Until the foregoing inquiries about the "unlucky" son's boyhood life be fully answered, we cannot reasonably permit ourselves to condemn him. There is nothing more in predestination than this; namely, it can be shown that the child is born with not a few latent abilities--aptitudes for doing and learning this and that--and that one of these aptitudes is likely to have correlated with it more than the average amount of nerve development in the corresponding brain center. As a result, that particular aptitude will require less training than the others and will tend to predominate over them as maturity is approached. The reply of the psychologist to the statement that some men are "natural-born failures," is this: Few if any of those possessed of ordinary physical and mental qualities at birth are necessarily so. Excepting the feeble-minded and the like,--whose marks of degeneracy are usually apparent to all,--it may be asserted on the highest authority that none are "natural-born failures" to any greater extent than they are "natural-born successes"; but that they have within the inherited nerve mechanisms many possibilities of both success and failure. THREE METHODS OF VOCATIONAL TRAINING We should be willing to overlook almost any other interest in this discussion for the sake of inducing in the farm father the belief that his young boy is a potential success--the belief that this boy is furnished by nature with the latent ability to shine somewhere in the broad field of human endeavor--provided he be rightly trained and disciplined during his growing years. Here, then, is probably the greatest of all the human-training problems; namely, the vocational one. Roughly speaking, there have been three methods of vocational training. 1. _The apprentice method._--First, historically there has been the apprentice method, the youth being "bound out to learn a trade." The chief faults of this traditional way of teaching the boy to be self-supporting were these: it made no allowance for intellectual development, and it gave the father too much authority to choose the calling for the boy. A modern offshoot of the old-time apprentice course is the trade school which flourishes in many of the big cities to-day. This new institution has one great advantage over its prototype. It offers such a great variety of forms of training that the youth may exercise much free choice. But it preserves one of the serious defects of apprenticeship in its neglect of the intellect of the learner. The modern trade school can never hope to do more than prepare young men and women to make a good living. It is a get-ready-quick institution, and can never be expected to give the student breadth of view and depth of insight into the great problems of human life.