Our Schools in War Time—and AfterDean, Arthur D. (Arthur Davis)
History
Our Schools in War Time—and After
Dean, Arthur D. (Arthur Davis)
Education -- United States; World War, 1914-1918 -- War work -- Schools
The industrial-school authorities should send into the factories
capable instructors who have had trade experience, in order to learn
the needs for trained help and to analyze the trade processes for which
men need to be trained. In this way the school may determine whether it
can best meet the situation by training the youth in its day schools
to go to work in industrial plants upon leaving school--although this
is not a very immediate way of meeting the emergency--or whether it
would be better to move the classes, so to speak, over to the plant
and have the instructors teach a group of unskilled workers on the
group-instruction plan. Perhaps the school could perform its best
service by giving trade extension courses to those already engaged in
productive work. Anyhow, these alternatives must be fully considered.
These instructors or trained experts, when visiting typical yards or
plants in a specific industry to learn of the needs for trained help,
must be able to reanalyze the trade processes in terms of training as
distinct from terms of production, and out of this analysis to draw
up suitable schemes for giving such training. The question of whether
this training should be given entirely in the school or entirely in the
plant or partly in the plant and partly in the school should be left to
experts, who know best the possibilities of each of these schemes.
This is no time for industrial schools to stand on their dignity and
claim that they can do all that is necessary in their day schools
without coöperation with those who employ. It is readily granted
that, generally speaking, directors of industrial schools know their
job quite well when it comes to giving trade-preparatory training
to youth before it enters industry; but at a time when the country
needs thousands of workmen we are quite sure that the better plan for
training operators and semiskilled workers is directly in the plant
itself. In a time of great emergency this intensive, immediate training
must be given in large part by the industries themselves within their
own plants. They have the equipment, they have the men who need the
training; all they lack is the proper instructing force, as they cannot
take men away from production for instruction purposes. It follows
that the instructors of our schools must give their instruction in the
plants or must have the unskilled operatives and helpers come to the
school for part-time work.
The present all-day industrial schools, even in normal times, need this
direct contact with industry to save themselves from shop methods which
savor of manual-training schools.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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