Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/674

654 these records the most practical testimony available of the actual results of manual training. Dr. Woodward, the director of the St. Louis school, and one of the fathers of manual training in America, has given many individual records in his two books, The Manual Training School and Manual Training, especially in the former. The results quoted are mainly industrial, but they are nevertheless of high interest from an educational point of view. Some of the schools publish records of their graduates in their current yearbooks. I found, for example, in my own school that one third of the graduates were in universities and other institutions of higher learning; that one third were engaged in technical work opened to them by the special training of the school; and that the remaining third had gone into trade, had taken miscellaneous posts, or were still unsettled as to a career. The latter number was always small, and there were particular moments when less than one per cent of them were unoccupied. The records made by the graduates at college have been excellent. Three of the Philadelphia boys have held fellowships at Harvard, one in philosophy and two on the Hector Tyndale foundation in physics. It was noticeable, as I mentioned before, that the colored boys seldom graduated. They worked under many disadvantages of poverty, and later of race prejudice outside the school, and I should therefore not wish to draw any unfavorable conclusions from their failures. Those of mixed blood, especially Indian or West Indian, were sometimes very clever, and became quite skillful; but the full-blooded Africans were less successful, and I have come to think that they ought to be taught apart and at less speed.

It was also noticeable that the Jewish children were quite clumsy with their hands. So much was this the case that the instructors in the manual departments came to make allowance and to set a different standard for their work. It is quite explainable, I think, since the Jews as a people have been forced by circumstances into commerce and banking, and have been for centuries practically excluded from manual occupations. I mention it as an interesting racial result, and not at all by way of discouragement. I feel that the Jewish people would be very wise to persevere in their present brave attempt at manual development. Nor was the best manual work always done by the children of mechanics. Often it was done by the sons of musicians and other professional people, and even by the sons of business men. It would, I think, be more to the point to inquire into heredity on the mother's side, since boys more frequently resemble their mothers, but this is less practicable.

The Chicago Manual Training School, the oldest independent manual training school in America, publishes an interesting summary of the occupations of its graduates. Out of a total of 568, 158