Education: Pegs v. Holes

More than 85% of the students attending U.S. public high schools today must find jobs soon after graduation. Yet a large percent of U.S. high schools stubbornly maintain a curriculum designed chiefly for college preparatory training.

Year and a half ago tall, robust Edwin Augustus Lee conceived a stunt to dramatize these facts. Dr. Lee, a former San Francisco school superintendent, is director of the National Occupational Conference, which was founded in 1922—under the leadership of General Robert Irwin Rees, head of the A.E.F.’s University in France in 1918-19—to gather facts about jobs. Dr. Lee herded 13 top-rank public-school superintendents into a private Pullman and for ten days, with their expenses paid by the Carnegie Corporation, these superintendents toured the schools of eight cities. They found interesting experiments, but nowhere did the superintendents find a complete, effective program of occupational adjustment.

Last week they sent to 1,000 public-school superintendents throughout the U.S. a report, Occupational Adjustment. They proposed that public schools adopt a three-point program to: 1) guide, 2) train, 3) place students in the right jobs. First step, said the superintendents, is to make up-to-date, realistic studies of occupations. In Denver, for example, the schools surveyed the baking industry, found what kinds of workers were employed, how many were likely to be needed, even what nationalities were preferred by employers.

These surveys made, Occupational Adjustment advises schools to counsel their students about the character and requirements of available jobs, give them practical training courses. The report’s most ambitious recommendation: schools should conduct their own placement bureaus, either independently or in cooperation with Government agencies, watch out for the welfare of their students after graduation.