Continuation schools are valuable and important, but only as palliatives and makeshifts; they deal with conditions which ought not to exist. Children should not leave school at fourteen, but should stay in school until they are sixteen or eighteen, and be helped to an intelligent use of their energies and to the proper choice of work. It is a commonplace among teachers and workers who come in contact with any number of pupils who leave school at fourteen to go to work, that the reason is not so much financial pressure as it is lack of conviction that school is doing them any good. Of course there are cases where the child enjoys school but is forced to leave at the first opportunity in order to earn money. But even in these rare instances it would usually be wiser to continue the family arrangements that were in vogue up to the child’s fourteenth birthday, even if they include charity. The wages of the child of fourteen and fifteen are so low that they make a material difference only to the family who is already living on an inadequate scale.
The hopelessness of the situation is increased by the fact that these children increase their earning capacity much more slowly and reach as their maximum a much lower level than the child who is kept in school, so that in the long run the loss both to the child and his family more than offsets the precarious temporary gain. But the commonest reason advanced by pupils for leaving school is that they did not like it, and were anxious to get some real work to do. Not that they were prepared to go to work, or had finished any course of training, but simply that school seemed so futile and satisfied so few of their interests that they seized the first opportunity to make a change to something that seemed more real, something where there was a visible result.
What is needed then is a reorganization of the ordinary school work to meet the needs of this class of pupils, so that they will wish to stay in school for the value of what they are learning. The present system is bungling and short-sighted; continuation schools patch up some of its defects; they do not overcome them, nor do they enable the pupils to achieve a belated intellectual growth, where the maladjustment of the elementary school has served to check it. The ideal is not to use the schools as tools of existing industrial systems, but to use industry for the reorganization of the schools.