Boy life & labour : the manufacture of inefficiency / by Arnold Freeman.

  • Arnold Freeman
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Boy life & labour : the manufacture of inefficiency / by Arnold Freeman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    23/276 (page 3)
    tion or in practice prevent casual employment.” 1 Thus, while the training of youth is questioned on the highest authority as a remedy for Unemployment, the treatment of the Boy Problem in this connection has served to hide aspects of it which would seem to be far more important than that of the so-called “ blind alley.” The proportion of boys who suffer in the straight- forward way suggested by the blind alley metaphor is an exceedingly small portion of the whole. An overwhelm- ing majority of boys graduate from boy labour to regular adult employment; and if “ the point of stress ” set up at 18 or 20 were the only consideration, the evils so caused would not constitute a momentous social problem. The real evil is far more complex and extensive ; and it is associated not so much with the problem of Unemployment as with the general level of efficiency and prosperity in the community. What we need to consider is not the sacrifice of a certain number of youths through faulty industrial arrangements, but the lack of training and the manufacture of inefficiency in the majority of boys between school and manhood. At the present time it would seem to be the consensus of opinion of school teachers, employers, and all those who are intimate with the problem, that great masses of boys are growing up to manhood, inefficient for adult work, and incapable of performing the elementary duties of home-life and citizenship. This truer mode of regarding the problem may be illustrated by the following quotation :— “ According to the main statistical sources of information, the very serious fact emerges that between seventy and eighty per cent, of the boys leaving elementary schools enter unskilled occupations. Thus, even when the boy ultimately becomes apprenticed or enters a skilled trade, these intervening years from the national point of view are entirely wasted. Indeed the boy, naturally reacting from the discipline to which school accustomed him, usually with abundance of spare time 1 W. H. Beveridge, Unemployment,” p. 131.