The later years of school life need a gradual preparation for definite social function, the aim being to discover what line of service is most probably suited to one’s capacities and inclinations, and to train him for it. This preparation is itself a social process, and one into which we cannot put too much intelligence, sympathy, and patience. Parents and teachers can aid in it by interesting the child in the choice of a career, offering suggestions and helping him to learn about his own abilities and the opportunities open to them. He must feel that the problem is his and that no one else can work it out for him. Psychological tests should be of considerable help, and will no doubt become more and more penetrating and reliable. I think, however, that methods of this sort can never be more than ancillary to the process of “trying out,” of gradual, progressive experimentation as to what one can actually do. We must still feel our way into life, but by doing this largely before we leave school, and in a more intelligent way, we can prevent the rift between the school and the world from being the alarming and often fatal chasm it now is. Unless we can have real opportunity in the schools—through study of the individual, training, culture, and vocational guidance, we cannot well have it anywhere else. That is, if education does not solve at least half the problem of selective adaptation there is little hope of rightly solving the other half in later years. The absence of suitable preparation makes competition unfair and disorderly. A boy leaving school at sixteen, without having learned his own capacities or received the training they require, is in no case to compete intelligently. It is a rare chance if he finds his right place in the immense and complex system. For the most part he takes up whatever work offers itself, too commonly a blind-alley occupation which leads nowhere. It is even worse with girls, who, regarding their work as temporary, commonly take little interest in it. Anna Garlin Spencer, in her Woman’s Share in Social Culture, describes the usual state of the working girl as untrained, unambitious, shirking, and careless, and speaks of “the positive injury to the work sense, the demoralization of the faculty of true service, that her shallow and transitory connection with outside trade occupation so often gives.”[11] Competition means freedom and opportunity only on condition that the individual is rightly prepared to compete. Otherwise it may mean waste, exploitation and degeneracy, and this is what it does mean to a large part of young men, and a larger part of girls and women.