“Why do you want to leave school?” That is the first question the Job Lady asks of each new applicant who comes to the Bureau for work.  Perhaps the child has heard that question before; for in those schools from which the greatest numbers of children go out at the age of fourteen, Miss Davis and her assistants hold office hours and interview each boy or girl who shows signs of restlessness.  They give informal talks to the pupils of the sixth and seventh grades about the opportunities open to boys and girls under sixteen; they discuss the special training offered by the schools and show the advisability of remaining in school as long as possible; they try to find an opportunity of talking over the future with each member of the graduating class.

But even when the way has been paved for it, the question, “Why do you want to leave school?” brings to light the most trivial of reasons.  In very few cases is it economic necessity that drives a child to work.

“I ain’t int’rusted,” explained one boy to Miss Davis.  “I jest sits.”

The Job Lady is often able to convince even the sitters that school is, after all, the best place for boys and girls under sixteen.  She persuaded between twenty-five and thirty per cent. of the children that applied at the Bureau last year to return to school.  Sometimes all she had to do was to give the child a plain statement of the facts in the case—­of the poor work and poor pay and lack of opportunity in the industries open to the fourteen-year-old worker.  Often she found it necessary only to explain what the school had to offer.  One boy was sent to Miss Davis by a teacher who had advised him to go to work, although he had just completed the seventh grade, because he had “too much energy” for school!  He was a bright boy—­one capable of making something of himself, if the two important, formative years that must pass before he was sixteen were not wasted; so he was transferred from his school to one where vocational work was part of the curriculum—­where he could find an outlet for his superfluous energy in working with his hands.  Now he is doing high-school work creditably; and he has stopped talking about leaving school.

But it isn’t always the whim of the child that prompts him to cut short his education.  Sometimes he is driven into the industrial world by the ignorance or greed of his parents.  Miss Davis tells of one little girl who was sacrificed to the great god Labor because the four dollars she brought home weekly helped to pay the instalments on a piano, and of a boy who was taken from eighth grade just before graduation because his father had bought some property and needed a little extra money.  Frequently boys and girls are put to work because of the impression that schools have nothing of practical value to offer.

Still, even the most miserly and most stubborn and most ignorant of parents can sometimes be made to see the wisdom of keeping a child in school until he is sixteen.  They are won to the Job Lady’s point of view by a statement of the increased opportunity open to the child who is sixteen.  Or they are brought to see that the schools are for all children, and that work, on the contrary, is very bad for some children.