Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/652

634 the plan of the school and of its practical working; and, as the system has been in operation nearly eight years with the most gratifying results, it may not, perhaps, be found a difficult task to estimate what effect, if any, such teachings, if generally introduced, are likely to produce in the condition of outcast children.

The system may be said to be original, since it is not founded upon any other known to exist. It is best adapted to a country where republican ideas prevail, and where, as in the United States, the political equality of the whole people is the fundamental principle of government. The underlying principle of the system, and one which it is sought to impress upon the minds of the little workingmen is, that all labor is honorable, and that greater dignity should attach to hand labor. The managers maintain, and few will be found to dissent from the opinion, that the most effective means of raising the dignity of hand-labor is by improving the condition of the workman; educating him in his calling, making him self-reliant, original, progressive; and to this end they bend all their energies.

It may not at once appear how hand-labor is dignified by making expert artisans of children plucked from the streets. But it should be remembered that in this country there is no class distinction: men may rise as far as their abilities will take them; the lowest in origin may aspire to the loftiest position, with none to ask them whence they came.

Unlike the industrial school, no age is fixed upon for entrance into the Workingman's School. That period of a child's life at which it breaks things in order to see what makes them go has been selected as the best time to begin to instruct its mind and direct its hands. In the industrial school certain trades are taught; youth is forced to look upon the stern realities of life, the coming struggle for bread, and to fix upon particular vocations ere yet the natural preferences are sufficiently developed to enable it to do so. When the course is completed, there is no time to change; the daily bread must be won, and thus it not unfrequently happens that he who would, perhaps, have been successful as a decorator, proves but an indifferent carpenter; and one who could easily have earned a competence as a mason is forced to eke out a scanty livelihood as a molder, a locksmith, or perhaps a brass-finisher. In the Workingman's School, though all the principal trades are represented, no effort is made to incline the little workingmen to the one or to the other.

Again, in the public school from which many of these little fellows are deserters, no allowance is made for the grades of intellect or rather for the various conditions of intellectual development. It is a ponderous educational machine, in which a certain amount of raw material being put in at one end will, in a given time, be passed out at the other in a more or less finished condition. The bright subjects, always in the minority, arc, no doubt, much benefited; the others, upon