240 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
of the other. In practice, as my example, I hope, has indicated, there 
need be no sharp opposition: indeed all education should have its 
vocational side, for if on the other hand it seeks to create in the pupil an 
understanding of his surroundings, on the other it endeavours to give 
him the appropriate power of using them for his own purposes. The 
real trouble is that we are very short of teachers of the right kind, by which 
I mean persons trained to teach who also have an industrial vocation in 
their fingers. 
Vocational bias or no, the senior schools bid fair to endow their pupils 
with a craft skill, besides other things, for which later they will demand an 
outlet. In the nature of the case they will find that outlet in local industry. 
While I am far from wishing to suggest that these practical developments 
in the senior school will dispense us from the necessity of establishing 
junior technical schools, where conditions are suitable, I do draw the 
conclusion that if, by the interaction of the junior and senior schools, 
the general level of intelligence is being raised—and it is—and if in the 
senior school the skill of the individual is being trained to a high pitch— 
and again it is—the senior school will make a very substantial direct con- 
tribution toward the training of the rank and file of our industries. As 
one Trade Union leader expressed it, ‘ Industry to-day is worthy of a 
better workman.’ Many industries are going to get him, chiefly through 
the agency of these senior schools. 
Practically all the students in the technical classes and institutions of 
every kind are either in employment or are reasonably assured of employ- 
ment when they are ready for it. But for a large section of the juvenile 
population no such comforting prediction can be made. The national 
conscience is troubled about the problem of adult unemployment. It is 
no longer enough that the State should provide the unemployed with 
the bare wherewithal to keep body and soul together. Voluntary agencies 
are springing up to help the unemployed men and women to maintain 
their self-respect and to keep healthy in mind and body. But the nation 
is not yet fully alive to the magnitude of the problem of juvenile unem- 
ployment and to its terrible consequences. Is there any worse example 
of social waste than that the young boy and girl should be carefully 
nurtured for good citizenship and then plunged without warning into a 
world in which they find they are not wanted, in which their instinct to 
be independent is thwarted and the opportunity of honest useful work is 
denied them? Could they have any experience more destructive of 
mental and moral fibre—in a word, more decivilising ? Yet this is the 
daily experience of thousands of them. 
According to the latest figures which are available (May, 1933), 108,000 
young people between the ages of fourteen and eighteen were registered 
with the Ministry of Labour as unemployed though desiring employment. 
Bad as they are these figures do not tell the worst. Registration at the 
Employment Exchange is voluntary between the ages of fourteen and 
sixteen, and if allowance be made on that account there are probably 
not less than 160,000 young people unemployed. The number has more 
than doubled in the last quinquennium, and it is likely to increase, for 
owing to the high birth-rate of the two post-war years there will be an 
