Vocational Psychology: Its Problems and MethodsHollingworth, Harry L. (Harry Levi)
Science
Vocational Psychology: Its Problems and Methods
Hollingworth, Harry L. (Harry Levi)
Psychophysiology
Along with this tendency went the attempt to give the pupil some first-hand
knowledge of and immediate experience with the materials, implements, and
products of the various industries from among which he or she might be
expected to choose after leaving the school. This has been a difficult step
to bring about, partly because of the various technical and administrative
difficulties which it involved. Occasional hasty visits to mills,
factories, stores, shops, offices, laboratories, and similar busy places
give the pupil but a superficial notion of the actual work of the
operations there observed. More extended and intensive observation, on the
other hand, with perhaps an actual trial at the work, means a corresponding
limitation of the range of institutions inspected. Talks by managers and
foremen are likely to give only a dramatized view of the facts. School
industries, on the other hand, cannot easily be organized and conducted in
a manner technically complete and industrially representative. The result
has been a growing tendency to push the vocational training further and
further back into the earlier years of the curriculum, thus displacing much
of the purely formal subject-matter. With this change have come various
experiments in study-practice methods, in which part of the day or term is
spent at the general academic work, and part in actual service in a
tentatively chosen form of industrial or commercial activity.
In this movement but little recognition was given to the psychological
differences and peculiarities of the individuals concerned. Knowledge of
personal aptitudes and capacities, interests, and satisfactions, was more
or less taken for granted in each case, or at least left to develop in its
own way. It was assumed either that any individual could satisfactorily
pursue any vocation in which he might become interested, or else that
industrial and vocational information alone was needed in order to enable
the individual to make a suitable choice. Nor was there any doubt that the
work which the youth found interesting and attractive at the time was the
work in which he might find a maximum of ultimate success, satisfaction,
and serviceableness. With the vocational surveys, the industrial schools,
and the part-time practice methods of education we shall not be concerned,
in what is to follow. They represent a movement of tremendous social and
educational significance, but their development does not immediately
concern that other field of work which we have designated "vocational
psychology." They proceed mainly by giving the individual a knowledge of
the external series of facts and events, thus replacing the era of
fortune-telling and clairvoyance, with its search for signs and omens, just
as fortune-telling had, in its own day, replaced the practices of crude
objective magic. But the methods of industrial and occupational training
have been found to solve only one aspect of the vocational problem; and it
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