Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/510

494 and to enable him by the use of tools to produce actual things from drawings that represent them. The discipline of workshop instruction may be regarded as supplementary to that of drawing, with which, however, it should always be associated, as teaching a knowledge of substance in addition to that of form. Moreover, under competent instructors, it may be made an instrument of education similar, in many respects, to practical science. In the workshop, the operations to be performed are less delicate, the measurements are not required to be so exact, the instruments are more easily understood, the substances employed are more ordinary; but the training is very similar, and in so far as the faculties exercised are those of observation rather than of inference, the training, educationally considered, is a fitting introduction to laboratory practice. At the same time, the skill acquired in the workshop is particularly serviceable to the laboratory student in enabling him to make and fit apparatus, and in giving him that adroitness on which progress in scientific work so much depends. But while a certain amount of manual training is valuable in the education of all classes of persons a fact which is already recognized by the head-masters of several of our best secondary schools the usefulness of this kind of training is much greater in the case of the children of the working-classes, whose education is too limited and often too hurried to admit of any practical science-teaching, such as older children obtain, and to whom the skill acquired is of real advantage in inducing in them an aptitude and taste for handicrafts, in facilitating the acquisition of a trade, and possibly in shortening the period of apprenticeship, or of that preliminary training which in so many occupations takes the place of it.

An objection is sometimes raised to the introduction of manual training into elementary schools on the ground that, as the children of the working-classes necessarily leave school at an early age, and spend their lives for the most part in manual work, such time as they can give to study should be occupied in other pursuits in cultivating a taste for reading, and in the acquisition of book-knowledge. This objection is due to a misconception of the true objects and aims of education, and to an imperfect knowledge of what is meant by workshop instruction. To assume that the best education can be given through the medium of books only, and can not be equally well obtained from the study of things, is a survival of the mediævalism against which nearly all modern educational authorities protest. But there is another and more deeply-rooted error in this argument. People often talk and write as if school-time should be utilized for teaching those things which a child is not likely to care to learn in after-life; whereas the real aim of school education should be to create a desire to continue in after-life the pursuit of the knowledge and the skill acquired in school. In other words, the school should be made, as far as possible, a preparation for the whole work of life, and should