A DELEGATE: Ten per cent.

A DELEGATE: About thirty per cent.

A DELEGATE: It is getting higher every year.

MR. JAMES J. GARVEY: Twenty-five per cent of my boys have been in the high school.

THE CHAIRMAN: Do you mean graduates?

MR. F. W. THOMAS: The fellow who has gone through the high school, or partly gone through it.

MR. P. E. WAKEFIELD: A high school education would mean one who has completed the high school course or very nearly completed it. There is another question I desire to ask-have you noticed any tendency in your section of the country on the part of high school graduates to consider themselves a little bit too well educated to make it advisable or profitable for them to learn a trade?

MR. F. W. THOMAS: About ninety-nine per cent of them do. MR. P. E. WAKEFIELD: Have not you seen the deplorable tendency among fellows who have gone to high school and gotten their diplomas to think themselves a little too good to don a pair of overalls or a jumper and go in the shop and get their hands dirty, and work about ten hours a day?

About three years ago we had an educational conference in Pittsburgh, and we had an address by a man away up in the educational system of Massachusetts, who has a national reputation for the work he has done in promoting industrial education, and in speaking of doctors, lawyers, brokers and business men he always referred to them as the higher occupations, and I had just made a start in educational work-that was about three years ago and I was the youngest man at the meeting, most of them were elderly men, and I did not have the courage to stand up and rebuke that man for encouraging a tendency that I think is entirely deplorable. Wherein does a boy profit merely because his parents have been well enough fixed financially to send him to a high school until he could graduate? Wherein does he profit in going into an office to become a second rate broker's clerk or a third rate business man, or a sort of a half way real estate dealer, or something like that, when that same man was really intended to be a mechanic, and if he had gone into the shop he might have made a successful foreman, or sub-foreman, or at least a highly trained mechanic who could earn as much or

more money than he can earn in the profession or vocation he chose, just because the work is cleaner and more comfortable physically.

Mr. this morning spoke of the special training schools and reported concerning the work of the Carnegie Steel Company in this particular. My experience has been this in the présence of Mr. Camp and Mr. McLeod I hesitate to state this fact that of the men we put on to learn the business in steel mills, I would say that 90 per cent of them, when they finish the course, make as straight a line for the city offices as they can, because down there they have a private or semi-private office, a roll top desk, and a stenographer comes in when they press a button, and they work seven and a half hours a day, and they get into the salesmanship class, and at the end of six or seven years they may be earning not more than $125 a month, whereas if they remained in the operating end, as the company desires them to do, they could qualify for a melters' job, or assistant melters' job, or assistant rollers' job, or a millwright's job and make from $250 to $300 a month. Of course, it is ten or twelve hours a day, and they get awfully dirty, and it is hard work, but most of the high officials in the Carnegie Steel Company have started as operators, and while men high up in the sales force do draw good salaries, they are in responsible positions and are important to the company, yet it seems to me if we could get away from speaking about the higher occupations the college and high-school boys would go into the shop and muss around a little until they can make something of themselves, we would not have to depend on those fellows who say: "I went to school, and look what I am, and what is the use of a boy going to school if he is to be a machinist ?"

At Duquesne we have not been able to make a systematic effort to bring boys into the shop, but this morning I picked up a suggestion, and that is to have our instructors in the shop to act as instructors in the high-school, and in that way get a line on material for our apprentices. In my opinion, we cannot do too much to encourage these men who have a thorough commonschool and high-schol education to devote the talent or the intellectual development that they have attained in that school to the trades rather than to these so-called higher lines of work.

The suggestion has been made that next year a steel man be

appointed on this committee, and Mr. Henderschott told me this morning that if my chief would let me spend the time on it I would be the goat. The reason is at the Duquesne works we have eleven trades-carpenters, tinners, roll turners, blacksmiths, masons and the like, and the work in each of these departments is quite different.

Then another thing I would like to bring to your attention. While I would endorse absolutely the statement in this report. that the shop end of the work is the more important end-I do not know whether fifty-fifty is really a correct valuation of it or not, and that that is the end which should be systematized, yet it has been absolutely impossible for any steel company I know of to systematize the shop training of the apprentices or the workmen in general because the work is too varied. We cannot have specialists in our work. We must have all-round mechanics, because if a man is not an all-round mechanic, he is not worth anything to us. Our machine shop takes care of all repairs and machine work for a $40,000,000 plant, and one week will be devoted to one class of job and the following week there will be an entirely different line of work going on, and it might be three or four months before the apprentice can be put on the same kind of job on which he was working last week, and that is the condition we are up against. That is why the steel industries made the request of the powers that be in this organization that we be allowed to have some representation on this committee so that the machinery would be provided for the steel business to prepare some data, compare notes and solve some of the details of the problems that are peculiar to their work.

