Civic improvement; Urban women; Women in public life
Not quite as comprehensive in her function as the visiting teacher, but
extremely valuable, is the teacher-counselor or vocational guidance
visitor. To be able to advise a child intelligently about a preparation
for a later vocation, the advisor must know something at least of the
family history of the child. Visitors therefore are engaged by those
organizations interested primarily in vocational guidance. Miss Marshal,
director of the Boston Trades School for Girls and agent of the
Industrial Commission, in a paper read before the National Society for
Industrial Education, set forth the idea of community responsibility for
letting boys and girls drift into low-paid, mechanical and often
degrading or health-endangering work. She said: “What happens to girls
who must earn their living when they go out from the grammar schools
untrained for any trade? They inevitably drift into low-paid,
mechanical, wearing, or even into dangerous work as packers in
factories, as errand girls in stores, with little chance of rising and
less chance of real life. The trade-school training for girls—definite
preparation for a trade—rapidly increases a girl’s wages and makes her
at once self-supporting and self-respecting.”
There are over one hundred vocational counselors in the public schools
of Boston whose duty it is to guide the child while in school, after
leaving school, and to follow-up the child to ascertain what becomes of
him after he goes to work.
Important work for vocational guidance and education has been done in
Boston by the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union and by the
Women’s Municipal League. The latter supervised the investigations made
by college students into employments for boys and girls in different
districts in Boston as a preparation for the dissemination of knowledge
of educational possibilities in occupations. It also prepared a complete
city directory of vocational schools and classes which is of great value
to teachers, parents, vocational counselors, employers, business
directors, social workers, and to organizations for vocational guidance.
This association has moreover financed research workers like Mr.
McCracken who investigated for it all commercial schools maintained for
profit in Boston.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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