of its capabilities.  For upon that rests the choice of its life work.  A mistake in this choice destroys all the real joy of living—­it almost means a lost life.”

Consider the stone wall against which the misfit batters his head: 

He uses only his second rate, his third rate, or even less effective mental and physical equipment.  He is thus handicapped at the start in the race against those using their best.  He is like an athlete with weak legs, but powerful arms and shoulders, trying to win a foot race instead of a hand-over-hand rope-climbing contest.

Worse than his ineptitude, however, is the waste and atrophy of his best powers through disuse.  Thus the early settlers of the Coachela Valley fought hunger and thirst while rivers of water ran away a few feet below the surface of the richly fertile soil.