Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/511

Rh is rapidly being extended to the girls too. In the West they are much ahead of us in this respect. In Denver, for example, they have a fine manual training high school, with a very liberal course of study, and open, as it should be, to both girls and boys. In Kansas City, the new Manual Training High School has just opened with an initial enrollment of seven hundred and thirty-six children—three hundred and forty-nine boys and three hundred and eighty-seven girls. In San Francisco, the Polytechnic High School is open to boys and girls alike. And this represents the general spirit throughout the West. I am very glad to see it, and I am the more sorry that our older and representative manual training schools in Baltimore, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago, Brooklyn, and Boston do not unlock their doors to girls in the same open-minded fashion.

The material that comes to a manual training school has always interested me. It does not come from any one class in society. On the contrary, it is a very composite group. News of the movement naturally reached the most advanced people of the community first. In the early days in Philadelphia—that is, something over a decade ago—it seemed to me that nearly all the boys in the training school were unusual. Their parents for the most part were come-outers of some sort, liberals, people interested in social and religious reform, very wide-awake people. As time went on, the groups became less marked. The industrial side of manual training got noised abroad, and for a time many boys were sent to the school merely because they were not fond of study, and the school was mistaken as a place for busy hands and sluggish brains. Boss mechanics, with no great faith in education, but with a strong desire to have their sons get on in the world, compromised the matter and sent them to the training school. From the very start, too, there was a large influx of Jewish children, whose parents were actuated, I think, not so much by that text in the Talmud which bids every man have a trade, as by the broader feeling that the children of Israel as a people were suffering from their too long and too exclusive devotion to commerce. The Jewish charitable organizations have since established a number of free manual training schools in the different cities, and are especially working among the poorer Russian Jews. There were also a number of colored boys, but these seldom remained to graduate.

Now that the schools are better known, and have taken their place alongside of the regular high schools, the choice has largely passed from the parents to the boys themselves. They come to the training schools, sometimes for good and sufficient reasons, because they have a taste along mechanical and scientific lines rather than linguistic lines, but often the reason is quite capricious. They come because some chum of theirs happens to come, or they don't come