Meanwhile those who had continued in school and completed the high-school curriculum emerged without special vocational fitness, and even without any knowledge of the vocational possibilities of their age and locality. The further development of vocational and industrial education of special sorts was then supplemented by general instruction in the vocational opportunities available. Vocational surveys were initiated for the purpose of acquiring information which could be placed in the hands of pupils and of those in charge of their training. These surveys made systematic inquiry into the vocational opportunities afforded to young people by the industries and enterprises of the vicinity. The assistance of employers was sought in the effort to learn the requirements of the various types of work; the nature of the labor involved; the wages; the general conditions, such as healthfulness, danger, companionship, and instruction; the rate of promotion; the prospect of future advancement. Such information has in many cases been published in pamphlets and bulletins and thus made accessible to teachers, pupils, and parents.
Along with this tendency went the attempt to give the pupil some first-hand knowledge of and immediate experience with the materials, implements, and products of the various industries from among which he or she might be expected to choose after leaving the school. This has been a difficult step to bring about, partly because of the various technical and administrative difficulties which it involved. Occasional hasty visits to mills, factories, stores, shops, offices, laboratories, and similar busy places give the pupil but a superficial notion of the actual work of the operations there observed. More extended and intensive observation, on the other hand, with perhaps an actual trial at the work, means a corresponding limitation of the range of institutions inspected. Talks by managers and foremen are likely to give only a dramatized view of the facts. School industries, on the other hand, cannot easily be organized and conducted in a manner technically complete and industrially representative. The result has been a growing tendency to push the vocational training further and further back into the earlier years of the curriculum, thus displacing much of the purely formal subject-matter. With this change have come various experiments in study-practice methods, in which part of the day or term is spent at the general academic work, and part in actual service in a tentatively chosen form of industrial or commercial activity.