The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1912-03-02
Taking The School To The Shop In
 Cincinnati
School Men and Manufac- turers Work Together Education By Doing Rather Than By Reading -Revitalizing the Old Apprentice System.

William H. Allen, Director, Training
 School for Public Service and Bu-
 reau of Municipal Research.
 Exclusive Service The Survey Press
 Bureau)
 Bringing shops into schools has been tried for years. We have had manual training. kitchens and workshops of every description in our schools. Dean Schneider of the College of Engineer ing, University of Cincinnati, charac- terizes the half-school half-shop meth cd as taking the school and the uni versity to the shops"
 To see how this plan worked, I went recently to Cincinnati The theory of sending boys and girls from their class rooms to work shops where the passing mark is 100 per cent and not 60 per cent I had heard frequently described was convinced. The founders and packers of the Training School for Public Service like the idea. But to get the manufacturers side I went to Cincinnati. I got it. I was surprised and pleased to find even less qualified enthusiasm in the man. ufacturers', business mems and public officials endorsement of the half and half plan than in the convincing statements by Dean Schneider.
 The casual visitor would probably be disappointed with what he can see about the half-shop half-claSsroOm method. The engineers and the high school boys and girls who are on the half and half plan look just like other engineers and boys and girls hai od, To see where their course of instruc- ton differs it was necessary to go to a large number of shops, with two of Dean Schneider's instructors, where men in each of the five years of the course were seen at work. No living man could have told which of the large number of workers in the fOun- dry were university men. I thought perhaps it would be safe to assume that those doing the greasiest dirtiest work would not be college men, but even here 1 was mistaken. They did not even differe from the non-college men working side by side with them in the matter of pay, because they were receiving market value for the time spent in the shops.
 The method is simple. Young John Smith and Bill Jones wanting to be engineers register in the University of Cincinnati They go there partly because they believe that this shop work supplement to school instruc- tion will earn them better jobs when they leave school and partly because they will earn almost enough to pay their way through college. Positions are found for them with a manufac- turer John Smith works the first week of September, let us say, Shov- cling sand. The next Monday he goes I'D to the university and listens to lectures. prepares papers, reads text books as Bill did the first week. He goes back to the shop the next week, and so on throughout five years, only that his job changes several times during this period as he demonstrates his fitness to a practical foreman.
 This work shop supplement to or dinary university training weeds out the men who want an education pri- marily to save them from hard work. That this combination of work for pay half the time with study at the students expense the other half is attrictive to students is proved by the fact that Dean Schneider has over 5000 applications this year for 150 openings in the freshmen class. The university professors informed me that it works we'll from the educa- t.onal point of view.
 Every time have told this story to a business man in Newark or New York they seem pleased but say, That would never work in our city" Whether Cincinnati manufacturers are .-oueer" in the sense that they will aecome tremendously enthusiastic over