If vocational guidance is to be a controlling social purpose, the manual training work will have to be made more diversified so that one can try out his tastes and abilities in a number of lines.  And, moreover, each kind of work must be kept as much like responsible work out in the world as possible.  In keeping work normal, the main thing is that the pupils bear actual responsibility for the doing of actual work.  This is rather difficult to arrange; but it is necessary before the activities can be lifted above the level of the usual manual training shop.  The earliest stages of the training will naturally be upon what is little more than a play level.  It is well for schools to give free rein to the constructive instinct and to provide the fullest and widest possible opportunities for its exercise.  But if boys are to try out their aptitudes for work and their ability to bear responsibility in work, then they must try themselves out on the work level.  Let the manual training actually look toward vocational guidance; the social purpose involved will vitalize the work.

There is a still more comprehensive social purpose which the city should consider.  Owing to the interdependence of human affairs, men need to be broadly informed as to the great world of productive labor.  Most of our civic and social problems are at bottom industrial problems.  Just as we use industrial history and industrial geography as means of giving youth a wide vision of the fields of man’s work, so must we also use actual practical activities as means of making him familiar in a concrete way with materials and processes in their details, with the nature of work, and with the nature of responsibility.  On the play level, therefore, constructive activities should be richly diversified.  This diversity of opportunity should continue to the work level.  One cannot really know the nature of work or of work responsibility except as it is learned through experience.  Let the manual training adopt the social purpose here mentioned, provide the opportunities, means, and processes that it demands, and the work will be wondrously vitalized.

It is well to mention that the program suggested is a complicated one on the side of its theory and a difficult one on the side of its practice.  In the planning it is well to look to the whole program.  In the work itself it is well to remember that one step at a time, and that secure, is a good way to avoid stumbling.

Printing and gardening are two things that might well be added to the manual training program.  Both are already in the schools in some degree.  They might well be considered as desirable portions of the manual training of all.  They lend themselves rather easily to responsible performance on the work level.  There are innumerable things that a school can print for use in its work.  In so doing, pupils can be given something other than play.  Also in the home gardening, supervised for educational purposes, it is possible to introduce normal work-motives.  By the time the city has developed these two things it will have at the same time developed the insight necessary for attacking more difficult problems.