METHODS IN INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION. 205 



system of beveled geariug- wheels ; but nothing more marketable. The 

 genial director, M. Laubier, enters heartily into the work of his pupils. 

 He has himself designed and executed many of their exercises the 

 plaster casts, the geometrical models, and the ingenious scholastic ap- 

 pliances of the institution. He thinks his school to be the type of the 

 elementary school of the future. He has need to be an enthusiast, to 

 train successfully his fifty apprentices and his two hundred non-work- 

 ing children on a grant not exceeding sixteen hundred dollars a year, 

 salaries, tools, and materials included. He upholds the rotation system, 

 believing extreme division of labor to be at this stage prejudicial to 

 the development of the youthful faculties. He does not want to sell 

 the produce of his workshops, as the construction of objects which 

 would be made to sell would not afford so good a training for his boys. 

 He admits that they do not work so rapidly as apprentices who have 

 been brought up amid the hourly exigencies of trade ; but he adds that 

 he prefers cultivating their intelligence to quickening mere manual 

 dexterity ; that will come later. And what are the results ? " Our 

 apprentices," says the director, " being at once fit for useful work on 

 entering the factory, are less often employed to run errands ; they are 

 better treated, steadier. I could tell you of young lads of fifteen who 

 are actually earning two francs and a half, and two francs seventy-five 

 centimes a day, and who in six months more will be jjaid as regular 

 workmen." 



The Institution de Saint JVicolas, in the Rue de Vaugirard, is the 

 oldest of the schools, having been founded in 1827. It is under the 

 exclusive management of a religious guild known as the Frh^es des 

 j^coles Chretiennes, who devote themselves entirely to education. In 

 this truly remarkable establishment there are eight hundred and ninety 

 boys, all children of artisans, all boarders. Of this number, about two 

 hundred are apprentices who come here to learn their trade. None are 

 admitted who can not already read and write. The greater part of 

 the day is given up to manual work, only two hours being reserved for 

 schooling on three days of the week, on the alternate three days the 

 two hours are devoted to drawing. On entering the premises the vis- 

 itor is first introduced into a sort of little museum, in which are ex- 

 hibited articles made by the pupils of the establishment a truly sur- 

 prising collection to have been executed by little fellows from eleven 

 to fifteen or sixteen years of age. Here there are picture-frames, 

 bronzes, panels carved in oak, wood-engravings that would not dis- 

 credit either the " Graphic " or the " Illustrated " ; farther on, in an- 

 other handsome case, are telescopes, leveling instruments, a model 

 engine, a saxhorn, and a trombone ; and, in yet another, some exqui- 

 sitely neat engraved maps, some of them executed on commission for 

 the Government, together with the medals they won in Paris, Vienna, 

 and Philadelphia. A varied assortment it would seem, and indeed 

 the system under which such works are produced is without a parallel 



