Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/360

348 of a happy, useful, and successful life. To be sure, this claim has been made for the old education, but, the claim is not allowed. The new education has the missing features all supplied. The old education was like a two-legged stool, it lacked stability; the new education stands squarely on three legs, and it is steady on the roughest ground.

I shall be better understood if I briefly outline my idea of the features of a manual-training school: Boys from fourteen to eighteen years of age are admitted on examination. The grade is about that of a high-school. The course covers three years. The programme of every day includes three recitations (mathematics, language, and science), one hour of drawing, and two hours of shop-work—making a session, exclusive of lunch-time, of six hours. The order in which these exercises come varies in different divisions. The shops and shop-instructors are generally occupied during school-hours. In each subject taught the instruction is progressive and thorough. Mathematics begins with arithmetic and ends with trigonometry. Language may be English literature and composition, history and political economy; or Latin, or French. Science, beginning with Huxley's "Introductory Primer," runs through botany, physical geography, elementary physics, mechanics, and chemistry. Drawing is free-hand and mechanical, projection and "model," geometric, technical, and ornamental.

The shop-work runs impartially through the range of bench, lathe, and pattern work in wood; forging, brazing, and soldering metals; bench, lathe, planer, and drill work in iron, brass, and steel. The aim is to make every exercise in every branch disciplinary—intellectually and morally fruitful. With the exception of the choice of Latin and French, there is no option in the course.

I claim as the fruits of manual training, when combined, as it always should be, with generous mental and moral training, the following:

1. Larger classes of boys in the grammar and high schools; 2. Better intellectual development; 3. A more wholesome moral education; 4. Sounder judgments of men and things, and of living issues; 5. Better choice of occupations; 6. A higher degree of material success, individual and social; 7. The elevation of many of the occupations from the realm of brute, unintelligent labor, to one requiring and rewarding cultivation and skill; 8. The solution of "labor" problems. I shall touch briefly on each of these points:

1. —Every one knows how classes of boys diminish as they approach and pass through the high-school. The deserters scale the walls and break for the shelter of active life. The drill is unattractive, and, so far as they can see, of comparatively little value. There is a wide conviction of the inutility of schooling for the great mass of children beyond the primary grades, and this conviction is not limited to any class or grade