Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/348

332 able to make their own boots, they no doubt learned enough to be able to mend them.

The introduction of manual work into our schools is important, not merely from the advantage which would result to health not merely from the training of the hand as an instrument, but abo from its effect on the mind itself.

I do not, indeed, suppose that, except in some special districts, we can introduce what is known as the "half-time" system, in the sense that the children will do ordinary work for wages, though Mr.Arnold tells us in his "Report on Certain Points connected with Elementary Education in Germany, Switzerland, and France," that in Prussia "the rural population greatly prefer the half-day school, as it is called, for all the children, because they have the elder children at their disposal for half the day."

I do not, I confess, see why a system so popular in Germany should be impossible in England; but what seems more immediately feasible is that our boys should be trained to use their hands as well as their heads. The absence of any such instruction is one of the great defects in our present system.

Such teaching need not in any way interfere with instruction in other subjects, Mr.Chadwick has given strong reasons for his opinion, "that the general result of the combined mental and bodily training on the half school-time principle is to give to two of such children the efficiency of the three on the long school-time principle for productive occupations."

Again, the Commissioners on Technical Instruction, speaking of schools in the Keighley district, say: "The most remarkable fact connected with these schools is the success of the half-timers. The Keighley district is essentially a factory district, there being a thousand factory half-timers attending the schools. Although these children receive less than fourteen hours of instruction per week, and are required to attend the factory for twenty-eight hours in addition, their percentage of passes at the examination is higher than the average of passes of children receiving double the amount of schooling throughout the country."

In our infant-schools we have generally object-lessons or some more or less imperfect substitutes of that kind for the very young children. But after this, with some rare exceptions, our teaching is all book-learning; the boy has no "hand-work" whatever. He sits some hours at a desk, his muscles have insufficient exercise, he loses the love and habit of work. Hence to some extent our school system really tends to unfit boys for the occupations of after-life, instead of training the hand and the eye to work together; far from invigorating the child in what M.Sluys well terms "le bain refraichissant du travail manuel," it tends to tear his associations from all industrial occupations, which, on the other hand, subsequently revenge themselves,