MOOSEHEART MAGAZINE
6
Conversations With Six Hundred Thousand
AUNT WINNIE’S SEARCH FOR A VOCATION
about business and banks and buying: and selling, as that helps to prepare them for life in the world; and at the same time it is a kind of bed-rock for later trade or business. Children that get a good pre-vocational training are to be happier and quicker and better off. It “trains for life.”
Another point is that this kind of “pre-vocational training” fits in with the regular school studies. Part of it can be taught in the school-rooms, part of it in simple work-shops, part out of doors. Most good city and town and country schools could do that kind of work, couldn’t they? It does not need all the resources of MOOSEHEART to give children this hold on what they are doing. Dan and I have tried for years to pre-vocational train our own children without knowing it.
A good deal was said at that conference about teaching children to be good citizens—that is certainly a part of training for life. They seemed to think that MOOSEHEART was ahead of most schools in that direction because it puts patriotism into all the school subjects—patriotic writing and reading, examples in arithmetic, or government work and all that. Geography crammed full of reasons for enjoying: our own country especially patriotism in all the history and civil government and courses in business relations. Children just like grown folks live in the midst of other people, all linked together in families and cities and churches and fraternities. Better teach them how to act in the world.
So far everything seemed quite slick in that Conference—the real tug was about vocational education, when the boys get to be thirteen or fourteen years old and begin to want to do something for themselves. MOOSEHEART has got to find something for each boy and girl to work on during the last few years of school that will lead to a living. MOOSEHEART is not like me and Dan, that can follow our children up and push them along up to twenty-one or beyond.
Now in these times when there is such a demand for skilled labor of every kind and such wages, it ought to be easy to fix up training at MOOSEHEART that will fit for trades and business. Some trades cannot be taught in school. Puddling iron and building vessels and making watches—you have to go to a factory to learn those. But you can teach carpentry, and painting and wood-working and iron working and automobile repairing and printing. You can put boys^ right into farming and dairying and poultry raising and lots of other things. My boy Day, Jr., built me a good pantrv last year right on the house.
When it comes to finding trades that can be taught to over a hundred MOOSEHEART big boys and more coming all the time it will make MOOSEHEART jump. Dan says they must be careful to keep an understanding with the labor unions about apprenticeships and all that. All the building work at MOOSEHEART has been done by union labor except what the boys do. There will be no trouble there.
Of course to teach a lot of trades to a lot of boys means many shops and plenty of experienced teachers a long time. I’m glad I am not the Mooseheart Governors to have all that to work over.
Naturally I was especially interested in the girls’ vocational training, ordinary house-work is, they told me, really pre-vocational. All the older girl's get that because at MOOSEHEART they live in family groups. They all learn something about dressmaking and that sort of thing. Vocations are quite a different ׳ thing. My Agnes is bound to make her own living when she graduates from High School. That’s what most wide-awake girls like.
What can MOOSEHEART do for the girls ? Printing, typewriting, short-hand; Secretary-work —that takes a good many. But that Conference believe that the time has come when girls can make a good living in shops and factories running machinery, especially the modern, automatic kinds. It does not require heavy lifting and it’s a good, honest kind of work. Women have got hold of lots of business places—in stores and offices and bookkeeping and all that. MOOSEHEART will look out for them.
I want to tell you all about the grand dinner that Mr. Davis gave us at the Astor Hotel, and the speeches and General Leopard Wood in uniform and Col. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. I was glad that the best speech was by a woman who had been to MOOSEHEART with me—another journalist. She has a vocation I can tell you—Miss Patterson the correspondent. Some other time, I’ll tell you why she said she thinks MOOSEHEART is really “The School that Trains for Life.”
By PROFESSOR ALBERT BUSHNELL HART Mooseheart Governor----Professor in Harvard University
that would give them good wages—then lots of them could earn as much as young men.
Aggie has been reading over my shoulder and she says: “Why, Mother, you haven’t told your readers what a vocation is.” Well, it is not for the lack of talk about it in the converence. The way of it was this. Governor Lentz explained that all the Mooseheart Governors wanted me and all the other experts to give them good advice about how to organize the practical side of MOOSEHEART, so that it may be really “The School that Trains for Life.” The Governors felt pretty well set up on regular schooling, but this plaguey vocational part was a hard nut to crack.
So the Conference met in a forenoon and an afternoon session for two days; and there were two luncheons and at each of these six chances there was talk and discussion and questions. Some of the people carry on schools or institutions something like MOOSEHEART, and some more the heads of state institutions, and some came from the Federal Board for Vocational Education at Washington. It was real homey, too, some like a camp meeting, and some like a debating society, and some like a last day at School. The Chaplain would call on me and the rest to speak a certain number of few minutes; and then we would r> ;e like a prayer meeting and then everybody asked questions and lots contradicted lots and told Tow much better they did it in their place. But if you really want to know, I’ll tell you■ the things that made most impression on my mind.
