Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/514

496 has been gained at the expense of their youth. You remember that when Harvey demonstrated the circulation of the blood, not a single physician in England, older than forty, accepted the new view. Darwin's theory of the origin of species fell for the most part on deaf ears except among the younger naturalists. It is unpsychological to expect men of a certain turn of mind and a certain way of life, and withal no longer young, to suddenly emerge out of their old selves.

The best work of the world is done without pay, the sacred work that asks no pay—the work of the mother, the work of the enlightened ones—but where the work is paid for, the rate of pay is a pretty sure gauge of the estimate that is placed upon the work. Now, in some of the manual training schools, the salaries in the manual departments are notably less, I should say about twenty per cent less, than the salaries in the academic departments. This seems to me a grave mistake. If manual training is to be put forward as a serious educational scheme, the teachers of manual training should be men and women quite as carefully educated, quite as acceptable in their language, quite as broad in their sympathies, quite as elevated in their morals—in a word, in every way quite as cultivated as the teachers of language and science and mathematics. And the first practical step in bringing about this equality of requirement would be to inaugurate an equality of pay. The manual teachers should get precisely what the academic teachers get.

In describing the manual training school, I am assuming that it is •one in which this unity of purpose prevails, just as, in developing the philosophy of manual training, I assumed the educational view. And if, at times, it should seem that I am describing an ideal rather than an actual school, bear in mind, please, that the picture has at least been suggested by a reality. Let us glance, then, at the several departments in succession.

The humanistic group is weak, especially in English, and this constitutes the gravest weakness of the manual training school as now organized. Adequate results can not be obtained in the time allotted to the studies. In the first year, only five periods a week are commonly given to the entire group, three to English literature and rhetoric, and two to a foreign language, and this, when you consider the importance of the studies, is a mere drop in the bucket. The children are not even well grounded in the bare structure of English. They come up from the so-called grammar schools, where it has seemed to me they learn the rules of grammar all morning, and break them all afternoon. We need really an excess of English, for the poor English heard in the manual departments, and bound, I fear, to be heard for some time to come, ought to be effectively offset, or these