Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/517

Rh and aptitude for the real work of their life, and so educated as to be able to apply to that work the results of scientific teaching and scientific methods.

In organizing a scheme of technical teaching in connection with our elementary schools, the difficulty has to be met of obtaining good teachers and competent inspectors. The artisan, who is a skillful workman and nothing more, may succeed in teaching the elements of carpentry and joinery; but he is not the kind of teacher needed. It is of the utmost importance that the instructor should be a good draughtsman, should have some knowledge of physical science, should be an expert workman, and should have studied the art of teaching. To obtain at first such ideal instructors would be impossible; but there is no reason why, gradually, they should not be trained. Two processes suggest themselves. We might take a well-trained elementary teacher, having an aptitude for mechanical arts, and give him a course of instruction in the use of tools, either in a technical school or in an ordinary workshop; or, we might take an intelligent artisan, who had studied science and drawing in some of the excellent evening classes which are now found in almost every town, and give him a short course of lessons on method in relation to workshop instruction. Good teachers might be obtained by either of these processes. Perhaps the latter is preferable, as it is most important that the teacher who is to inspire confidence should be a good workman to start with and thoroughly familiar with the practice of his trade. For such intelligent and educated artisans there is, I hope, a future of profitable employment. It would be well, however, that in all our technical colleges opportunities should be afforded to teachers in elementary schools of acquiring practice in the use of tools; and that special training-classes should be formed for artisans, in the organization of workshops and in the best methods of workshop teaching.

Nearly all educationists have pointed out the many advantages of enabling children at an early age to realize the connection between knowing and doing. Comenius has well said, "Let those things that have to be done be learned by doing them." Rousseau has pithily expressed a similar idea in saying: "Souvenez-vous qu'en toute chose vos leçons doivent être plus en actions qu'en discours; car les enfants oublient aisément ce qu'ils ont dit et ce qu'on leur a dit, mais non pas ce qu'ils ont fait et ce qu'on leur a fait." (Remember that in everything your lessons ought to be more in actions than in speech; for children easily forget what they have said and what has been said to them, but not what they have done and what has been done to them.) Locke, speaking of the education of a gentleman—for in his day the education of the poorer classes was scarcely thought of—says, "I would have him learn a trade, a manual trade"; and Emerson, in the choice words, "Manual labor is the study of the external world,"