The fact was that MOOSEHEART seemed to be pretty well known all over the United States and several had visited it—President Herrick of Girard College in Philadelphia that has been educating poor boys for near a hundred years, seemed to think MOOSEHEART was in the same class. And Mr. Munroe of Boston, a business man, and a member of the Federal Board who had been to MOOSEHEART himself without anybody knowing he was coming. He said that MOOSEHEART was one of the best and biggest institutions in the whole United States. They all seemed to like MOOSEHEART. Most people do that see it.
Next, I began to understand what all the talk about “pre-vocational” and “vocational” means. Those experts believe that in any good school the children ought to learn something besides the ordinary common-school things, the “3 R’s,” and geography and how to write good English and all that. They argued that all children, both boys and girls, ought to know something about the world they live in.
That means that everybody ought to learn how to use good English, writing and talking, so as to tell people about things. Everybody must study “Elementary Science,” so as to know what the world is made of and how earth, air, fire and water work together and what makes weather and what trees and plants and animals are. And everybody ought to be able to draw the things that he sees.
That is not enough to make up pre-vocational training. Every boy and girl ought to know something about farm life and crops and live stock; and how to handle tools and drive a nail straight and saw a board off square. Yes and something
Pittsburgh, Pa., February 21, 1920.
Mr. John W. Ford,
Editor Mooseheart Magazine,
421 Commercial Trust Bldg., Philadelphia, Pa.
Dear John:
I congratulate you on the March issue of the Mooseheart Magazine. It is splendid! It is surely looking better every day. I hope it will continue to improve until there shall come a time when we will be able to say there is little room for improvement.
Congratulating you again on the way in which you are attending to the affairs of the Magazine, I am,
Fraternally yours in P. A. P.,
JAMES J DAVIS,
Director General.
(The above is encouraging and much appreciated.—Editor).


Do you know what vocational education is? Are you on speaking terms with a pre-vocational system?
Are you up in educational values? If not, how do you know that your good two dollars a year is going the right way in MOOSEHEART? Maybe there were a few things that I did not know a month back; but ever since th t MOOSEHEART Vocational Conference in New York, I go ’round telling all the neighbors and officers of Doledo Lodge No. 2313 and the minister and the principal of William Henry Hanson Grammar School and the milkman all about ’em and not one knew enough to contradict me.
It all begins with a letter from the Mooseheart Governors. I thought perhaps they had found my back-comb that I lost when I was visiting MOOSEHEART. But, no, it was a particular invitation to “attend a MOOSEHEART Vocational Conference in New York on Friday and Saturday, February 12th and 13th. The headquarters will be the Astor Hotel. Sessions will be held in the Engineering Societies Building, West 39th Street. You will be the guest of the Governors.”
Dan—that’s my husband, Dan is, and a good one though he does love making fund of me—and the children, they let drop that the invitation wasn’t never for me anyhow. You see we kind of misread it when it first came. We thought it was a “Vocational Conference”—simply like the Chautauqua Circle, or the Moose in their annual convention, just a meeting around. When my husband was Dictator of No. 2313 he went to that Convention in Pittsburgh—and he wrote home what a strain it was ־with those continuous meetings and the holding up the hands of the Supreme Officers by their votes. Pie allowed it was awful exhausting. But he said it wasn’t for me because no woman ever gets a real vocation, let alone a whole vocational conference.
I wasn’t scared by all that; but I was kind of t ken aback when my oldest girl started a new ov׳e. Agnes was highest in her class in the Pop-kins High School last term, and she read it over e reful. “Why, Ma,” says she, “this is Vocational Conference not a vocation; and you haven’t any vocation handy.”
That made it worse than ever, for Dan, he up and insisted that a vocation was something high-toned, like a young man that feels he has a “call” to be a minister, or a college graduate girl that went to start a diet kitchen. And anyhow everybody knows that a woman’s true vocation is to set by the register and mend her husband’s socks, and cook him a good dinner and not be running off to free conferences.
There they started a new one. That invitation w ■s directed to “Mrs. Hawkins, Vocational Expert, Doledo.” That must be me because I am the only Mrs. Hawkins that ever made a visit to MOOSEHEART and wrote about it under the seu־de-name of Aunt Winnie to the Mooseheart Magazine. But Aggie says it must be that other Mrs. Hawkins that used to teach the Practical Arts Class in the Pligh School—how to make home bright by some cooking and how to type-write and such, tell they ca led her over to Toledo at a salary of $4,000.00 and no questions asked. Aggie says the Moose-heirt Governors would be more likely to want fine advice from a four thousand dollar expert than from a perfectly good plain-cooking nice old family mother.
However, I had the best of it for the expenses was to the order of Winifred Hawkins. Dan and Aggie were both dying to have me go and settle the great educational problems of the day that were to be discussed in that conference while he went to the Lodge to have a smoke with the boys, and she kept house and made chocolate cake and ice cream and invite all the boys and girls in while Ma was away.
My invitation said that the guests of the Governors would be accommodated at the Astor Hotel, in New York—and when I got there I began to understand why those Astois have so much money. It all comes from their living for nothing in their own hotel.
When the conference got together it showed up about twenty-five people, some of them ladies that were stray on vocations just like me And it was a woman’s suffrage Convention for letting the women talk. They all said, and most of the men agreed, and the row of Mooseheart Governors took it all in that girls were entitled to have vocations