he first, leads
nowhere, but also like the first, brings in three or four dollars
a week, perhaps less. A teacher at a public-school social center
inquired of a group of fifty girls, cracker-packers, garment-workers
and bindery girls, how long each had been in her present situation.
Only one had held hers eighteen months. No other had reached a year in
the same place. The average appeared to be about three or four months.

Worse still is another class of blind-alley occupation. These are the
street trades. The newsboy, the messenger and the telegraph boy often
make good money to begin with. Girls, too, are being employed by some
of the messenger companies. These are all trades, that apart from the
many dangers inseparable from their pursuit, spell dismissal after two
or three years at most, or as soon as the boy reaches the awkward age.
The experience gained is of no use in any other employment, and the
unusual freedom makes the messenger who has outgrown his calling
averse to the discipline of more regular occupations.

What a normal vocational education can be, and a normal development of
occupation, is seen in the professions, such as law and medicine. The
lawyer and the doctor are, it is true, confining themselves more and
more to particular branches of their respective callings, and more
and more are they becoming experts in the branch of law or medicine
selected. The lawyer specializes in criminal cases or in damage suits,
in commercial or constitutional law; he is a pleader or a consultant.
The doctor may decide to be a surgeon, or an oculist, an anesthetist
or a laboratory worker. And the public reap the benefit in more expert
advice and treatment. But the likeness between such professional
specialization and the dehumanizing and brain-deadening industrial
specialization, which is the outgrowth of the factory system, is one
in name only as was admirably put by Samuel Gompers, when presiding
over the Convention of the American Federation of Labor at Toronto in
1909.

"It must be recognized that specialists in industry are vastly
different from specialists in the professions. In the professions,
specialists develop from all the elements of the science of the
profession. Specialists in industry are those who know but one part
of a trade, and absolutely nothing of any other part of it. In the
professions specialists are possessed of all the learning of their
art; in industry they are denied the opportunity of lea