Vocational Guidance in School and Occupation

Vocational guidance deals with the problems of informing or advising persons in regard to choosing, preparing for, entering upon and making progress in occupations. The importance of this problem is evident to any thinking adult; what is not so obvious is the practical answer to the question: What can the school do about vocational guidance? This paper aims to present in summary fashion the plans and possibilities which suggest the answer. The very breadth of our problem makes its complexity inevitable. Glance, if you will, at the topics of the papers in this volume, and note that many of them are related, directly or indirectly, to success and happiness in the calling. Besides these subjects, moreover, vocational guidance must concern itself with the problems of commerce and industry: economics, labor organizations, land values, taxation, transportation; any plan for comprehensive guidance must not restrict itself to narrowly educational investigations. In spite of the importance of the subject of vocational guidance, and the need for strenuous intellectual endeavor in attempting to solve its complex problems, schools had made little conscious effort to work out even a tentative solution until Meyer Bloomfield began his activities in the Boston schools six years ago. Several causes have contributed to the reluctance of the school: (a) School people have not known the occupational world well enough to advise pupils in regard to vocational opportunities; (b) schools prepared for life only in general and indefinite ways,-it was not widely recognized, as it begins to be now, that culture on the one hand and specific experiences of a practical sort on the other belong together and should both be furnished by the school; (c) it was frequently assumed that parents would provide all the vocational guidance necessary, or that the job itself would automatically furnish it; (d) American individualism led to a laissez-faire policy, to an enervating admiration of the self-made man, and to other such tacit denials of the utility of vocational guidance. 54

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