AN AMERICAN MANUAL TRAINING-SCHOOL. 627 



The Aims of Education. But to return. I claim for these forms 

 of expression, which I have taken pains to distinguish, more nearly 

 equal care and consideration in the elementary education of every 

 child. Teach language and literature and mathematics with a view to 

 make each child a master of the art of verbal expression. Teach me- 

 chanical and free drawing, with the conventions of shade and color, 

 and aim at a mastery of the art of pictorial expression. And, lastly, 

 teach the cunning fingers the wonderful power and use of tools, and 

 aim at nothing less than a mastery of the fundamental mechanical 

 processes. To do all these things while the mind is gaining strength 

 and clearness, and material for thought, is the function of a manual 

 training-school. 



Prejudices to be overcome. The traditions are heavily against 

 us, but the traditions of the fathers must yield to the new dispensa- 

 tion. As was to have been expected, the strongest prejudices against 

 this reform exist in old educational centers. 



As President Walker, of the New York Board of Education, frankly 

 admitted at the laying of the corner-stone of Professor Felix Adler's 

 splendid institution, " The Workingman's School and Free Kinder- 

 garten," the methods and aims proposed by the advocates of manual 

 training-schools are a criticism upon the methods and aims of the es- 

 tablished system, and nothing is more natural than for it to resent the 

 criticism and discourage reform. 



No man has done more nay, no man has done as much to intro- 

 duce the manual feature into American education as Professor John 

 D. Runkle, of Boston, and yet the School of Mechanic Arts established 

 by him in connection with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

 has, after an existence of several years, been apparently almost frozen 

 out in the biting atmosphere of that highly aesthetic city. I doubt if 

 one could find on American soil a more unpromising field for a manual 

 training-school than beneath the lofty elms of Cambridge and New 

 Haven. 



Luxuries ix Education. There are luxuries in education, as in 

 food and dress and equipage, and in wealthy communities the luxuries 

 command the chief attention. At the English Universities of Oxford 

 and Cambridge, a large proportion of the students expect to be gentle- 

 men of leisure. The idea of giving heed to the demands of skilled 

 labor, of preparing for lives of activity and usefulness the idea of 

 earning one's daily bread and of supporting one's family scarcely 

 enter their heads. Either they inherit livings, or they seek to get 

 livings through the Church, or they enter the army with commissions 

 purchased by kind friends who wish to get them out of the way, or 

 they go into law or politics. It is no wonder that such men devote 

 themselves largely to the luxuries of education Greek, astronomy, 

 philology, higher mathematics, Latin hexameters, Italian in a word, 

 to "polite " learning. In such an atmosphere as that how incongruous 



