and Hebrew are not vocational studies.  The preacher might assert that they are vocational for his work, in which case I’d find myself in the midst of an argument.  I know a young man who is a student in a college of medicine.  He is paying his way by means of his music.  He both plays and sings, and can thus pay his bills.  In the college he studies chemistry, anatomy, and the like.  I’m trying to figure out whether or not, in his case, either his music or his chemistry is vocational.

I have been perusing the city directory to find out how many and what vocations there are, that I may plan my course of study accordingly when I discover what the life-work of each of my pupils is to be.  If I find that one boy expects to be an undertaker he ought to take the dead languages, of course.  If another boy expects to be a jockey he might take these same languages with the aid of a “pony.”  If a girl decides upon marriage as her vocation, I’ll have her take home economics, of course, but shall have difficulty in deciding upon her other studies.  If I omit Latin, history, and algebra, she may reproach me later on because of these omissions.  She may find that such studies as these are essential to success in the vocation of wife and mother.  She may have a boy of her own who will invoke her aid in his quest for the value of x, and a mother hesitates to enter a plea of ignorance to her own child.

I can fit out the dancing-master easily enough, but am not so certain about the barber, the chauffeur, and the aviator.  The aviator would give me no end of trouble, especially if I should deem it necessary to teach him by the laboratory method.  Then, again, if one boy decides to become a pharmacist, I may find it necessary to attend night classes in this subject myself in order to meet the situation with a fair degree of complacency.  Nor do I see my way clear in providing for the steeple-climber, the equilibrist, the railroad president, or the tea-taster.  I’ll probably have my troubles, too, with the novel-writer, the poet, the politician, and the bareback rider.  But I must manage somehow if I hope to retain my membership in the band.

I see that I shall have to serve quite an apprenticeship in the band before I write my treatise on the subject of pedagogical predestination.  The world needs that essay, and I must get around to it just as soon as possible.  Of course, that will be a great step beyond the present plan of finding out what a boy expects to do, and then teaching him accordingly.  My predestination plan contemplates the process of arranging such a course of study for him as will make him what we want him to be.  A naturalist tells me that when a queen bee dies the swarm set to work making another queen by feeding one of the common working bees some queen stuff.  He failed to tell me just what this queen stuff is.  That process of producing a queen bee is what gave me the notion as to my treatise.  If the parents want their boy to become a lawyer I shall feed him lawyer stuff; if a preacher, then preacher stuff, and so on.