Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/66

Rh made it a settled policy. The seniors add one hour to the German and now study literature, if one may so express it, in and for its own beauty. Civics are well represented under the triple head of American history, government, and economics.

The mathematical sequence is always an open problem. A contemporary philosopher who has written much that is wise and helpful as regards education contends that modern schools make entirely too much of mathematics. He holds that there are promising minds quite disqualified for such studies, and that it is unwise to force them along these lines as well as unfair to judge of their ability by reference to so alien a standard. His heresy seems likely to spread. I should agree with him were mathematics an isolated subject; but when one comes to think about it, we are dealing here not with a separate branch of study, but with an element common to all branches of exact study—the quantitative element. It is the expression of an acknowledged master that we have only so much science as we have mathematics. To omit or curtail such a study would be to omit or curtail exactitude of thought, and at the present juncture in human affairs we can ill afford such a result. The manual training school, therefore, as an exponent of modern education does well, I think, to lay full stress on mathematics, and I am only sorry that its work in this direction can not be more thorough and more extensive than it is. The present sequence begins with algebra and runs through geometry, plane trigonometry, and higher algebra to analytics. Up to the senior year the work is restricted to pure mathematics, but at this point two practical applications are introduced—surveying and bookkeeping. The sequence is much the same at all of the larger manual training schools. An inversion of the earlier part is now contemplated at the Northeast School. We propose to start with geometry. The motive for this somewhat unusual sequence is a serious one. Of the several branches of lower mathematics geometry makes the most direct appeal to the imagination of a child, and it does this by reason of its graphic method of presentation. Its concreteness makes it easier than either algebra or arithmetic. Algebra is nearly always difficult, and can best be introduced, it seems to me, after a boy has gained a somewhat more lively conception of quantity and relation than that given by the study of arithmetic. Such a sequence holds, I am told, in a number of English schools.

As it is essentially a modern-language and mathematical school, so also is the manual training school essentially a scientific school. The daily curriculum always includes a science lesson. The work begins with natural history (geology, botany, and zoölogy), progresses through physics, and ends with chemistry and electrical engineering. The two latter branches have long