Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/830

810 And here let me say very explicitly that the matter is not one to be disposed of, for or against, by mere opinion. In view of its seriousness such disposal would be simply cavalier. It is a matter for scientific inquiry and decision. I am not an advocate of manual training any more than I am an advocate of the vortex theory of atoms. Such a position is not defensible, I stand toward the problem, as I do toward other problems of science, simply as a student weighing the evidence. I would ask for a similar attitude on the part of other teachers, and for nothing more. The final judgment will come, bear in mind, not from schoolmasters and school committees, but from the men who are patiently and experimentally studying the brain as the organ of human intelligence, and mind as a function of brain,

I have here tried to tell the main ground for the faith that is in us—the raison d'être of the manual-training cult. One other question remains: What does this training lead to? It is the question of a practical world, of a world which pays the bills, and very properly looks into the quality of its purchase. The question may be answered in two ways: one is the very cold and matter-of-fact way of telling just what the graduates of a manual-training school are doing at the present moment; the other is the more rosy method of setting forth what we think these same graduates, in view of their education, ought to be doing, and what, when manual training shall have done its perfect work, they undoubtedly will be doing. I shall combine these methods by giving the statistics of our own school and then criticising them.

It has become a custom for some of the principal manualtraining schools to publish in their catalogues a list of graduates with their occupations. These lists form very instructive reading, for they tell in the most practical way just what the training does lead to. The Northeast School has graduated but two classes, or one hundred and twelve boys in all. An examination of their record shows the following results: