industrial courses in junior high schools that have been recommended
in the previous section, there should be established a two year
industrial trade school for boys. It should receive boys 14 to 16
years of age who desire direct trade-preparatory training. There are
good reasons why the present elementary schools, the proposed junior
high schools, and the existing technical high schools cannot
satisfactorily take the place of a specialized two year course in
giving boys direct trade-preparatory education. Boys who go through
the technical high schools do not remain in the building trades as
artisans. This is shown by the fact that less than two per cent of the
graduates of these schools are working in the building trades.

The elementary schools and the junior high schools cannot conduct
satisfactory trade-preparatory courses for the building industry for
the reason that they do not bring together at any one point a
sufficient number of these future workers to make it possible to teach
them economically. This is a consideration which conditions every
plan for the organization of industrial education. It is a question of
the community's capacity to absorb workmen trained for any given
occupation. In Cleveland about 4,000 boys leave the public elementary
schools each year. Approximately 2,400 of them drop out of the
elementary schools or leave after graduating from them, while the
remaining 1,600 go on to high school. The future workers in the
building trades will be largely recruited from the 2,400 boys who
leave the elementary schools each year. Most of them range in age from
14 to 16 and in school advancement from the fifth to the eighth
grades. They represent a cross-section of a large part of the city's
adult manhood of a few years hence.

Now the census figures tell us that if present conditions maintain in
the future only about 100 of the 4,000 boys leaving school each year
will be carpenters. For the purposes of the present inquiry we may
assume that these 100 future carpenters are to be found among the
2,400 boys who do not go on to high school. But Cleveland has 108
elementary schools and these 100 future carpenters are widely
scattered among them. Even if we knew which boys were destined to
become carpenters, and even if we knew when they would leave school,
and even if we should decide to give them all trade preparatory
education for the last two years of their school life, we should still
have an average