New Concepts of Terminal Education

Between the learned professions at the top and the nontechnical trades and crafts at the bottom there lies a large and growing number of vocations which call for a high degree of intelligence, some scientific understanding and discriminating judgment, and in some cases, considerable manipulative skill. In this middle group of technical and semiprofessional vocations are to be found countless avenues of employment in agricultural, industrial, governmental, social, artistic, and religious fields. These constitute a new unit which is clamoring for recognition of its identity and for a place in the educational sun. Because of the expansion of various occupations and the specialization of functions and processes within each, there has developed a marked stratification. For instance, the healing art is a realm of stratified professions or occupations, namely: physicians, surgeons, psychiatrists, dentists, laboratory technicians, pharmacists, optometrists, nurses, and midwives, all requiring different types and amounts of training. One does not graduate from one to another but rather selects one of them, prepares for it, and follows it permanently. Industry likewise has multiplied the technical functions of engineering, many of them subprofessional in nature. The immediate need in our technical education is a rational diversification to advance a limited part of it to definitely higher scientific and professional levels, to provide for more generous training for the higher pursuits of industry, and to strike a better balance between the dominantly technical and the dominantly managerial programs. Terminal education on the junior college level is an inevitable corollary of the upward extension of free public education. This extension of education has been brought about by the operation of several factors. Not only do legal and other restrictions operate against the employment of youthful workers, but an ever increasing proportion of our workers are employed in fields where maturity above the high school age is demanded. During recent years, under normal prewar conditions, 1 Report, Committee on Junior College Terminal Education, Junior College Journal, Nov. 1940, p. 158

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