acement

Problems of varied kinds meet the school in placing its students. Each
new enactment of child labor or industrial laws has its influence. Even
a good law will sometimes have a temporary serious effect in lowering
wages or turning capable girls out of satisfactory positions. Care must
be exercised that students are not placed where there is a possibility
of running counter to the best interests of labor. The desire to place
each pupil where she can develop to her highest condition requires
continual knowledge of the market needs and of the characteristics of
the many girls. Records of students entering, studying, and placed, the
kinds of positions open, and industrial and labor information must be
kept up to date, yet such data are often hard to secure.

Trade Union Attitude

An important question that is always before a trade school is the effect
the instruction may have on the working people. It is difficult for one
not continually in the midst of the pressure of the actual trade to
know the many ways that thoughtless advance in trade teaching may react
to the disadvantage of the very ones that the school wishes to help.
Injury may be done by preparing too many for certain occupations,
filling places where a strike is on, replacing well-paid positions with
trade school girls at a less price, placing the girls at too small a
wage for their skill, doing order work at too low a price or when a
strike is on, considering too closely the fitting of a worker for the
employer's benefit rather than for the broadening of her own life, and
like thoughtless actions. The difficulties of the situation are great
and the solution frequently obscure, but a fair-minded school must be in
touch with the effort the working woman herself has inaugurated to
better her condition. The apparently unnecessary suspicion with which
the laboring class regards the organization of trade instruction would
have foundation if no thought were given to the trade conditions as the
working girl sees them. A trade school for fourteen-year-old girls need
not make a point of their immediate entrance into unions, but it should
consider the subject simply and wisely in all its bearings, that the
students may know the full aims and advantages of cooeperation as well as
the point of view and many difficulties of the employers.

Contact with Trade

The faculty of a trade school needs the cooeperation and assistance of
the working people and the em