Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/362

350 digests generous rations of a varied diet. Did you ever see one whose mind was nauseated with spelling-books, lexicons, and grammars, and an endless hash of words and definitions? And did you, in such a case, call in the two doctors, Johann Pestalozzi and Friedrich Froebel? And did you watch the magic influence of a diet of things prescribed by the former, and a little vigorous practice in doing, in the place of talking, under the direction of the latter?

The students of a well-conducted manual-training school are intellectually as active and vigorous as in any high-school. Nay, more, I claim, and I have had good opportunity to observe the facts, that even on the intellectual side the manual-training boy has a decided advantage. I have been in charge of both kinds of school, and I know whereof I speak. The education of the hand is the means of more completely and efficaciously educating the brain. Manual dexterity is but the evidence of a certain kind of mental power; and this mental power, coupled with a familiarity with the tools the hands use, is doubtless the only basis of that sound, practical judgment and ready mastery of material forces which always characterize those well fitted for the duties of active, industrial life.

I go a step further. When the limit of sharp attention and lively interest is reached, you have reached the limit of profitable study. If you can hold the attention of a class but ten minutes, it is worse than a waste of time to make the exercise fifteen. The weary intellects roll themselves up in self-defense, and suffer as patiently as they can, but the memory of those moments of torment lingers and throws its dreadful shadow over the exercise as it comes up again on the morrow; and how automatically, as these over-taught children take their places again, do they begin to roll themselves up into an attitude of mental stupidity! Intellectual growth is not to be gauged by the length or number of the daily recitations. I firmly believe that in most of our schools there is too much sameness and monotony; too much intellectual weariness and consequent torpor. Hence, if we abridge somewhat the hours given to books, and introduce exercises of a widely different character, the result is a positive intellectual gain. There is plenty of time if you will but use it aright. Throw into the fire those modern instruments of mental torture—the spelling and defining books. Banish English grammar, and confine to reasonable limits geography and word-analysis. Take mathematics, literature, science, and art, in just proportion, and you will have time enough for drawing and the study of tools and mechanical methods.

Manual exercises, which are at the same time intellectual exercises, are highly attractive to healthy boys. If you doubt this, go into the shops of a manual-training school and see for yourselves. Go, for instance, into our forging-shop, where metals are wrought through the agency of heat. A score of young Vulcans, bare-armed, leather-aproned, with many a drop of honest sweat and other trade-marks of