VOCATIONAL EDUCATION. Voca tional education is that education whose chief aim is to fit for productive capacity. That vocational education which is specialized to the preparation of lawyers, physicians and teachers is called professional; that which is designated to train the boolckeeper, clerk, stenographer or commercial traveler, including business leadership, is called commercial; that which is organized with reference to the needs of the bricklayer, the machinist, the shoe maker, the metal worker, the factory hand and higher manufacturing pursuits is called indus trial; that which conveys slcill and knowledge looking to the tillage of the soil and the man agement of domestic animals is called agri cultural; and that which teaches the girl dress maicing, cooking and the management of the home is called education in the household arts or homemaking.
The term vocational education has come to be applied somewhat loosely to cover the field of industrial, agricultural and homemaking education; particularly has it come to mean in dustrial education of less than college grade for boys and girls, 'and other persons, over 14 years of age.
The early American colonists appreciated the importance of industrial training for chil dren and in some cases provided for it by law. A Massachusetts law of 1642 provided for the putting forth by the towns as (apprentices the children of such as shall not be able and fit to employ and bring them up . . . and they are to talce care that such as are set to keep cattle be set to some other employment withal, as spinning up on the rock, knitting, weaving, tape, etc. They are also to provide that sufficient quantity of materials, as hemp, flax, etc., may be raised in their several towns, and tools and implements provided for working out the same.° Virginia in 1646 advanced an elaborate plan for industrial education for poor children who were to be sent up to James City to be employed in the public flaxhouses under such master and mistresses as shall be ap pointed in carding, knitting and spinning. These and other laws seein to be reproductions of antecedent English laws of the same nature.
Between 1824, when the House of Refuge for delinquent boys was established in New York City, and 1875 American reformatories for juvenile delinquents provided industrial work whidh, while at first not of an educative character, gradually became so by the substi tution of the domestic industries of the institu tion, farming, gardening, carpentering, black stnithing, plumbing, painting, bricIdaying, fur niture tnaking and printing for the contract work onginally provided. For many years the reformatories for juvenile delinquents were almost the only institutions providing trade training for pupils 14 years of age and over.
The modern system of industrial education may be traced in part for its origin to the manual training movement. Calvin M. Wood ward and John Daniel Runkle were closely con nected with the beginning and growth of man ual training in America. Woodward who was a professor of anlied science and mathematics at Washington University, Saint Louis, and Runkle who was a professor of mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, saw the exhibit of the Imperial School of Moscow, Russia, at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876 and becatne interested in the forrn of manual training developed by Victor Della Vos. The idea of Della Vos was that of pure manual training, not to make a product but to train a worker in certain tool processes. Woodward fotmded the first manual training school in America in Saint Louis in 1880.
Between 1890 and 1905 manual training was introduced into approximately 200 cities of over 8,000 population. About 1905 there began a strong tendency to criticize manual training. This cntwism assumes two forms: (1) that manual training courses as phases of general education should have more real educative value than the formal schemes of exercises that have prevailed in the past; (2) a demand for the substitution of actual special trade training for those intending to become industrial work ers. Manual training in consequence giving place to (1) industrial arts courses in the grade schools and higher schools, and (2) trade preparatory courses in industrial schools.