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Choosing a Vocation: The Origins and Transformation of Vocational Guidance in California, 1910–1930

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Harvey Kantor*
Affiliation:
University of Utah

Extract

In the opening decades of the twentieth century, the idea of using schools to prepare young people for work blossomed into a major campaign to integrate the school more closely with the economy. Reformers across a wide spectrum of opinion became convinced that in place of the seemingly haphazard manner in which young people left school and drifted into the labor market the school should mediate between youth and the workplace, or as one proponent put it, “act as a transmitter between human supply and industrial demand.” It was the central task of the school, they argued, to train youth for jobs and to direct them into occupations that suited their talents and interests and matched the economic needs of their communities.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1. Quoted in Committee on High Schools and Training Schools, Board of Education, New York City, 1914, “Vocational Guidance,” in Bloomfield, Meyer, ed., Readings in Vocational Guidance (Boston, 1915), 307.Google Scholar

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53. Ibid., 297. These responses may well have indicated what educators thought they should have been doing, not what they were actually doing. As we shall see below, much of what passed for guidance in California was quite rudimentary. Californians were not the only ones who indicated that they had at least begun to introduce guidance, however. In the nation as a whole, educators indicated that they had made an initial commitment to guidance. Data collected in a 1927 sample of 522 secondary schools in forty-one states indicated that, according to the principals, 87 percent provided educational guidance, 83 percent provided personal guidance, and 74 percent provided vocational guidance. Similarly, in 1930, when the White House Conference of Child Health and Protection surveyed the status of guidance across the country, thirty-four of the thirty-six largest cities responding had a guidance program while 57 percent of the medium-sized cities had guidance counselors and almost 60 percent of the smallest cities had them, although few rural communities did. See Reavis, William C., Programs of Guidance, U.S. Office of Education, Bulletin No. 17, 1932, Monograph No. 14 (Washington, D.C., 1933), 3–4; and White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, Vocational Guidance (New York, 1933), 43.Google Scholar

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64. For a similar analysis, see Lazerson, Marvin, “ “Choosing Our Roles': American Youth and Guidance in Historical Perspective” (Paper prepared for OECD, Center for Educational Research and Innovation Project, March 1981). The analysis in this section closely parallels Lazerson's and has benefitted greatly from it.Google Scholar

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72. Givens, Willard, “Oakland Famous for Splendid Educational Opportunities Offered,” Oakland Tribune Yearbook, 1929, p. 86.Google Scholar

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74. Children's Bureau, Vocational Guidance, 417, 421–22. On the educational training of counselors in Los Angeles see Los Angeles Public Schools, Division of Psychology and Educational Research, Third Yearbook, 1929, p. 155.Google Scholar

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76. On the importance of these two points nationwide, see Lazerson, , “‘Choosing Our Roles,’” 3637.Google Scholar

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79. Nationwide the proportion of the labor force engaged in clerical occupations increased from 2.2 percent to 8.2 percent between 1890 and 1930, the proportion engaged in trade from 8.3 percent to 12.5 percent, and the proportion in professional occupations from 3.9 percent to 6.7 percent. In California, the proportion of the labor force in these three occupational categories in 1930 was even greater. In 1930, 10 percent were in clerical occupations, 17.5 percent in trade, and 9.4 percent in professional service. See Kantor, Harvey, “‘Learning to Earn’: The Origins of Vocational Education in California, 1900–1930” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1985), ch. 6. On the formalization of educational requirements for entry to the professions, see Kett, Joseph F., Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York, 1977), ch. 6; and Collins, Randall, The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification (New York, 1979).Google Scholar

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81. California Commission for the Study of Educational Problems, Report, Vol. 1, 1930, p. 48. On the need for still more counseling services in California, see also Koos, Leonard V., Secondary Education in California: Report of a Preliminary Survey (Sacramento, Calif., 1929), 81.Google Scholar