Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/394

380 mechanic's arm, in the acute observation through the physician's eye or ear, there is always mind. We are, in manual training, simply training another kind of faculty—not memory, but discriminating observation and correct perception. The old-fashioned education was chiefly devoted to the training of memory; most of the work in the grammar school to-day is memorytraining. I am thankful for every effort to train our youth to correct observation, just discrimination, and accurate measurement.

"There is another value in manual training in that it trains the mind through success, through achievement, through doing something tangible and visible and doing it well. When a boy has planed a parallelopiped of iron so well that no light shows under the edge of his try-square when he applies it to the faces of the block, he has done something which demands patience and care and attention, something which he can prove to be well done—something which he be proud of. There is mind in such work, and there is also sound morality in it."

Sir Edwin Chadwick says: "It is proved practically that the physical training in the school stage, giving the use of hands, arms, eyes, and legs, is giving aptitudes for all industrial occupations"; and, also, in commenting on the military drill as introduced largely through his influence in the public schools in England: "The physical exercise in the military drill is a visible moral exercise in all that is implied in the term discipline—viz., duty, obedience to command, order, self-restraint, punctuality, and patience. There is good and bad elementary moral education, as shown by the outcome, and especially by the outcome of the half-time system of education; but the half-sedentary or intellectual and dogmatic education, and the half-physical, has now been proved to be far more successful than any other system yet known or practiced."

The eminent manual instructors all over the country echo this experience, as above set forth, by two of the foremost authorities among English-speaking people.

During the last twenty years, and especially during the last ten, the great army of Christian men and women, who have been striving to uplift humanity, have been revising and modifying their views as to the best time in which to begin setting young feet in those right paths that shall lead them to usefulness and happiness; and the general consensus of opinion is that between the years of three and six is the most precious seed-time for the implanting of moral principles—that then is the time for "bending the twig" effectively. One of the men in New York of the largest experience among the children of the neglected and criminal classes says, "We find that all we can do for their moral