Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/510

492 country that have for their express purpose the bringing about of a more complete understanding between the high schools and the colleges, and the mutual adjustment of the curriculum of the high school and the entrance requirement of the college. It is more and more coming to be felt that the best education should be the one leading to college and should be the one for all.

Now, into this somewhat vexed state of affairs the manual training school has come and must be given due place, and brought into relation with the rest. Coming as it did with its technical side uppermost, it was decided at once to be too strong meat for babes and was graded as a high school. This determined its relation to the lower schools, and there was no difficulty on that score. The children from the lower schools pass the same entrance examinations, whether they elect the manual training or the English or Latin high school. In some of our cities, and notably in those of the middle West, manual training has been incorporated into the regular high schools and consequently has introduced no new problems, at least as far as the educational sequence is concerned. But the older typical manual training school is a distinct instituioninstitution [sic], one of recognized high-school grade, but differing from the older high schools in having a three years' course in place of four years.

If I have at all succeeded in making clear to you the philosophy and methods of manual training, you will easily see that as a scheme of education manual training is equally applicable to all grades, the lowest as well as the highest. It is only that the work would have to be adapted to the age of the children. We should not expect babies to make steam engines any more than we should expect them to learn to read out of Shakespeare. From the artisan point of view it is limited to the upper grades, for little children can scarcely gain enough industrial skill to make it worth while. There are, however, only a few elementary manual training schools in this country. There is a public one in Philadelphia in the slum district, and there are several conducted by charitable organizations there and in New York and other cities. It is most encouraging to note, however, that manual training is rapidly making its way into the regular elementary schools. In New York city alone two hundred thousand children in the lower schools are having manual training, and it is making its way into nearly every progressive grammar school in the larger cities either as a required or elective study. But in the main, when we speak of a manual training school, we mean a high school having a three years' course, and it is to such a school that I want to call attention in this paper. Furthermore, I am sorry to say, a typical manual training school of the older sort means a school for boys onlv. But with the growth of the educational idea, manual