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oratory course whose aim is to offer practical instruction in electrical measurements and electrical construction to persons who are employed wholly or in part at such work, or who desire to fit themselves for it.

The instruction in mechanical drawing is given by a man who has occupied important positions as draftsman in manufacturing establishments. The instructors in machine-shop practice and tool making are men who have had wide experience as mechanics and as superintendents of shops. The teacher of pattern-making had learned the trade as a young man and had practical experience in it for years. The teacher of plumbing is the plumbing inspector for the city, and is recognized as an authority in his trade. The teachers of electricity, mechanics. and mathematics are technically trained men. All of these teachers, except the teacher of plumbing and the assistant teacher in the machine shop, are employed in the day high school, and are skillful teachers. The school is under the supervision of the principal of the day high school.

The enrollment for the winter 1902-3 was 311, and the percentage of attendance was 86.8, ranging in the different classes from 81.5 in plumbing to 89.5 in pattern making. This will be recognized as a considerably higher percentage of attendance than is found in other types of evening schools. In enrolling students. when all applicants properly qualified can not be accommodated, preference was given to men already engaged at their trade, either as apprentices or as journeymen; and such men constituted the large majority of students in the school. This policy recommends the school to manufacturers and other employers of skilled labor, because it educates their men and trains them to do a higher quality of work; it also recommends the school to the workingmen, because it enables them to secure promotions and higher wages; and it wins for the school the good will of the labor unions, because it does all this without appreciably increasing the labor market and becoming a means of depressing wages.

Superintendent Balliet adds:

This is a brief account of an experiment in teaching trades at public expense: it is a feature of our public school work which has provoked but little criticism and is rapidly growing in favor, and I believe it is destined to become a permanent part-and a very important part of the school system of our city. Our experience has convinced me that there is no insuperable difficulty in the way of organizing an evening trade school in every well-equipped manual-training high school in the country, and I believe that this is the point from which instruction in trades at public expense can be most effectually developed with the least expenditure of money. Such evening trade schools can not only use the shop equipments of manual-training high schools, but they can have the free use of their laboratories, of their drawing room with its equipment, and of other facilities for academic instruction. No trade school, even for men who are mature and are already engaged at their trade, ought to confine its instruction to shopwork; it must not lose sight of the man in training the mechanic. Thorough courses in mechanical drawing, in mechanics, in applied physics and applied mathematics, and, if possible, in other academic studies, should be offered, and every student in the shopwork classes should be encouraged to take as many of these courses as his time and his strength will permit.

RELATION OF EDUCATION TO INDUSTRY.

These three questions are of prime importance:

1. When and how shall a boy make a wise choice of an occupation?

2. To what extent does "manual training," as gained in high schools and academies, open the doors into the trades?

3. Why are so few "manual graduates

enrolled as mechanics? Does the

small number indicate any failure or disappointed hope?

1. The choice of an occupation is a very important matter. The theory of the ordinary manual training school assumes that the boy of 14 or 15 is unprepared to make a choice-first, because he does not know himself his mental and physical possibilities; again, because he does not know what the different trades involve; finally, he does not know what other avenues of emplo ment or occupation there are which would naturally compete in his mind with the mechanical trades.

Years ago, way back in the seventies, a Mr. Ruggles, of Boston, proposed to organize what he called a developing school” for the youth of Boston. This was to be a school with certain academic features as its central point, and around it a series of practical commercial shops, each one of which involved the principles and practice of some trade. The exact number of the shops was of course not defined, but the number was supposed to be large enough to cover all reasonable demands from the community. Mr. Ruggles's plan was this: To admit a 14-year-old boy to this school, and during his first year have him spend a few weeks in each one of the shops, in order that he might sample the work, as it were, and find out which one was to his taste. At the end of a year he was to make a deliberate and final choice and spend the rest of his shop time while in school in gaining a thorough mastery of all the details of the trade he had chosen. This plan was fully explained in a very interesting pamphlet supported by a large number of opinions from eminent men as to the necessity of some sort of opportunity for a boy to acquire a knowledge of the mechanic arts. It is hardly necessary to say that this plan came to nothing. In the first place, the enormous extent and cost of such an establishment, which should properly cover the variety of occupations of a modern city, put the matter beyond all question. There was in the plan no suggestion of a better way of teaching the use of tools than the old, wasteful, and inefficient method of apprenticeship.

In 1885 I visited the trade school on the Boulevard de la Villette, in Paris. There I found, in miniature, Mr. Ruggles's idea realized. The boys entered at 13 or 14; one year was spent in sampling the shops, and two in learning a trade. To be sure the number of practical shops was not more than four or five, and those shops were not so much intended to teach trades, as we use the term in this country, as they were intended to teach the actual construction of certain lines of goods. For instance, one of the shops was a place where the boys learned to make locks for drawers and safes. Of course there was quite a variety of locks manufactured, but every boy in that shop did nothing but make locks, and the drafting he learned (which was a minimum) concerned itself almost wholly with the detailed drawings of the parts of a lock. Another shop was very much like a machine shop doing a small range of work, but with a very thorough course of instruction and training in the work they did; another was a forging shop where each boy who selected that department became a practical blacksmith. The woodworking shop was not so much for general culture as it was for learning the manufacture of certain articles of household or office furniture.