CHAIRMAN YODER: The point Mr. Wakefield brought up in reference to the high-school man can be adjusted in this manner : When we receive a graduate from a high school we picture to him the dark side of the trade and tell him about the dirt and grease he will be up against, and if he is not of the right caliber he will not take up the apprenticeship, but if he has the right kind of material in him he won't mind the dirty end of the trade and will stick to it. We have quite a few apprentices who are high-school graduates making good. This is due to the fact that they had machine work in the high school and did good work.

A DELEGATE: Those who are conducting trades apprenticeship schools I am afraid have been more or less hindered in their

work by the lack of good problems. In our own work we may have picked up a limited number which we feel are good, yet undoubtedly there is a scarcity, as there is in my own case, of such problems as we would like to have. If each company instructing trade apprentices would send to our committee say ten or more selected problems, each one being accompanied with a statement as to what the particular problem is to illustrate, and the whole number properly edited and made ready for distribution to the company members, I believe it would be of great value, and, Mr. Chairman, I make that recommendation, that this committee be instructed to make such compilation.

MR. EDWARD S. COBAUGH: I guess I can confess to being the baby of the flock, having been appointed as a representative of the Midvale Steel Company, of Philadelphia, two months ago. I submit to you gentlemen that I am in a class by myself, and the school which I represent is in a class by itself. I have never mixed in with so much brains in my life before, and I do not know what effect it will have upon me, I am sure. I went through a common grammar school, and spent one year in a country town high school, and never since have I spent a day in scholarship. It does not always take a college man to make good, but I believe it is a good thing for a man to have a college education, if he can get it, but I have never had an opportunity to get it, but after spending twenty years in the employ of Mr. Charles J. Hill in his works, now under the management of Mr. Corey and Mr. Dinkey and the rest who have from the west, I submit to you that in a humble fashion I did make good. I said to my friends in Philadelphia: "If I do not meet another man at the convention, I am going to see F. W. Thomas, because I have met him before, and whenever his name appears on a periodical received from headquarters I say, 'That is my man, you bet.

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As to the subject under discussion, I will say that we have twenty-six departments in the Midvale Steel Company, each department having some apprentices. At one of our works we have five departments-machinists, electricians, pattern makers, moulders, and bricklayers. We have nineteen departments in our rolled steel plant, taking in mill men, blacksmiths, machinists, and men representing all the various trades and occupations that are usually found in steel mills. We have boys in the school room from all of these various departments. Mr. R. B. Lindsay,

who was the father of the apprentice school in the Midvale Steel Company, left the employ of the company, after certain changes were made, and they gave him a nice banquet, and he just dropped out, and I took his place. This gentleman, Mr. Hale, said in his remarks that there were certain things he must keep to himself, as they were a family secret-he was speaking of how to get to the man higher up, and put through some of the work which this Association stands for. If I don't go back to the Midvale Steel Company with some good dope, and if you do not give me a story to back up our work here, some good reason for this thing as an asset to that company, you perhaps will not receive the $100 fee for class A membership from the Midvale Steel Company next year.

When I put a requisition in for certain things in connection with the school, with all due respect to our assistant superintendent, with whom I must deal at the plant, he says: "Why cannot you do with half that amount?" I say: "If I did not need it, I would not order it." He did not put me in the position I am in there, and it looks to me as if he thought the best way he could hold his job was to practice the most rigid economy in these matters, but we cannot do the work that we want to in this direction without a reasonable appropriation.

I am now making application for a larger school room. Mr. Lindsay was my immediate predecessor, and very suddenly he resigned. Why he resigned is also a family secret which I must keep to myself. The authorities in the plant said: "We will give you a school room now, and we will hold you responsible for the work." That is the sort of man I like to deal with, but this man in particular changed his position shortly after that.

Mr. Henderschott says they will not employ a boy who has not graduated from a grammar school. I have 160 boys learning the machinist trade, and I do not believe there are five of those boys who went through the grammar schools in Philadelphia. I have boys who went to the fourth and fifth grades. I am not kicking them out, but I am putting my arm around them and studying their home environment. I find there is a drunken father in some instances, and a careless mother in other instances, and their home environment is absolutely bad, like the case of a father whose boy came home from school and said: "Dad, how much is a million dollars?" The father said, "Son, it is a hell