Increasing proportions of young people are at gainful work, except during occasional recessions in the nation's business. The hypothesis here is that part-time, casual work experience can be valuable in the socialization of adolescents. In exploring this contention, we shall not be occupied with the social or educational significance of vocational guidance, vocational training, or the need to make career choices. Rather, we shall focus on the young teenager's introduction to the world of work and its psychological significance.

The educational program which will permit the fullest realization of potentialities for all children faces a number of important questions on which research is needed but for which research alone will not suffice. Well-supported developmental principles can imply different educational emphases, depending upon the educational values assumed. A broad and stimulating educational program can insure the discovery and fulfillment of potentiality. In this program, tests can be an important adjunct but cannot supplant the perceptive teacher, alert to children developing and learning.

Other chapters of this yearbook concern themselves with motivation. Undoubtedly the problem of "motivation to learning" is central both to educational psychology and to schoolroom procedure. In this chapter we consider the interests and attitudes of children, and at the outset we present the notion that interests and attitudes in children are best understood when viewed as externalized expressions of motives. Hilgard and Russell, elsewhere in this yearbook, consider as a motive anything that energizes and directs conduct. Earlier writers made a distinction between motives on the one hand and attitudes and interests on the other. The latter were considered as channels through which motives are expressed. Allport takes the position that attitudes and interests may have motive power in their own right as well as being simply directional. Social psychologists in the last fifteen years have tended to follow Allport.

What does research say about delinquency and the schools? Although there is little reported specifically on this subject, the results of a number of related investigations axe of interest to school people. They further clarify ideas and support the description of present practice presented in preceding chapters. The references included in this chapter represent the best pertinent material among the hundreds of titles examined by this author and his collaborators.