V

SCIENTIFIC VOCATIONAL GUIDANCE

Observations of this kind, which refer to the borderland region between psychology and social politics, are valid for all modern nations.  Yet it is hardly a chance that the first efforts toward a systematic overcoming of some of these difficulties have been made with us in America.  The barriers between the classes lie lower; here the choice of a vocation is less determined by tradition; and it belongs to the creed of political democracy that just as everybody can be called to the highest elective offices, so everybody ought to be fit for any vocation in any sphere of life.  The wandering from calling to calling is more frequent in America than anywhere else.  To be sure, this has the advantage that a failure in one vocation does not bring with it such a serious injury as in Europe, but it contributes much to the greater danger that any one may jump recklessly and without preparation into any vocational stream.

It is fresh in every one’s mind how during the last decade the economic conscience of the whole American nation became aroused.  Up to the end of the last century the people had lived with the secure feeling of possessing a country with inexhaustible treasures.  The last few years brought the reaction, and it became increasingly clear how irresponsible the national attitude had been, how the richness of the forests and the mines and the rivers had been recklessly squandered without any thought of the future.  Conservation of the national possessions suddenly became the battle-cry, and this turned the eye also to that limitless waste of human material, a waste going on everywhere in the world, but nowhere more widely than in the United States.  The feeling grew that no waste of valuable possessions is so reckless as that which results from the distributing of living force by chance methods instead of examining carefully how work and workmen can fit one another.  While this was the emotional background, two significant social movements originated in our midst.  The two movements were entirely independent of each other, but from two different starting-points they worked in one respect toward the same goal.  They are social and economic movements, neither of which at first had anything directly to do with psychological questions; but both led to a point where the psychological turn of the problem seemed unavoidable.  Here begins the obligation of the psychologist, and the possibility of fulfilling this obligation will be the topic of our discussion concerning the selection of the best man.