How To Write Special Feature Articles, page 309 by Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
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en bad. For the most part, the industries that employed children were seasonal; and many boys and girls were forced into long periods of inactivity between positions. This state of affairs, combined with a natural tendency to vary the monotony of life by shifting, on the slightest pretext, from one job to another, was making of many children that bane of modern industry, the "casual" laborer.
The Bureau--started informally in the course of initial investigations and kept alive through the grace of the Women's Club, until the Board of Education was ready to adopt it--has been able to do much in amelioration of the lot of the fourteen-to-sixteen-year-old worker. But no statistics it can produce are as telling as the sight of the Bureau in operation. Sit with your eyes and ears open, in a corner of the office in the Jones School and you will make the acquaintance of one of the humanest employment agencies in the world; also you will learn more about such grave subjects as the needs of our educational system and the underlying causes of poverty than you can learn out of fat treatises in a year.
"Why do you want to leave school?" That is the first question the Job Lady asks of each new applicant who comes to the Bureau for work. Perhaps the child has heard that question before; for in those schools from which the greatest numbers of children go out at the age of fourteen, Miss Davis and her assistants hold office hours and interview each boy or girl who shows signs of restlessness. They give informal talks to the pupils of the sixth and seventh grades about the opportunities open to boys and girls under sixteen; they discuss the special training offered by the schools and show the advisability of remaining in school as long as possible; they try to find an opportunity of talking over the future with each member of the graduating class.
But even when the way has been paved for it, the question, "Why do you want to leave school?" brings to light the most trivial of reasons. In very few cases is it e