fund of information that will enable her to offer valuable suggestions
and advice to girls who expect to become wage earners.

The vocational counselor must guard against conventional thinking and
the mass of "inspirational" nonsense which forms the main contribution
to the vocational guidance of youth provided in the average
schoolroom. The ideals of success usually held up before school
children seem to have been drawn from a mixture of Sunday school
literature and the prospectuses of efficiency bureaus. Boiled down the
rules prescribed for their attainment are two: first, "Be good;" and
second, "Get ahead." The pupils are told about well-known men who
became famous or rich, usually rich, by practicing these rules.
Occasionally there is some prattle about the "dignity of labor," as a
rule meaningless in the light of our current ideas of success. We do
not think of a well-paid artisan as "successful." His success begins
when he is promoted to office work, or becomes a foreman.

The inherent difficulty with ideals of success which demand that the
worker become a boss of somebody else is that the world of industry
needs only a relatively small number of bosses. Theoretically it is
possible for any individual to reach the eminence of boss-ship. In
real life less than one-tenth of the boys who enter industrial
employment can rise above the level of the journeyman artisan, at
least before later middle age, because only about that proportion of
bosses are needed.

The task of the vocational counselor will consist in putting the
pupil's feet on the first steps of the ladder rather than showing him
rosy pictures of the top of it. For the great majority the top means
no more than decent wages. This, after all, is a worthy ambition,