14 Environment and Efficiency 



The extreme economic importance of regular and suitable 

 employment during the first critical years after leaving school 

 is the point insisted upon by the authors of these and dozens 

 of similar statements. But if it is correct to infer that the out- 

 of-work and unemployable of forty is the outcome of the youth 

 who enters a blind ally occupation or hangs about street corners 

 at eighteen, nineteen, and twenty, it is surely equally fair to 

 infer that the youth satisfactorily employed until twenty will 

 probably be the man satisfactorily employed at forty. 



I have classified my records as follows : 

 (a) Satisfactory. 



(b} Fairly satisfactory, or doubtful. 

 (c) Unsatisfactory. 



From many of the outside institutions to which I wrote, I 

 received their annual estimate of satisfactory or unsatisfactory 

 children turned out by them. But, in cases like these, the 

 difficulty arises of the need of a common standard. 



As the lady superintendent of the X. Homes said to me, 

 referring to a Home for Boys in the same neighbourhood, 

 " What they would count satisfactory would not satisfy us at 

 all. Our standard is so much higher." Or, again, another 

 superintendent : " My own opinion is, you must not take the 

 various classifications too literally ; they are broad and general ; 

 the opinions (perhaps loosely formed sometimes) of district 

 visitors, some keen and interested, some only casual." 



And because of this unavoidable looseness of definition, I 

 felt with regard to the institutions whose records I investigated, 

 that it was infinitely more conclusive to personally go through 

 a limited number of cases from each Home and submit them all 

 to one standard than to accept unquestionably the annual 

 statistics upon the subject, and then proceed to search for sup- 

 posedly representative cases. 



With regard to the small number of records I have taken 

 from some of the Homes, my apology must be the length of 

 time involved in collecting even a little satisfactory evidence. 



