Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/836

816 One of the noticeable features of the exhibition was an apparent decline in originality of invention and spontaneity of thought after the first year or two at school. Pride in the execution of good work seems to have been exhibited most prominently in the middle period. As the girls grew. older and were trained in household and needle and fancy work at home, their products exhibited more variety, but not more novelty, and they continued to contribute specimens till their highest age at school. But, while some work was furnished by girls of over fourteen, very little was exhibited by boys of corresponding age. They found themselves too unskilled to make good specimens, and were too proud to exhibit poor ones. Another fact deserving notice is that, in the work of the boys during the first years of school, there were apparent a love for color and a skill in using it for decoration and design, equal to that displayed by the girls; while in the later years the use of color becomes exceptional with the boys, but still continues to prevail, with evidences of increased skill, in the work of the girls.

When a few days ago we were requested to prepare this report, Superintendent Gorton was consulted, and from him it was learned that this Yonkers experiment was of two years' growth, and that the idea originated in Mount Vernon. The first exhibition of the kind was held in the public-school house of that village nine years ago, and with the exception of two years the exhibitions have since been regularly continued. The parents and citizens have always taken great interest in them, the children have enjoyed and felt pride in them, and the teachers have cheerfully done the extra work. The present principal of the school, Mr. Charles Nichols, heartily approves them as a source of good moral influence.

As results of an investigation of this subject, your committee would sum up as advantages accruing from the exhibition of the home-work of children through the medium of the schools: A bringing together of the home and the school, thus conducing to a better acquaintance between the parents and the teachers; giving to the teacher a better knowledge of the child's home influences and surroundings, thus enabling him to exercise a more intelligent care over the development of the child's moral character; giving to the parents a better insight and new interest in the schools and their management, with an overflowing of the moral influence of school training into homes where intelligent discipline is unknown; a greatly increased respect in all quarters for handicrafts; the diffusion of the principle that in the liberal education of the individual a development of manual skill, as well as a harmonious unfolding of the mental faculties, should be looked after, and that these react favorably on each other in various ways.

The facts were made clear that some children are especially endowed with native capacity for mechanical contrivances, which needs