I noticed, by the way, that the boys were fairly distributed through all these shops. This by no means indicated, as I thought, that the natural bent and fancy of the boys had led to this result, but that under the advice of the management this result had been brought about in a perfectly natural and businesslike way, with a minimum of judgment on the part of a boy and a maximum of shrewd advice on the part of the director. I remember asking the director what he did with a boy who found out that he was not well suited to any of the trades which they taught, and finally discovered, or thought he discovered, that he was cut out for something else and not for a locksmith or a blacksmith or a machinist. He turned upon me with a very impatient air and said with some little feeling, "These boys are here to learn a trade, and they do learn a trade, and the moment they leave this school they go to work at the trade. There are no exceptions to this rule. Every boy must earn his own living, and there is no other course for him to pursue.”’

As to the academic work done in that school, it was of a very meager and inadequate sort. It was evident that the moment a boy had made his choice his academic work was trimmed down to just what were supposed to be the “essentials"

for the trade which he had chosen. In fact, it seemed as if all other doors were shut the moment he entered a shop the second year, and his destiny was sealed.

I came back to St. Louis entirely satisfied with the plan of our school in so far as it left the student free to make his choice of occupation at a later period, when all the presumptions would be in favor of a correct choice.

In point of fact I suppose it to be true that, so far as a majority of parents go, the controlling motive in sending boys to a manual training school is to find out what is in them-what their innate capacities and inherited tastes really are. Parents continually complain that their boys will not decide what they want to do in life. Again and again have I heard boys in the presence of their parents insist that they did not know what they would like to do; that they "could not make up their minds." This sort of answer frequently irritates a parent, and it has been my privilege to read many parents a very pointed lecture on the spur of the moment, showing them how utterly unreasonable and illogical they were: and I have commended the boy for persisting in his attitude of unwillingness to decide whether he wished to be an electrical engineer, or a chemist, or an architect, or a lawyer, for the simple reason that he was utterly unprepared to make such a decision. The whims and fancies of a boy are as inevitable and as natural as his appetite for play and his fondness for sweetmeats, but they depend very largely upon his environment, upon what he sees and hears, and upon the opportunities that seem to be open to his boyish gaze. They are only surface indications and have very little to do with natural or inherited aptitudes.

In regard to this matter of boyish fancies I find myself exactly in agreement with Professor Henderson, who was for some years principal of the Northeast Manual Training School of Philadelphia. He says:

At 14 a boy is too young to interrupt the culture process, much too young to know what will be the true occupation of his adult life. I have seen-and who. indeed, has not?-the very sad effects of this too early specialization. A boy of 14 is full of fancies, and it is perfectly right and wholesome that he should be. The harm comes when those fancies are taken too seriously. Let them occupy his leisure time. Let him run the whole scale of boyish interests; let him be the naturalist, surveyor, mechanic. electrician, astronomer, artist, musician, poet, philosopher. Let him go in for them heart and soul, and then, quite as light heartedly, let him drop them. You make a sad mess of it when you hold a boy to an outgrown interest.

The fancy of a boy as regards his future occupation may, and probably will, change with every year of school training; but that should excite neither rebuke nor criticism. The boy that starts with the hope of being an electrician and comes out with an ambition to be a lawyer is not to be called fickle; and he that begins with the firm purpose of being a machinist but graduates with the deliberate aim of being an architect has probably replaced a groundless whim by an intelligent choice. Give a boy manual training by all means, not because you wish or hope that he may become an artisan, but because you want him to be a whole man and to have an opportunity to make the most of himself, whether he become in the end an artisan or an artist, a follower or a leader, a bookkeeper or a general manager, an engine driver or a civil engineer, a farmer or a manufacturer. 2. Does manual training open the door to trades?

Superintendent Balliet, whom I have been glad to quote several times, says: While the manual training school does not aim to teach a boy a trade, it gives him a training which will enable him at once on leaving school to earn from $1 to $2 a day, and thus become self-dependent. If idleness, shiftlessness, and pauperism are immoral in their tendency, if not in their very nature, then there are worse things for which our schools may be responsible than teaching a boy how to earn an honest living.

My graduates are wanted as draftsmen, electrical workers, inspectors, apprentices, and clerks of industrial establishments. Their versatility makes them valu

able as assistants to superintendents and general foremen. One-third of our graduates go on into higher education, either immediately or after working a year or two. The following extract from a letter written by the master mechanic of the Missouri Pacific shops in this city is pertinent here:

When a manual training school boy enters our shops he is paid $1.50 per day; all other boys, or those not having what is called a manual training school education, are paid $1 a day. Each year after the first we add 25 cents per day to the pay of these boys, and when they become proficient, or at the end of the third year, they receive very nearly the full rate, provided they are the right kind of boys. Were it possible, I would in all cases prefer employing graduates from manual training schools for apprentices to ordinary boys who apply to us with perhaps nothing more than a very ordinary public school education, but, of course, it is not always possible to act on these lines.

