st meet the exacting demands of the
buying public has a distinct educational value. The Manhattan Trade
School for Girls in New York City and other successful schools in the
country operate on this basis. There is reason to believe that there
would be little difficulty in making arrangements with the clothing
manufacturers in Cleveland to furnish a good trade school as much
contract work as the classes could handle.

OTHER OCCUPATIONS

From one-fourth to one-fifth of the girls in the school will later
enter employment in commercial and clerical occupations, as
stenographers, typists, clerks, cashiers, bookkeepers, saleswomen, and
so on. Their needs will be considered in Chapters XII and XIII, in
which the findings of the special reports on Boys and Girls in
Commercial Work and Department Store Occupations are summarized.

A relatively small number will become semi-skilled operatives in
industrial establishments, such as job printing houses, knitting
mills, and factories making electrical supplies, metal products, and
so on. As a rule such work requires only a small amount of manual
skill or deftness. Not much training is needed and it can be given
quickly and effectively in the factories.

About one-ninth of the girls in the school will enter paid domestic or
personal service of some kind. The household arts courses probably
meet the needs of girls who may be employed in such occupations as far
as they can be met under present conditions. The woman domestic
servant occupies about the same social level as the male common
laborer, and a course which openly sets out to train girls to be
servants is not likely to prosper. The load of social stigma such work
carries is too heavy. At some time in the future it may be possible to
ignore the traditional and universal attitude of our public toward the
so-called menial occupations sufficiently to consider training
servants. At present such a possibility seems remote.

CHAPTER X

VOCATIONAL GUIDANCE

Very few of the army of young people who become wage earners each year
take up the occupations in which they engage as the result of any
conscious selection of their own or of their parents. They drift into
some job aimlessly and ignorantly, following the line of least
resistance, driven or led by the accidents and exigencies of gaining a
livelihood. They possess no accurate or comprehensive knowledge of the
advantages and disadvantages of different types of wage ea