Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/402

388 with the good old style of disciplinary measures: "No, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, etc., stand back! No, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, etc., step forward! Hands folded! Hands up! Hands down, down! March!!!" etc. A workshop of children silently and mechanically performing certain motions with their hands, produces too much the impression of one of the state institutions for the correction of the young, not exactly credited with having produced such geniuses of thought and action as the Nasmyths, the Whitworths, the Goodyears, the Edisons, and others.

3. Manual training continues the work of the Kindergarten, which, of course, presupposes the full knowledge and solution of that problem. The pupil, nevertheless, has by that time outgrown childhood, and unless one imagines a uniformity in the mentality of mankind from seven to seventy years of age, some different stage of intellectual development is reached, and though continuing the Kindergarten, another work, psychologically speaking, is expected, the explanation of which is still to come. Then follows a whole series of claims set forth under the large and benevolent mantle of Industry. We begin with the sewing class and the agricultural Kindergarten, with the fields in a box four feet by five feet, minute plows, harrows, spades, etc. Scroll-work, taken from Krüsi's series of drawing-lessons, something like three hundred sketches of pitchers, vases, chairs, brooms, crescents, etc, all cut out to impress the idea of form upon the patient mechanic. Then innumerable pieces of wood, worked with the jackknife only. Plaster relief-maps, giving half an inch height to the poor Cordilleras, the whole of South America represented in six by nine inches, etc. Things valuable indeed in their way, but not warranting, as general educational measures, any outlay of state money.

Further, again comes the instruction in the use of the seven tools—adze, plane, hammer, drill, chisel, saw, gauge, etc. This at last sounds more serious and comprehensive, but still remains unpromising, if it stops there, and, unluckily, one does not have a chance to hear what is to follow. Such exercises may be carried out very successfully, experimental as they are in colleges, alongside of a full allowance of theoretical mechanics; but they are by no means the Alpha and Omega of manual training in a common school. Finally, we have a series of trades with their gamuts of so-called elements, wood-work, modeling in clay, metal, and stone work, etc., representing a dozen or so of trades, the elements of which are expected to be mastered. No one can deny a practical side to this programme, only it is apt to embrace either too little or too much.

The enthusiastic statement of the advocates of this system, that the ground principles of any trade are practically learned in