Atlanta semi-weekly journal. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1898-1920, 1917-12-07

wy ASHINGTON, D. c., Dec. One kind of
wv trained man for which the government mas
a most pressing need right now is the eA-
perenCed driver of auto trucks. The truck has ds-
placed the army mule wherever there are ROADS
and in many places where there are not FOOD ann
ammunition go forward on trucks from the base %
the fighting line.
1t is not always the case that the man who has
spent few months years driving a delivery
truck over asphalt streets with traffic to tell
him what to do, is qualified for this war work AT
the front the problem is more apt to be that OF
directing his machine rOadless piece Oh
country, powed up by shells, Uttered with shat-
tered equipment and shreds of barbed wire en-
tanglement, unlt by the occasional flash and
glare of bursting shrapnel. And if this war driver
fails to deliver his goods at the proper time, i
will be a good deal more serious than the irritation
of customer, for the of an attack, the
lives of men, may depend upon that delivery.
When the government need for the kind OF
truck drivers who could be depended upon to de-
liver the goods under conditions became appa-
rent, a certain educator in Minneapolis, Dr. c. A.
Prosser, OF the Dunwoody institute, set about the
task of producing such drivers by Schooling them
in their duties
1t is probable that the average man, soldier
citizen, would not consider such an undertaking
practicable. He would say that the drivers would
have to learn their business for the most part at
least by the hard and expensive process of trial
and in the field. For We have all come to
look upon education a sort of dispensable pre-
liminary to the main business of life. We know
that the college man comes away from his alma
mater with "a head full of theories which he has
to forget before he become really useful while
some practical men even regard much education
handicap.
DR.. Prosser belongs to a class of educators
who do not believe that education necessarily lacks
this applicability to the practical ends of life, al
though admitting that it generally does. They
have set themselves to the task of making educa-
tion useful So Dr. PrOsser went at the truck driver
problem in characteristic fashion by creating 1T
tie mo mans land in large field near his school,
He equipped it with artificial she-holes, with
tangements and difficulties of all kinds and he set
his novtiate truck drivers the task OF bringing
their machines safely across it. He exposed them
to every condition which a close study Of the
in Europe indicated they would be apt TO meet in
France. And he turned out military truck drivers
that could drive
DR.. Prosser's field Of activities as a practical
trainer of has been enlarged to include
substantially the whole country; for he has been
made director of the federal board for vocational
education, which is a department of the gov
eminent created by recent act of congress for the
purpose of using federal funds and the federal ad
ministrative machinery to help the states install
practical training courses in the schools. In its
application to civilian life it is revolutionary
measure, and means a new opportunity for the
youth of America. That phase of it will be treated
in a separate article For the present the board is
directing it's energies to work similar to that which
DIR. Prosser undertook at Dunwoody-the work of
training men to fill the industrial needs of the
nation at war.
This, of course, is not what the board was
created primarily to do, but a clause in the law
under which it works gives it power to make in
vestigations and studies Of methods of vocational
training. 1t regards the training of men for
work as an excellent experimental investigation
of such methods.