Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/378

364 year to the two graduates having the best records throughout the school. The kindergarten and primary pupils are stimulated to remain in school, for they see, every day, the high school boys and girls in the same building with them. In its first years, 1894-5 and 1895-6, this school showed an unusually large percentage of children advancing from primary to grammar grades, and from grammar to high school. It cannot be known how much of this was due to the manual training and how much to the presence of all the grades in one schoolhouse. The result of the combination, however, commends itself to all who are interested in prolonging the school life of working-class children. It is the more brilliant because the schoolhouse stands in the very heart of the great Bohemian colony of wage-earners.

Contrast with the advantages offered by this model school, typifying the ideal unity of the school system, the plight of the boy who goes to work at fourteen, even under the cheerful assumption, rarely borne out by the facts, that he is reasonably well instructed according to the methods of today. The trades unions will do something to limit his opportunity to learn a trade, but their power in this direction is trivial compared with the extinguishing influence of the industrial evolution. The automatic self-feeder is everywhere, and machines are made by machines. Whether the raw recruit wraps caramels, or carries boards from the buzz-saw to the board pile, or pastes labels on tin cans, or performs any one of the stupefyingly simple manipulations which fall to the lot of the children, his occupation teaches him little else than instability; and he comes to manhood a worthless wight with all the energy and hope gone out of him and no skill acquired in any direction.

It is children who have "growed" in this way who form, all through life, the rank and file of the great army of the unskilled. They are the last to be taken on and the most wretchedly paid in good times; in bad times they are the first to be discharged. It is for such as they that we go to the expense of woodyards in winter. They are always on the mind of the friendly visitor, for they are always on the verge of pauperism; from time to