d.  Courses in industrial information.

    e.  General courses in industrial shop work.

These are general industrial courses and it is recommended that they be introduced as prominent features of the work of the junior high school.  They are not intended to take the place of specialized courses in the building trades, but they are proposed as courses valuable for all future industrial workers and within which certain adaptations should be made for those who are intending to enter the building trades.

3. A two year industrial trade school. In addition to the general industrial courses in junior high schools that have been recommended in the previous section, there should be established a two year industrial trade school for boys.  It should receive boys 14 to 16 years of age who desire direct trade-preparatory training.  There are good reasons why the present elementary schools, the proposed junior high schools, and the existing technical high schools cannot satisfactorily take the place of a specialized two year course in giving boys direct trade-preparatory education.  Boys who go through the technical high schools do not remain in the building trades as artisans.  This is shown by the fact that less than two per cent of the graduates of these schools are working in the building trades.

The elementary schools and the junior high schools cannot conduct satisfactory trade-preparatory courses for the building industry for the reason that they do not bring together at any one point a sufficient number of these future workers to make it possible to teach them economically.  This is a consideration which conditions every plan for the organization of industrial education.  It is a question of the community’s capacity to absorb workmen trained for any given occupation.  In Cleveland about 4,000 boys leave the public elementary schools each year.  Approximately 2,400 of them drop out of the elementary schools or leave after graduating from them, while the remaining 1,600 go on to high school.  The future workers in the building trades will be largely recruited from the 2,400 boys who leave the elementary schools each year.  Most of them range in age from 14 to 16 and in school advancement from the fifth to the eighth grades.  They represent a cross-section of a large part of the city’s adult manhood of a few years hence.

Now the census figures tell us that if present conditions maintain in the future only about 100 of the 4,000 boys leaving school each year will be carpenters.  For the purposes of the present inquiry we may assume that these 100 future carpenters are to be found among the 2,400 boys who do not go on to high school.  But Cleveland has 108 elementary schools and these 100 future carpenters are widely scattered among them.  Even if we knew which boys were destined to become carpenters, and even if we knew when they would leave school, and even if we should decide to give them all trade preparatory education for the last two years of their school life, we should still have an average class in carpentry of only two boys in each elementary school.  This is administratively and educationally impossible.  For similar reasons specialized trade preparatory classes in junior high schools would prove exceedingly difficult to organize.