494 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and to enable him by the use of tools to produce actual things from 

 drawings that represent them. The discipline of workshop instruc- 

 tion may be regarded as supplementary to that of drawing, with 

 which, however, it should always be associated, as teaching a knowl- 

 edge of substance in addition to that of form. Moreover, under com- 

 petent instructors, it may be made an instrument of education similar, 

 in many respects, to practical science. In the workshop, the opera- 

 tions to be performed are less delicate, the measurements are not re- 

 quired to be so exact, the instruments are more easily understood, the 

 substances employed are more ordinary ; but the training is very 

 similar, and in so far as the faculties exercised are those of observation 

 rather than of inference, the training, educationally considered, is a 

 fitting introduction to laboratory practice. At the same time, the 

 skill acquired in the workshop is particularly serviceable to the labora- 

 tory student in enabling him to make and fit apparatus, and in giving 

 him that adroitness on which progress in scientific work so much de- 

 pends. But while a certain amount of manual training is valuable 

 in the education of all classes of persons a fact which is already rec- 

 ognized by the head-masters of several of our best secondary schools 

 the usefulness of this kind of training is much greater in the case 

 of the children of the working-classes, whose education is too limited 

 and often too hurried to admit of any practical science-teaching, such 

 as older children obtain, and to whom the skill acquired is of real 

 advantage in inducing in them an aptitude and taste for handicrafts, 

 in facilitating the acquisition of a trade, and possibly in shortening 

 the period of apprenticeship, or of that preliminary training which in 

 so many occupations takes the place of it. 



An objection is sometimes raised to the inti'oduction of manual 

 training into elementary schools on the ground that, as the children 

 of the working-classes necessarily leave school at an early age, and 

 spend their lives for the most part in manual work, such time as they 

 can give to study should be occupied in other pursuits in cultivating 

 a taste for reading, and in the acquisition of book-knowledge. This 

 objection is due to a misconception of the true objects and aims of 

 education, and to an imperfect knowledge of what is meant by work- 

 shop instruction. To assume that the best education can be given 

 through the medium of books only, and can not be equally well ob- 

 tained from the study of things, is a survival of the medievalism 

 against which nearly all modern educational authorities protest. But 

 there is another and more deeply -rooted error in this argument. 

 People often talk and write as if school-time should be utilized for 

 teaching those things w T hich a child is not likely to care to learn in 

 after-life ; whereas the real aim of school education should be to create 

 a desire to continue in after-life the pursuit of the knowledge and the 

 skill acquired in school. In other words, the school should be made, as 

 far as possible, a preparation for the whole work of life, and should 



