<0 J '.J^J .^sr\i '^^ ^^:...' Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/cletails/cu31924031754488 THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERS 29 WEST THIRTY-NINTH STREET. NEW YORK INTENSIVE TRAINING C. R. DOOLEY To be presented at the Annual Meeting of The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 29 West 39th Street, New York, December 3 to 6, 1918. The Socie^ty as a body Is not responsilile for the statements ol facts or opinions adranced in papers or discussions (C 65). INTENSIVE TRAINING By C. R. Doolet,' Washington, D. C. Non-member 'T^HE run of the draft only partially supplies the number of trade specialists needed by the army. 2 I recently visited the Field Artillery Replacement Depot at Camp Taylor and found that the Personnel Officer there is able to get just one-half the required specialists from the draft. He looks to the Committee on Education and Special Training for the balance. 3 The records of the personnel officers throughout the camps show that less than ten per cent of the men have had a high-school education or better and that the great majority have had no spettal training of high degree, and lack skill or even any continuity of experience. 4 The Committee on Education and Special Training was appointed in February, 1918, with instructions to train men for the service. First of aU the men must be soldiers, disciplined to prompt and complete obedience and broken into the routine of army life; second, they must be skilled in those trade specialties needed in the army; third, they must have that originality and initiative which will enable them as soldiers to use the tools and materials at hand in meeting emergencies. 5 These men are not an aggregation of mechanics, but an organi- zation of soldiers possessing special trade ability as an additional equipment. 6 The needs of the service often require new combinations of parts of the standard trades of civil life. For example, a machinist on a mobile repair shop of the Ordnance Department must be able to do gas welding and to maintain the electrical generator and motors in good repair. Further, the degree of skill must agree with Army ' Educational Director, Vocational Instruction, Committee on Education aad Special Training, War Department. For presentation at the Annual Meeting, December 1918, of The American SociETT or Mechanical Enginbebs, 29 West 39th Street, New York. AU papers are subject to revision. 3 4 INTENSIVE TRAINING requirements. For example, carpenters are required in large num- bers to build barracks, dugouts, simple bridges, etc., but only very- few are needed to do interior finishing or cabinet work. 7 So the Committee set up a program about as follows: 1 Military training 2 Sorting and training according to ability 3 Trade fundamentals and combinations 4 Development of originality and initiative. 8 Two months were allowed as the length of each course and six months, April 15 to November 15, were assigned to the experiment. I use the word "experiment" advisedly for the job was absolutely new. A total of 90,000 men were assigned to the Committee to be trained. ADMINISTRATION, ORGANIZATION «9 The Committee, the Advisory Board, the Executive Military Ofi&cers and the Vocational Director remained in Washington in charge of the planning. The United States was divided into ten districts with Field Military Officers and District Vocational Direc- tors in full charge of administrative details, thus at once largely decentralizing inspection and administration. The District Voca- tional Directors and Military Inspectors literally went from Coast to Coast inspecting, approving and establishing units, wiring in the results each night from April to August. 10 A large production chart showed the capacity necessary to be arranged for each day in order to meet the 90,000 by November 15 and at the same time the field men were instructed to contract only with those places which were well equipped and willing to do the work. Fortunately the summer vacation was in our favor, and also this is a good place to mention the fact that the great majority of school heads were willing and eager to tackle the new job. No greater evidence of American resourcefulness has been developed than that of the 140 odd schools in their radical changes of equipment,, methods, and policies to meet this emergency. We aU agreed it could not be done, but had to be, and that was sufficient. The production chart was eagerly watched day by day until the danger line was passed and now we are closing up the experimental period with a total of approxi- mately 100,000 men trained in some thirty different trades. C. B. DOOLBY 5 METHODS 11 Mere numbers, of course, do not tell the story. The results are largely yet to be heard from after the men get into real action in France. Yet, preliminary results warrant a continued faith in the methods pursued — methods that need refinement, yet funda- mentally are sound. 12 Military Training. Three hours a day were devoted to Infantry Drill, Military Courtesy, Inspection, and General Military Training, tending not only to break in green men but to develop habits of promptness, precision, order, and to establish a company spirit in place of the normal American individual spirit. 13 It is worthy of note that these characteristics so permeated the atmosphere, even in the shops and class rooms, that the character of the vocational work was greatly raised. In fact, I doubt if satis- factory vocational work could have been done without the accom- panying military training. The spirit of this training would not be fully described without adding that the men at all times felt inspired by enthusiastic leadership rather than driven by superior authority. 