VOLUME I

AR

SALUTATION

S a contribution to the growing fund of information and practical experience in its especial field, the North End Union School of Printing sends its message to the fraternity and the public in this APPRENTICESHIP BULLETIN, which it is proposed to issue monthly for the spread of the gospel of trade education and indentured apprenticeship.

THE cause of industrial education is now

to the fore in America. Men and women in a hundred walks of life— educators, social workers, economists, employers, superintendents, and thoughtful craftsmen, with a hundred ideas as to what they are jointly driving at, and the way they are to go about it

NUMBER I

to meet industrial needs. In this connection the experience of one trade school may be of interest.

THE School of Printing has been in existence over six years, and has had an experience of peculiar significance. From its beginning it has had the support and supervision of practical printers of wide experience, leaders in the affairs of their craft. These men felt the imperative need for some better method of training apprentices than is in vogue or is possible in the average workshop. The first step necessary was the establishment of a trade school, where the young man beginning his industrial career could find the chance to learn and practice the things he should know in order to be useful. The commonly accepted theory that all that was needed was to open the school and invite pupils was given full and free opportunity to work itself out as a possible, or even passable, solution of the problem. Master printers, foremen, and journeymen attended meetings at the rooms of the school from time to time and discussed the question earnestly and hopefully, and fully endorsed the plan and scope of the school.

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are each day, with growing earnestness, focusing their attention on the problem. Discussions, proposals, theoretical and practical experiments, are leavening the entire mass of our industrial life. Through it all runs a common conviction that something should be done — must be done to educate the coming workers in a specific and direct way for the work they are to do. Raise the standard of skill in the workman, improve the tone of industrial morality, give the greatest number of individuals the opportunity to "live a full and ample life," are some of the urgent demands of the time. To meet these demands, most persons agree that the trade school is the prime necessity. BUT what kind of a trade school? On

this point there is great variance of opinion. Everyone entertains a notion of what it ought to be; often persons with the least experience entertain the strongest convictions and the most impractical theories; but those of wider views are not yet sure, and are trying to find a method that can be fitted into existing conditions, made adequate for the instruction of the pupil, and competent

FOUR years' experience with an evening

class served to show that while it was of advantage to the ambitious boy who is bound to get ahead, yet the plan failed to meet the situation by reaching the average boy, who is a much more numerous class, in order to make the most of him for future work. The pupils were young men who were already at work in printing offices. Some of them were ambitious boys in whom their employers or foremen took an interest and who seemed ambitious to advance themselves. Many of them came from that large class of boys who drift into the trade, with no ambition concerning the work and no discernible qualifications for it; while look