Training Front

The U.S. must go back to school. If U.S. defense factories are to work around the clock seven days a week, at least 3,000,000 more workers must be trained within a year.

In Boston, where the American Vocational Association convened last week, the men in charge of this job faced its staggering dimensions. They thought they had already performed miracles. U.S. Education Commissioner John W. Studebaker reported work done: 1,776,000 trained for defense jobs in 17 months (29 times the number trained in World War I). Congress had appropriated $183,622,000 for their training. Of the nation's 1,200 busy vocational schools, half were at work 24 hours a day.

But this was now only a beginning. Lieut. Colonel Frank J. McSherry, U.S. Director of Defense Training, told the teachers that to equip and supply one soldier in this war, 14 industrial workers are needed. Greatest need: in shipbuilding, aircraft, ordnance, welding, machine operators, radio and instrument assemblers.

How could it be done? In the whole U.S. there are 85,000 training stations (each station: a lathe, drill press or other machine at which a worker can be trained in one skill). Even working in three shifts, turning out partly trained mechanics in six to eight weeks, they were not enough. But Colonel McSherry had a plan.

Breakdown. His plan, already fact in many factories: break down jobs and training to simpler operations. E.g., although it takes two years to train a machinist, an unskilled hand can be taught to run a lathe (a machinist's first lesson) in six to eight weeks at school. Then he graduates to a factory, begins at once to produce on his lathe. Thereafter he progresses, under instruction from a factory foreman and in night school, to drill press, shaper, planer, grinder, milling and screw machine. Advantages of this system: 1) training is much faster, 2) trainees produce while they learn, 3) fewer teachers are needed.

The Colonel's biggest headache is not a shortage of workers but of supervisors. Factories and 144 U.S. engineering colleges are training some (Lockheed has 2,300 in a training school), but level heads and leadership are not produced overnight.

Last week the pattern of the U.S. people's coming re-education was already visible in many places:

> Busiest educational center was Detroit, where 16,000 men & women (more than in New York City and Chicago combined) went to classes in the public schools, thousands more were in training in factories, 10,000 more waited their turns. While Detroit's great auto factories retooled for tanks and planes, their workers studied plane welding, tank assembling, parachute making, etc. Lights in 30 Detroit schools blazed all night. Factories gave foremen leaves of absence to teach in the schools; some paid their workers full wages to go to school for more training.

> In Seattle, feverishly at work training shipbuilders and planebuilders (Boeing), the blackout stopped night classes temporarily. But the schools quickly came to the decision that training would have to go on without interruption, air raids or no air raids.

> In the "Victory Building" in Portland (Ore.), busy training shipbuilders for shipyards up & down the coast, the blackout stopped work only one night. Welding was the big subject: Portland's public schools had 74 teachers teaching it to 1,200 men in classrooms, installed welding machines in shipyards to teach it on the job.

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