Music Trade Review

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THE MUSIC TRADE REVIEW
7i
The Player School in Chicago and How It Indicates the Progress Made in
Public Industrial Education—The Details of the Course and What it is De-
signed to Accomplish—High Type of Students Interested—How Instructed
Just how far the public schools are taking up
the task of educating the youth of America for
the actual work to which their lives are to be de-
voted is a question which can best be understood
only when we realize the great progress which has
been made by public opinion in the last twenty-five
years. In almost all the older countries, training
of youth for definite activities, for becoming defi-
nite workers in this or the other craft, has been
perity and honor constantly before his mind, the
young American has not wished to bind himself
down to any sort of training that intimates by its
very existence his destiny to artisanship.
The
American boy has not wished to do anything that
would brand him as destined for a mechanic's
life. He has always had the hope, and to some
extent has tried to realize the idea of ending life
behind a mahogany desk as a bank president. The
that, in the absence of an apprenticeship system,
they must make a beginning in that direct them-
selves.
Both in Germany, in Great Britain and in the
United States, there has begun a movement which
means the co-operation of industries with the
schools, whereby apprentices may be taught their
future trade and at the same time receive a good
education. This is being done partly 1>y ;i Mowing
Class Number One, Course of Player Construction, Chicago.
carried on through the system of apprenticeship,
whereby young men or boys are put through a
course of training in a factory, lasting from one to
five years, after which they are regarded as thor-
oughly equipped. And the system of industry in
such countries is based upon the idea that it is the
duty of private employers to see that the supply
of skilled craftsmen is thus kept up.
Not only is this so, but it has long been recog-
nized in Europe, and especially in Germany, that
the education offered by the public schools must
concern itself more and more with fitting the child
for the after life he is expected to lead. Hence
we have the ideal of vocational training as part of
the school curriculum more and more coming to
the front.
ideal of the American boy has been that of get-
ting "something soft"; and he has been encouraged
by the very fact that fortunes are still made and
lost overnight, and that anybody may, by some
stroke of fortune as we say, become a millionaire
in a day.
Hence the public sentiment regarding education
has been that the child must have the best oppor-
tunities to take his place as a prospective million-
aire. He must be taught in the grade schools to
prepare for high school, and in high school to pre-
pare for college. But, while this ideal is still
prevalent in American education, the fact is being
seen more and more that vocational training, the
training of the boy and girl to work with hands
and head together, the training of the youth to
pupils in the schools to spend part time in the
shops of a corporation learning the trade they
have chosen and getting credit in school for the
same, and partly by corporations starting schools
in which both trade and general cultural educa-
tion are offered to suitable youths whose parents
will bind themselves to keep their children under
discipline and see that they go through the course
from end to end. The former method is, of course,
to be commended. But this does not meet the in-
dustrial problem entirely.
How about the young man, or for that matter,
the older man, who has gone out into the world
and, being without early mechanical training, finds
that he cannot keep up with the competition in
life? How about the youth who having graduated
Class Number Two, Course of Player Construction, Chicago.
In this country the apprenticeship system never
had a chance. Seeing before him an almost virgin
territory wherever his vision roamed, and with
the hope of almost any conceivable future of pros-
understand mechanics and the facts of this me-
chanical age, is absolutely essential if we are ever
to keep up our supply of skilled artisans. That sup-
ply we must keep up; and the schools now see
from school would like to do something in one of
the well-paid trades, but cannot find a chance to
apprentice himself because the trade is not or-
(Continued on page 8.)