14 Sorting and Training According to Ability . Both the experi- ence and the natural aptitude of each man were used as a foundation to build upon. Where these coincide the job of training is easy. Where they are opposed the best of judgment and tact must be Used to determine the right classification and assignment. If a man has made a success at a given line of work the chances are favorable for giving him further special training in the same lines. On the other hand, circumstances of youth have often prevented men from follow- ing their natural talents. Such cases are by no means the exception. For example: 15 The Dickinson High School of Jersey City positively had the least desirable detachment of men sent by the various draft boards to any school in the second district, and I am inclined to bfelieve to any school in the country. Over 60 per cent came from the lower East Side of New York: sweat shop workers, garment workers, toughs, gunmen, men from the docks, teamsters and every kind ex- cept men from the mechanical trades; men who had never been in an industrial shop; never handled a shop tool nor even a foot-rule and who seemed hopeless for training. 16 They were assigned to classes and our job was started. In a few days there was a remarkable change. An able commanding officer and his lieutenants took them in hand. Due to this admirable military discipline and the efficient shop instruction some 360 "fight- 6 INTENSIVE TKAINING ing mechanics" were delivered to the army. There was one group of 26 blacksmiths, not one of whom had grasped a blacksmith's hammer nor struck a piece of iron while it was hot before coming to the school; and at the end of sis weeks nearly every one of them had accomplished more and better work than has been done in the regular course in forging at the school in less than a year's time. We were proud of these men when they left after the eight weeks of training; these men who had acquired the ability to do a real job and who also were trained soldiers. One must live through an experience of this kind, in order to realize the remarkable, almost miraculous change that can be effected in men through this combined military and vocational training. 17 And again a class of 200 men reporting for instruction in general electrical repair and construction work at BUss Electrical School appeared to be hopeless in point of previous experience. A few days after the detachment arrived the head of the school called me on the phone and begged to have the men transferred to another school as practically none of them had had the slightest experience in electrical work. Most of them had been called suddenly without an opportunity to choose the kind of training they would take and it was felt that any degree of success was absolutely out of the ques- tion. The nature of our organization, however, made it impossible to shift these men and the school was persuaded (of necessity) to make an experimental, or at least an honest effort. 18 One man in particular, 30 years of age, had come from a real-estate concern where he had been responsible for the legal operations of his company, conducting business of many hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was especially urged that this man be transferred to some branch of the service where his experience could be used immediately. 19 Within 10 days the report came back that this particular man was so intensely interested in electrical work that he preferred not to change and near the end of the period the head of the schools reported that the class as a whole had made greater progress than any class he had ever had in civilian Ufe in the same work in the past 25 years. 1 have personally examined some of the repair work including the winding of armatures and the making and fitting in of a new bar in a commutator and found it practically perfect. 20 At the University of Pittsburgh a young man came directly from the farm where he had had no experience whatsoever with sheet metal work. His education was merely that of the common school. C. E. DOOLEY 7 In six, weeks time he was making stove pipe elbows of commercial quality from patterns which he himself developed by sound principles of descriptive geometry. In this particular school the instruction was given right in the machine shop in connection with the making of the pieces and the principles of projection and intersection were learned in a manner which made them a part of this young man's conciousness rather than by merely memorizing methods. 21 One of the inspiring things about these and hundreds of other incidences is the fact that the men themselves are enthusiastic about continuing with some form of industrial work even after the war. Three men in pattern making at Carnegie Institute of Technology had formerly been bank clerks and declared most emphatically that they would never leave the wood-working industry. 22 The creative instinct seems to be fundamental in human nature and the accomplishment of practical results without help is the most stimulating of himian experiences. With this motive estab- Ushed, a man normally becomes hungry for more accurate and deeper scientific information in order that his creation may be more perfect and he therefore begins to teach himself and the instructor merely becomes the means for the final checking of results. 23 In the hght of such experiences it is evident that the classifi- cation of men cannot be based too completely upon their past ex- periences, and that full consideration must be given to their latent native abilities. 24 In the adjustment of men among the trades, the specific needs of the service always came first. As a rule, however, counter adjust- ments between schools could be made from time to time so that if the number of carpenters, for example, fell short at one place it could be increased at another, thus maintaining the total in Hne with the army requirements and at the same time giving wide latitude in the local assignment of men, 25 With the best of classification, all men will not be able to fol- low a single schedule with equal success. Schedules, therefore, must be progressive rather than circular and based on achievement rather than length of time. Each man in the army must do his part per- fectly, no matter how small it is. Therefore, each man is rated, not by the per cent grade at which he can perform over a complete list of prescribed jobs, but by the actual list of jobs he can do well. For example, I recently saw a small niunber of men of one of the detach- ments making simple ofiBce furniture in the wood shop. The in- structor explained that these men were the "dubs" of the class; that 8 INTENSIVE TRAINING the majority had been on actual building construction work out in the town practically all of the time, only coming into the class room occasionally to discuss the technique of the work. They had been prompted and re-assigned until some were now gang leaders while a few remaiaed on the most simple bench work, in Une with their several abilities. 