There have been cases where young men, graduates from training schools, have come into our shops and have actually been worth more money to us than we were paying them, but in accordance with rules established long ago in regard to apprentices, we could not give them higher wages.

I can confidently state that most of the graduates who have come to me from the manual training school of the Washington University have proven to be exceptionally good boys and have turned out good men. In fact, most of them do so well that they are often offered better situations and they leave us to accept the same. We can not afford to pay the wages they can command from other sources. 3. Why do so few of the graduates of manual training schools become and remain mechanics?

Boys who expect to become and remain mechanics rarely go to a secondary school. A recent letter from Professor Marburg shows that out of 1,063 graduates of the two manual training high schools of Philadelphia 310, or almost 30 per cent, have entered college, about one-half of whom have entered the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel Institute as students of engineering and architecture, and that Philadelphia is gradually being supplied with a class of welltrained technical men who started in the manual training schools. There is no question to-day as to the high standing which those men are taking in that community.

A second reason for the small number of mechanics among the graduates has already been hinted at in the observed tendency of laboring people to shun the school from a vague sort of suspicion that the school was intended to teach manual labor and to keep boys at manual labor, no matter how much a hardworking father might wish his boy to have an easier or a more genteel lot in life than he had had himself. This reason was potent while the school was new and its educational value was in doubt. It is not very strong now, and it grows

weaker every year.

The third reason is the chief one, and it removes all doubt and answers all queries. A fair and reasonable proportion of our boys after graduation do turn to industrial establishments for practical work in some capacity. They soon find a great deal of work out of the ordinary line which pays fair wages and has more promise for the future than regular apprenticeship. Again, the number who have actually taken terms of apprenticeship is much greater than the number of those now rated as "mechanics," for the reason that they have accepted higher positions and better pay. Nearly all those who are reported as general foremen and superintendents took more or less apprenticeship before promotion.

So long as the number of manual graduates is small, just so rapidly will the boys win promotion. Were the number of graduates turned out each year twenty times as great as it is, the number who would become and remain me hanics would be fifty times as great as it is. In other words, by multiplying manual training schools we shall solve the problem of training all the mechanics our industries need, and at the same time we shall keep the way open to higher things for the rare and gifted ones, who, like Hercules, will find a way or make one."

SUGGESTIONS AND WARNINGS.

I wish to make two practical suggestions affecting both secondary and higher technical schools: First, that in every community large enough to maintain two high schools one of them should be organized as a manual training school, allowing the other to maintain more or less rigidly the traditional literary curriculum without opposition or criticism.

The second suggestion is that the theory and use of tools and fundamental processes of construction, with the rudiments of mechanical drawing, be relegated from engineering schools to the secondary schools as rapidly as possible.

First, we must not ignore the fact that the force of educational traditions is very great. The great body of school principals and superintendents have had no manual training, as we understand the term, in their development, and to a very great extent they still misunderstand and underrate it. The great mass of American teachers has as yet no adequate conception of the fine invigorating effect of a correct system of manual training upon the mind of a healthy normal boy; hence when it is injected into an old high school it finds itself in an atmosphere neither friendly nor helpful. It flourishes best when the whole school participates in it and when every teacher in the school believes in it.

Again, in every school which is well conducted there is systematic correlation between different subjects and cooperation between different teachers, so that one branch of study is made to help and illustrate another branch. For example, all the processes of our forging shop, our brazing and soldering shop, are used to illustrate the principles of physics and chemistry. Our geometry, plane and solid, gets uncounted illustrations and applications from "projection," "intersection," and "shadow" drawing. The exercises of the machine shop serve most lucidly to illustrate the principles of physics, friction, movements, the development of heat, electricity, the action of steam, compressed air, etc. All these illustrations would fall flat and weak upon the ears of pupils studying Greek instead of shopwork and drawing. For the present I am convinced it is best to keep the schools separate and give the pupils the privilege of choice between them.

The second suggestion, that manual training and drawing be regarded as legitimate work for the secondary school, needs little to support it. In the first place, the boys need it in their mental, moral, and physical development. From its active character it appeals strongly to boys in their early teens, and for the most part the principles are comprehensible to boys. Finally, it will leave the engineering school free to put its students into the engineering laboratory instead of into the shop, and into detail drawing preparatory to design instead of taking the rudiments. All this will involve a great gain to the engineering school as well as to the preparatory school.

Serious dangers threaten the manual training movement. I will mention three: (1) Its premature introduction into the lower grades; (2) mistakes as to its object; (3) faulty methods of teaching or the neglect of all teaching.

1. I have already referred to the fatal mistake of attempting to teach the theory of tools and logical processes of construction to boys below their teens. Little fellows may play with tools and they can learn something and they can be kept out of mischief, but the rigor and logic of correct methods and exact workmanship on abstract principles are beyond them. The work degenerates and their interest wanes. In either case the attempt fails and the boy is more or less spoiled and comes later t› the work with feeble interest if not a prejudice against manual training. "The motor cells of the brain controlling the muscles of the joints nearest the trunk develop first, and later, in regular order, those which control the muscles of the more distant joints. Education ought to follow this order of growth; it should avoid training the fingers to make finely coordinated

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