Thirty-six states now have a fourteen-year limit for factories; thirty-four prohibit night work under sixteen years; eighteen require an eight-hour day between fourteen and sixteen; and thirty-six provide for the inspection of factories.
With all the children shut out of industry to the age of sixteen,—as all girls are in Ohio,—we have discharged our first duty to normal adolescence. The next step is to keep them in school.
Little children are not critical. They accept school, as they accept their relatives and their backyard and front door-step, as a part of the uni verse with which they are getting acquainted. By the time they have reached the age of twelve or fourteen, however, their attitude changes. They make comparisons; they become restless; they chafe against restraint and look about for more adequate channels of self-expression and develop ment; and when the opportunity comes for a change, they welcome it. This is what make this period at once the despair and the opportunity for the educator.
It has been a popular pastime, and a profitable one, for several years to ask working children why they left school when they did, and the most com mon answer, aside from the assumption that it was the thing to do as soon as one reached his four teenth birthday or "graduated" from grammar school, has always been that they were tired of it, or didn't like it; four hundred and twelve out of five hundred factory children said definitely that they liked the factory better.* Their reasons for this preference are well summarized by two of them, who explained it thus: You never understand what they tells you in school, but you can learn right off to do things in a factory.
When you works a whole month at school, the teacher she gives you a card to take home, that says how you ain't any good.
These two comments go to the root of the edu cator's problem. To-day's young people are prac tical. They want to make things, to get results, to see the use of whatever they are asked to do in school. They are interested in their school work, apparently, in proportion to the relation which they can see between it and "real life." It is on the teaching profession that the main responsibility must rest for solving these educa tional problems, for "rationalizing" and "democ ratizing" the public schools and making them as useful to the boys and girls who leave them at sixteen to go into an office or a factory as they have been in the past to those who go on into normal school or college. We may safely leave this re sponsibility with the educators of the country— half a million of them there are, or more, including those twenty-one under fourteen years of age, * Helen M. Todd in McClure's Magazine, April, 1913.
though we ought not perhaps to impose too much responsibility on these infants—if the students of industrial problems do their part in supplying in formation about the conditions in the various in dustries and in helping to analyze the various pro cesses with a view to discovering what is the precise training required for each.