BOGUS CAREER SCANDAL

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 44, 14 May 1927, Page 12

BOGUS CAREER SCANDAL

ROGUES WHO PREY ON PARENTS Beware of bogus training-schools. Careers planned and diplomas given! It sounds fine. There is a lure about such advertisements. But how many of them can be trusted? Of the institutions that profess to supply short cuts to lucrative careers, hundreds are sheer swindles run by scamps. All parents should beware of these bogus training-schools. But it may be mentioned here that parents can safely rely upon any training institutions whose advertisements appear in THE SUN. Most parents are anxious to do their best for their children when they leave school, and this natural desire makes them easy prey for a large class of unconscionable swindlers. These sharks profess to supply short cuts to careers, and, besides wasting the time of those who are beginning the battle of life, rob their parents of money they can iii afford to lose.

In England a favourite device of the lesser fry is to offer postal courses of tuition, some of which are impudent “ramps.” Recently, for instance, a parent sent for a course in poster lettering, which is issued “in conjunction with other essentials, to aspirants to fame and fortune in the great world of advertising.” The “course” consisted of a copy book, such as could have been obtained at any stationer’s for about threepence, with a few instructions on forming letters. But expert parent pluckers take much higher flights than those of pos-tal-course swindlers. They operate, from bogus schools, academies, studios, and “works” where there is more or less display, and where “personal tuition” is a great feature. The Only Order

Sometimes the pupils in these places are nominally apprentices and their exploiters do “make a show.” A notorious career-monger kept a sort of apprentice farm, though it was called an engineering works, and in it were a prehistoric lathe and a few other machines dating from remote antiquity. It was supposed to be always busy on important orders: but the only one that came to it during the fourteen months that a certain youth idled away his time in it was brought by a blissfully ignorant youngster who wanted his hoop mended. Many thousands of pounds came from the pockets of parents whose sons wasted their time in this establishment.

Often, however, there is no pretence of teaching learners anything. A certain engineering “works,” though it is, by a pleasing fiction, divided into the pattern shop, the drawing office, the foundry, and the other regulation departments, is really an old stable and a yard, and the pupils spend their nonlaborious days in playing cricket or football with the manager, whose qualifications for his job is understood to be that he was once a rivet-holder, as umpire or referee.

Some studios arc run on similar lines. A few years ago a certain man made several attempts to establish one for the exploitation of artistic girls; but these all failed, and ultimately he was ejected from a place for failing to pay his rent. He immediately took, under a new name, another office, giving his former name and address as a reference. Of course his landlord was perfectly satisfied with the testimonial he received.

Shortly afterwards a mother who had seen his advertisement paid him £2O for the tuition of her daughter in fashion and commercial art. When the girl arrived at the studio she found there a number of other girls who were complaining that they had nothing to do, and a little later she discovered that the owner of the place had two or three more studios, which also were filled -with girls occupied from morning to night at that most tedious of tasks, killing time.

He had, in fact, a host of pupils, and yet they rarely ever saw him, and never were they taught anything by him or his deputy. His income was about £IOO a week, and he gave no consideration whatever for it. In the end some of the duped parents complained to Scotland Yard, with the

result that the rogue, who had had an astonishingly long innings, was sent to prison for twelve months. The Game of Make-Believe The same game is played in connection with mechanical dentistry, though, as a rule, there is more or less make-believe. One man has “run” simultaneously four or five surgeries solely for extracting fees from parents anious to give their sons a start in life. For a long time his method was to offer to teach mechanical dentistry in six months on condition that he was paid a premium of £ 200, part of which was to be returned in salary. Youths who fell into the trap were installed in one of his surgeries, where they found their fellow-victims. Here most of them received no instruction whatever, and their duties consisted in cleaning the waiting-room and tidying up generally’. Occasionally the principal turned up and made appointments with patients, genuine or otherwise, over the telephone; but whenever any of them called he was out. Though, too, at some of the surgeries dental plates and sets of teeth were made, they were promptly returned as useless. The promised salary, moreover, was not forthcoming and in no case could any* money be extracted from the demon dentist without much pressure. Other forcing houses that are traps for the unwary are bogus cinema schools, which, though not so numerous as they* were a few years ago, sti!; flourish in many parts of England.