Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/666

646 the treatment of the morally oblique, manual training has proved a veritable redeeming force. Dr. Barr, the chief physician at Elwyn, writes me: "The secret of the development of the imbecile lies undoubtedly in manual training. The schools for the feeble-minded in England and on the Continent, recognizing this, have gone far along this line, while we have wasted years in trying to force abstract theories upon mental defectives. Surely a truer thing was never said than 'The working hand makes strong the working brain.'" Mr. Bates, the director of manual training at the Elmira Reformatory, sends me the following striking letter:

"The influence of manual training processes upon the originally selected defectives was so marked that the Board of Managers unanimously decided to increase it so as to take five hundred of the special defectives, classed as follows:

"Group 1 are those mathematically defective, those who fail continuously in arithmetic, failures beginning with 'evening kindergarten,' and continuing into Set 1 and Set 2, in which advanced problems in percentage are taught.

"We find that by manual processes judiciously selected and properly taught, keeping the object in view in each case, we are able to assist men to acquire the necessary proficiency in elementary mathematics to pass in their respective arithmetic sets. I give you in advance of our 1898 yearbook, statistics on that point as follows:

"Out of an actual number of pupils—viz., fifty-eight in Group 1—we have to show graduation of thirty-four, which is fifty-eight per cent—that is, returned to the usual reformatory treatment as susceptible to the conditions governing their release.

"Our second group deals with the men who are assigned for the development of 'self-control,' which comprises by far our largest assignment—viz., two hundred pupils, made up of men who are intellectually bright in most cases, but this intellectuality runs riot, so that they are habitually breaking the demeanor regulations in the institution, and so must regularly be depressed in grade and their time of commitment correspondingly lengthened. We select for such men manual processes calculated to overcome, by the concentration of mind and regularity of muscular movement, the defective element in their nature.

"We are able to show out of an actual number of pupils—viz., one hundred and seven—twenty-three per cent as having been returned susceptible to the reformatory treatment. The moral influence of the manual training department is better observed from this group than any other. We note a particular instance of a man assigned to the manual training from the third grade (incorrigibles), who had committed almost all the crimes known to prison life. After