Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PRE-APPRENTICESHIP SCHOOLS OF LONDON. MR. Robert Blair, Education Officer of the London County Council, in an address to the Imperial Educational Conference held in London in the summer of 1911, made the following statement of the need of vocational training for the English youth. Of the total industrial population of England and Wales employed in factories and workshops London holds one-seventh. London engages one-quarter of all the clerks in England and Wales. Besides this vast industrial and commercial system, there are in London enormous services of a more or less unskilled character. One-quarter of all the men and boys over fourteen years of age are engaged in unskilled employments. About one-third of the children leaving the elementary schools enter a form of occupation which can by any stretch of imagination be called skilled. The remainder drift into unskilled occupations where, for the most part, they learn little that is useful, and where the mental and moral effects of their school training are too soon dissipated. Seventy per cent, of the London dock laborers have been born in London; the skilled trades are largely recruited by immigrants; newcomers from home and abroad constituting one-third of the London population. The system of indentured apprenticeship has largely disappeared. An exhaustive inquiry made for the County Council in 1906 showed that it would appear to be only a waste of time and money to attempt to revive an obsolete system. In consequence of extensive competition and of extensive subdivision of labor, opportunities for an all-round training can scarcely be said to exist in the London workshops. In one direction the skill developed is extreme, but the training is either one-sided or no training at all; and a change in the circumstance of a tr...