Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/361

Rh of intelligence. Wage-workers we must have, and the graduates of the higher grades are not expected to be wage-workers. According to the report of the President of the Chicago School Board, about one and one eighth per cent of the boys in the public schools are in the high-schools. From his figures it appears that, if every boy in the Chicago public schools should extend his schooling through a high-school, the four classes of the high-schools would contain some nine thousand boys; in point of fact, they have about four hundred.

Superintendent Hinsdale, of Cleveland, says, "Of one hundred and eight pupils (boys and girls) entering the primary school, sixty complete the primary, twenty finish the grammar, four are found in the second class of the high, and one graduates from the high-school." In St. Louis the average age at which pupils withdraw from the public schools is thirteen and a half years. Now, I doubt if any reflecting person would consider it an unmixed good if every boy in the city should go through the high-school as it is at present conducted. Under the circumstances supposed all would probably admit that some change in the character of the instruction would be necessary.

From the observed influence of manual training upon boys and indirectly upon the parents, I am led to claim that when the last year of the grammar and the high schools include manual training, they will meet a much wider demand; that the education they afford will be really more valuable; and, consequently, that the attendance of boys will be more than doubled. Add the manual elements with their freshness and variety, their delightful shop exercises, their healthy intellectual and moral atmosphere, and the living reality of their work, and the boys will stay in school. Such a result would be an unmixed good. I have seen boys doing well in a manual-training school who could not have been forced to attend an ordinary school. If the city of Boston shall carry out this year, as I hope it will. Superintendent Seaver's plan for a public manual-training school for three hundred boys, there will be, in my judgment, one thousand applications for admission during the first three years.

2. —I am met here with the objection that I am aiming at an impossibility; that, if I attempt to round out education by the introduction of manual training, to develop the creative or executive side, I shall certainly curtail it of elements more valuable still; that the educational cup is now full; and that, if I pour in my gross material notions on one side, some of the most precious intellectual fluid will certainly flow out on the other.

Now, I deny that the introduction of manual training does of necessity force out any essential feature of mental and moral culture. The cup may be, and probably is, full to overflowing, but it is a shriveled and one-sided cup. It is as sensitive and active in its own defense as are the walls of the stomach, which, when overfed with ill-assorted food, contracts, rebels, and overflows, but which expands and readily