"I honestly didn't see how we were going to do it," he says, in frankly discussing the entire matter, "the tradition in favor of an office career rather than a selling one in a store has so long ruled in the high schools of the city. There are several reasons for this--the most important one, in my mind, the feeling in the average high school girl's head that less education having been required in past years for the girl behind the counter than for the girl behind the typewriter, she lost a certain definite sort of caste, if she followed the first of these callings. Of course, that is utter rubbish. I have no hesitancy today in telling my girls that if they are looking for a genuine career retail selling is the thing for them. In office work, if they are very good, they may get up to forty or even fifty dollars a week but there they are pretty nearly sure to come to a standstill." The skilled educator shakes his head as he says this. "You see the difficulty is that so many girls coming out of schools such as these look upon business not as a boy would look at it, as a career with indefinite and permanent possibilities, but rather as a bridge between schooling and matrimony--a bridge of but four, or five, or six years. And when they are frank with me--and they often are--and tell me of this bridge that is in their minds, I am frank to advise office work. It offers better immediate returns--yet in the long run none that are even comparable with those of a high-grade department-store." Following the successful plan of the University of Cincinnati in its technical engineering courses, the students down at Haaren are grouped into working pairs, which means that, in practice and working in alternation, each goes to school every other week. In the week that one is in the classroom, her partner is in one of the city stores studying retail selling at first hand. When, at the end of six days, she returns to her schoolroom she has many questions derived from her actual practice to put to her instructor. So the practice and the principles of this new hard-headed science are kept hand in hand with its actual workings. Nor is this all: some six or seven hundred young women--and young men, too--are also making a special study of retail selling in the city's evening schools. A single course at the DeWitt Clinton High School is quite typical of these. Four evenings a week, for two hours each evening, a huge class is being taught--in an even more detailed way than is possible under a department-store roof--the principles and manufacture of textiles. In these classes a goodly number of the Macy family are enrolled. Another goodly enrollment goes into the special lectures given by a museum instructor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on certain evenings and Sunday afternoons. Truly, indeed, education has become the handmaiden of merchandising.