Going along the street one day in profound concern over this matter an impulse seized him to learn at once the nature of the needed part.  He jumped into an automobile standing by the curb, drove it to the nearest alley, and crawled under it to make the necessary disconnections, when the police caught him in the act.  The case was a clear one and he was thrown into jail.  The mother in her letter to the Juvenile Protective Association which was working for his release said that now, since he had been so unfortunate as to fall into the hands of the authorities, she wondered whether they might not perform an operation for his benefit, for she had heard that there was an operation by which the skull could be opened and a certain part of the brain removed, and she thought that possibly they might do this for her boy and take out that part of his brain which made him so “wild about machinery”!

Public education in America is only beginning to respond to the need of intelligently connecting our educational product with the world’s work.  Trade schools for boys and girls, half-time schools, continuation schools, night schools, and in a few cities vocational bureaus are at work, but so are poverty and the helpless ignorance of the hard-pressed home.  The children who must in tender years be offered to our rapacious industries are the very children who are without hope of parental counsel and direction.

In New York City 42,000 children between fourteen and sixteen years of age take out their “working papers” every year, and out of 12,000 to 13,000 taking out working papers in Chicago annually about 9,000 are only fourteen years of age and 1,500 have not yet reached the fifth grade.  Many of these walk the streets and degenerate while in search of work or because of such fitful employment as only serves to balk the department of compulsory education, which has the power to insist upon school attendance for children of this age if not employed.

It is not that work is uniformly bad for these children.  Indeed, idleness would be worse.  And it is not that all these children are forced to turn out bad.  But as a matter of fact children under sixteen are not generally wanted save in positions of monotonous and unpromising employment, and their early experience, which is quite without reference to taste and native ability, is likely to turn them against all work as being an imposition rather than an opportunity.  In the long run this cheap labor is the most expensive in the world, and society cannot afford to fully release children from school control and training prior to sixteen years of age.  Much less can it permit them at any time to approach the employment problem blindly and unaided.  Nor should it fail to reduce the hours of labor for such children as fall into permanently unprogressive toil and to organize their leisure as well as to provide opportunities whereby some may extricate themselves.