ed school
preparation, and their scattered geographical distribution, the best
possible preparation for taking their places in the work-a-day world.
They represent every grade of intelligence, every stratum of social
and economic life, and it is extremely difficult to bring them
together for instructional purposes. They are scattered in little
groups through more than a thousand classrooms.

THE IMPORTANCE OF RELATIVE NUMBERS

Now it is possible to foretell with some certainty what these young
people will be doing a few years from now. Almost all of them are of
American birth and it is certain that in a few years they will be
engaged in doing just about the same sorts of work as are now done in
the city of Cleveland by adults of American birth. The data of the
United States Census of Occupations show us that among every 100
American born men in Cleveland there are eight who are clerks, seven
who are machinists, four who are salesmen, and so on through the list
of hundreds of occupations. The number of American born men in each
100 engaged in each of the 10 leading sorts of occupations is
approximately as follows:

Clerks 8
Machinists 7
Salesmen 4
Laborers and porters 4
Retail dealers 4
Draymen, teamsters, etc. 4
Bookkeepers 3
Carpenters 3
Commercial travelers 2
Manufacturers 2
----
41

This simple list at once calls into question all the standard
assumptions about the extension of industrial education depending on
greatly increasing the number of carpenter shops and machine shops in
the public schools. The figures show that among each 100 American born
men in Cleveland only seven are machinists and only three are
carpenters. Clearly we should not be justified in training all the
boys in our public schools to enter the machinist's trade or the
carpenter's trade when nine out of each 10 will in all probability
engage in entirely different sorts of future work. The more the
figures of the little table given above are studied, the clearer it
appears that our conventional ideas about industrial education need
critical scrutiny and careful challenge. These 10 leading occupations
include only 41 out of