in the silk lampshade
trade.

PART II

REPRESENTATIVE PROBLEMS[B]

The organizing of a girls' trade school in any given locality
necessitates the meeting of many problems of a serious nature. Some of
these appear immediately and require consideration before a satisfactory
curriculum can be developed, but most of them are hydra-headed, and one
phase is no sooner settled than another arises. Attention must be given
to them whenever they come if any progress is to be made in solving the
question of the broadest and yet most practical education for the girl
who must earn her living in trade. These problems are so connected with
the keenest yet most obscure social and industrial questions of the day
on one hand, and, on the other, with the future of the race, that they
are often very puzzling. Some of them can never be entirely settled,
though they can be temporarily adjusted to immediate needs. The
following are selected as representative.

Direct Trade Training

Many schools of a domestic or technical nature have been opened in the
United States, but the instruction in them is for the home or for
educational purposes rather than for business. The trades, if they are
represented at all in these schools, are general in character, covering
often many branches of an industry in a short series of lessons, and
not having the particular subdivisions and special equipment which are
found at present in the regular market. Employers of labor have not been
favorably impressed with the practical usefulness of the graduates in
their workrooms. As the sole reason for the existence of the Manhattan
Trade School is to meet this requirement of employers, and therefore to
develop a better class of wage-earners directly adapted to trade needs,
the instruction must be in accord with methods in the shops and
factories of New York City. Such specific trade education for
fourteen-year-old girls was new, and therefore the problem of
organization had to be faced for the first time in America. Careful
study of the workrooms and the industrial conditions of New York City
was essential before the aims or the curriculum could be decided upon
and the school could be opened for instruction. Furthermore, if the
training is to be kept up to date this study of trade conditions must
not cease, and readjustments of the curriculum must equal the changes
taking place in the outside workrooms. Consequently these problems must
be met repeatedly.