EDUCATION AND INDUSTRY. 435 



of technical experts who shall do for us what the graduates of German 

 schools have done for the German chemical and textile industries. 



Training for Office Work has remained in the hands of private in- 

 stitutions for the most part in this country. These schools, > usually 

 known as 'commercial colleges,' aim to fit young people of both sexes 

 for clerical positions in offices and for employment as bookkeepers or 

 stenographers. The chief subjects taught are penmanship, correspond- 

 ence, stenography, typewriting, commercial arithmetic, bookkeeping and 

 'business practice.' The demand for persons to fill clerical positions 

 has steadily increased for many years owing to the development of 

 systems of stenography and to the invention of the typewriter and to 

 the more elaborate form in which the record of business transactions 

 is now kept. As the size of the individual business has increased and 

 the territory covered by its operations has widened and the period of 

 time involved in its calculations has lengthened, the need of carefully 

 kept records has become apparent. The growth of the corporate form 

 of business organization, furthermore, has made it necessary to protect 

 the interest of shareholders by complex systems of accounting, involv- 

 ing sufficient checks and balances and frequent audits. 



The 'commercial college' has responded in a more or less unsatis- 

 factory manner to the calls made upon it. This is due in part to the 

 fact that they are private institutions, run as money-making businesses, 

 and without any uniformly enforced standards such as they might have 

 attained for themselves through organization, or such as are enforced 

 upon preparatory schools and high schools by university requirements 

 for admission. Studies may be pursued in them in a wholly elective 

 manner, as fees are paid, and so it has happened that they have been 

 used as an educational short-cut by scholars of every variety of ability 

 and education from the high school graduate, who may spend a year 

 or more in them, to the youth from the country district school, who may 

 study for two or three months. In accounting for the unsatisfactory 

 work of this system of schools as a whole two other circumstances should 

 be taken into account. One is that the business community has been 

 expecting a kind of education from them which they were not organized 

 to give and are not in a position to give, and the other is that educators 

 who are capable of giving assistance have, for the most part, not as- 

 sumed a helpful attitude toward the problem presented by them. 



The aggregate of interests represented by these schools in this 

 country is enormous, and the problems connected with them are serious 

 and merit attention. It. has been estimated that there are now 2,000 

 'commercial colleges' in the United States, employing 15,000 teachers, 

 and having an attendance of 160,000 pupils. The best of these estab- 

 lishments in the large cities are handsomely equipped for the work they 

 set out to do and amount practically to private commercial high schools. 



In recent years this problem of education for office work has been 



