Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/251

Rh educational qualifications, is generally within the reach of the masses, the subjects taught and, as a rule, the manner of teaching them, have but little practical bearing on industrial pursuits. However, in the last few years considerable progress has been made in introducing a substantial help to industrial education—that of manual training-schools—and already their feasibility and desirability as a feature of popular education have been practically demonstrated. Well-equipped schools of this character are to be found in St. Louis, Chicago, Toledo, Philadelphia, and Boston.

The secret of the popularity of this kind of education is to be found in the natural and practical combination it makes of intellectual and manual training. Both thought and action are developed equally, and the skill acquired at school, together with the respect for industrial pursuits there fostered, makes their pupils useful, wealth-producing citizens.

It is undeniable that our national prosperity has been greatly promoted by the pre-eminence of certain of our manufactures in the markets of the world; but our success in this respect has been due not to the superior intellectual cultivation or manual skill of our native artisans, but to very different causes, which we may regard as, in comparison, accidental; and it is sad to reflect what greater success might have been achieved by combining with these causes that high degree of intelligence and skill that European nations are cultivating in their industrial classes. While the value of our great workshops as practical technical schools may be admitted, the ordinary workshop does not yet combine mental instruction with manual training. At the same time, our science-teaching is of too high a grade to be assimilable by the ordinary mechanic and mechanical apprentice, and is too theoretical to be adaptable to the current work of the shops. There is too little application of science to our handicraft, and a lack of intelligent effort to teach apprentices in our workshops the mechanical dexterity which they are supposed to acquire there. Now that the old system of apprenticeship is becoming obsolete, the question of what shall take its place in the way of educating and training the youth of our working-classes becomes an important consideration.

Provision for teaching mechanic-trades was attempted in the organization of the agricultural colleges, but most of these institutions have drifted away from the original intention of the authors of the act, and there is in them, generally, little or no effort to combine theoretical instruction with practical mechanical training in other than those branches of knowledge closely related to agricultural pursuits; and much remains to be done before they can be of any material advantage to manufacturers and others requiring skilled labor. Our privately endowed schools do this work more directly and efficiently, but not as perfectly as they ought. Our university special departments, and our technological schools, even aggregated, are insignificant in