How will children in elementary and junior high school know what high school they wish to enter, unless well before graduation they have learned much about occupations and about their own interests and desires? And when they gain new experience, develop new ideas, and change their minds, how will they know "what to do" unless a counselor is handy and alert at every point along the line? Despite this, some vocational schools have no guidance program at all and assert that they do not need it. Others want it, but plead poverty and lack of staff. Some conduct guidance on an occasional, semi-emergency, disciplinary basis, rather than as a vital school function.

Vocational education is learning how to work. For the educator, it is teaching others how to work. In the rise from savagery to civilization, people have learned to work in many different ways.

Method is "a general or established way or order of doing anything or the means or manner by which it is presented or taught."

Patently, vocational education is a function, a resultant of technical, economic, and social forces. Throughout the book these forces have been described or implied. While they do not justify prophecies, they do indicate trends. They serve to point up the answers to the foregoing basic questions. They are the stuff out of which vocational education draws its substance.

When viewing the European scene, which constitutes the major foreign area with which we are concerned, it must be kept in mind that the term 'guidance' is always coupled with 'vocational' and is never used in the broader sense assumed in this Yearbook. Orientation professionnelle, Berufsberatung, and orientamento professionale mean orientation and counsel toward occupations. In this sense guidance is highly organized.