26 Trade Fundamentals and Combinations. That fundamental principles are infinitely more important than even a very great assort- ment of specific formulas and rules is no longer doubted, yet this has been demonstrated again and again in the army training schools so that it will bear repetition here. For example, at one of the camps a group of soldiers built and installed a complete multiple-jack switch- board for telephone service out of nothing in the world but scrap. Cartridge shells were used for plug jacks, the enunciator drops were cut from tin cans, the magnet cores were made of horse-shoe nails, the transmitter and receiver cases were made out of blacking boxes, the permanent magnets were made by rubbing small pieces of scrap steel on the magnets of a magneto and the battery was made by in- serting a case knife and copper wire in .the ground and satm-ating them with vinegar. The whole worked very satisfactorily and of course could not possibly have been done without a thorough under- standing of the simple principles of electricity and magnetism. 27 Many of the jobs in the army do not completely follow the standard Hues of industrial occupation and it was therefore necessary to define the duties of the men in terms of the work to be done which many times included certain very definite combinations of parts of standard trades. For example, the operator of a mobile machine shop for the Ordnance Department must be able to operate a small lathe, a small drill press and do small vise and bench work. Further, he must be able to do gas welding, especially on thin-metal parts and must maintain in operating condition a gas engine-driven electrical generator and the several electrical motors. Such an operator is called a machinist, although obviously a machinist as ordinarily known has no knowledge of gas welding or small motor operation, and could not fin the bill. This emphasizes the great value of the man who can handle several different trades. Obviously he cannot become thoroughly skilled in all the phases of a number of trades, but by Umiting the instruction to the fimdamentals several aUied trades may be covered, adding greatly to a man's usefulness. 28 Originality and Initiative. Kind begets kind — one cannot C. B. DOOLEY y learn to swim by taking music lessons. We learn to remember by memorizing. We develop resourcefulness and judgment by exer- cising these characteristics to get us out of difficulties. We learn to do by doing. Applied knowledge is power, not mere knowledge. Further, the doing of an original job does seem to stimulate the acquisition of the accurate knowledge of facts required, many of which lie within the materials at hand and some within reference books in the library. The job, therefore, not only serves as the mediuni for the development of originality but as the means for the discriminative acquisition of special knowledge. In the final analysis one of the chief objectives of this training is to compel each man to use his own initiative and originality in attempting any task. 29 Instructive Papers. The text outlines for instruction pur- poses are so arranged that a series of jobs are taken up in order, from simple to complex, and the whole prefaced by a statement of the duties of each type of tradesman and the conditions under which the work will be done. The range of information required to do each job is covered by a carefully-prepared list of questions, the answers to which are left to the men to find in the process of doing the job. The instructor is not so much a source of information as a court of last appeal who can settle discussions and rectify mistakes. It is much better that the instructor judge the correctness of information which the men have obtained by their own efforts than it is to give the in- formation himself. 30 Although the job sheets in general are numbered according to the difficulty of the tasks, still there is no necessity for strictly fol- lowing this numerical order with each man. Nor is it to be supposed that the sheets represent a complete course or even the best course. Instructors must fill in the gap between the questions provided, being governed entirely by the class of men with whom they have to deal. 31 Among other things that have been shown by the war to be advantageous is that type of efficiency which reckons on the personal originality of each man rather than on the completeness of the detail of his instructions, of a type of training that is flexible and elastic rather than rigid and exact in aU predeternaination. The war has been won through inspiring leadership that somehow seemed to spring from the atmosphere rather than through autocratic force. And so with the soldier-mechanic, much faith is placed in his ability to meet successfully new situations if only we can give him a correct understanding of the simple fundamentals of his trade and stimulate his constructive imagination. 10 INTENSIVE TRAINING 32 The war is over. Thousands of men will return to industry with keen, alert minds, disciplined to act promptly and thoroughly as members of a team rather than as individuals. Many will not be highly skilled in civil occupations and will have to be trained in special work, but they will learn quickly and will advance rapidly because of their military experience. 33 The Committee on Education and Special Training could operate its organization backwards so to speak, and train the returned soldiers for industrial work during the process of demobilization if such a plan were approved. 34 In closing, may I state that industrial training means voca- tional skill, plus imagination and initiative, plus the discipline of keen service, which marks the beginning of true leadership. It is hoped that the work of the Committee has contributed to the cause of general education in establishing some evidence of the fact that military train- ing and vocational or academic training supplement each other; and in holding up before all students the motive of production for the com- munity rather than for individual profit. Cornell University Library arW38938 Intensive trajnin] olin.anx 3 1924 031 754 488 m^^^^ ^' i^^"^' i^^r^<^^.^