Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/404

388 face of the board was required. This the chihh'en tested for themselves. Often during the first work with saws a child would ask, "Will that do?" "Test it" was the reply. Reluctantly the child applied the test, and renewed his courage as Lest he could. After a time the desire to use a new tool and to get on as some other child did gave way to desire for perfection. This brings me to the chief end of the work—not skill in handicraft or any finished products, but to put before the children concrete examples of the true and the false, in such a manner that the child himself should judge his own work by some unvarying standard. As an instance of the moral effects: One of the older boys was the first to finish the shelves and both sides of his case, all but one groove. The excitement of this eminence dizzied him, and that groove was a failure—being too wide, it left an ugly crack above the shelf. No one was more sensitive to that ugliness than he; but the struggle between his desire for perfection and the fancied humiliation of making another side and letting some other child be the first to complete a case went on for some time. Finally, with a manly effort to keep his eyes from overflowing, he laid the faulty side among the failures and began again. To give up the work of many days, and the prospect of coming out ahead, was to win a great battle not for himself alone but for his comrades. For use, the rejected side was almost as good as perfection itself; to ideas of truth and beauty the boy's mind yielded obedience. Such yielding of lower motives to higher ones, such discipline of patience and judgment as these lessons gave, were not reached in any other line of work.

Most public schools for primary children have two sessions a day for ten months; in the experiment there was but one session a day for eight months. In the former, five hours or more a week are spent in reading alone; in the latter, less than five hours a a week were given to the science lessons and to the reading drawn from them. The saving of time in other studies was almost equally great; and besides the large body of superior knowledge opened to the children, the ordinary proficiency in all subjects commonly taught in primary schools was generally reached. This demonstrates the fallacy of the current opinion that children can not be taught science, history, and literature, and at the same time master the usual three r's allotted to them.

But the experiment aimed to introduce the child to the world of real learning, with the idea that such introduction would produce certain effects on his mind; and it is by that aim and those effects that it should be judged. As to the former, the reader has but to examine the body of knowledge outlined, and judge whether it is worthy to be called real learning and the foundation of knowledge.