450 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



report prepared for the consideration of the Education Committee says 

 of them : 



" In the long-time schools, during the time the boy is kept waiting 

 under restraint, his mind is absent from his lessons, which are com- 

 monly so uninteresting as to be repugnant to his voluntary attention, 

 and his thoughts are away on cricket, or some sort of pleasurable play, 

 so that he generally only returns, upon call to the lesson, as to a task to 

 be got rid of. Under the restraint of separate confinement in a prison, 

 the mind of the young criminal can not, as is shown by his action on 

 release, have been occupied with compunctious visitings of remorse, as 

 commonly assumed. His thoughts are of his ill-luck under the wide 

 chances of escape of which he has had experience during all the time 

 he has been at large before detection, and of how he may have better 

 luck when he gets out. He is exhorted to be good : but the child of 

 the mendicant or of the delinquent does not see his way to doing other 

 than he has done before ; and why should he, so long as he feels his in- 

 aptitude of hand and arm for industrial work ? Be this as it may, under 

 the common conditions of restraint in the district schools, or in the 

 reformatory schools all of which, comprising some thirty thousand 

 children, are now of necessity conducted on the half-time principle of 

 varied physical and mental teaching the pupil is placed under 

 entirely new and opposite conditions, by which bad thoughts are 

 excluded and good thoughts induced and impressed from day to day 

 by practical work from the like of which he may hereafter get some- 

 thing good for himself. In the morning he is roused out of his sleep 

 to attend to his head-to-foot washing and his dressing. Then he has 

 to go with others to his breakfast ; after that to the school, where, 

 with his class, he is kept to the simultaneous class lesson without wait- 

 ing, to which he willingly gives himself, as it is not over-wearisome, 

 like the lessons of the long-time schools. He may next have to fall 

 under the drill-master or the gymnast, and, if he stumble or fail, he is 

 jeered by the other pupils, or reproved by the corporal ; but he soon 

 participates in the zeal and competition of common lively action. He 

 may on the following day have a swimming-lesson. He may next 

 have some naval exercise at the mast, where, unless he holds on, he 

 will fall into the net spread beneath to receive him. Then he has to 

 go to the workshop, where the work-master in carpentry, in shoe- 

 making, or in tailoring keeps the mind, the hand, and the eye, of the 

 pupil intently occupied. His day's occupation may be varied by free- 

 hand drawing, so useful to handicrafts, or by lessons in singing, or, if 

 he be a very good and apt boy, by lessons in instrumental music. The 

 enumeration of the incessant occupations may sound as of severe labor ; 

 but the course is varied by "relief -lessons," and it becomes so little 

 irksome that an interruption is disagreeable, and an exclusion from 

 any part of it is acutely felt as a punishment. When some parents 

 exercise their right of taking away children from the district school, 



