“The larger part of the boys and girls leave school before the completion of the elementary course, unprepared in anything which will aid them in their immediate problem of earning a living with their hands. From statistics available in other states it is safe to estimate that there are fully 25,000 boys and girls in this state between fourteen and sixteen who have not secured adequate preparation for life work in the schools and who are now working in “dead end” or “blind alley” jobs, or in other words, jobs which hold no promise of future competence or advancement. The investigations in Massachusetts and New York city show that not more than one out of five of the pupils leaving school at fourteen do so because it is necessary to help make a living. The conditions are doubtless even better in Indiana. The remainder, four out of five, leave school for a variety of reasons, chief among which is the feeling among pupils and parents that the schools do not offer the kind of instruction which they need for the work they expect to do and which would justify them in foregoing wage earning for a time in order to get it.” The commission found no organized effort in Indiana to put pupils in touch with the opportunities for life work. The pupils are in the main, it declares, left to their own resources in choosing a vocation except where enterprising teachers have been able to give personal advice. It believes that every city and town should survey the vocational opportunities within its borders and place the information, together with all information available on vocational work, within reach of the pupil at the proper age. Contrary to the claims of some of those who are administering industrial education in other states the commission found that the largest problem in carrying out such training is the lack of teachers competent to do the work. “If the vocational subjects are to find and hold the place that is due them in the common schools of the state,” says the commission, “the teachers must be educated to handle them more effectively than they have been able to handle such subjects in the past.”