49 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The boys are chosen mainly from the seventh standard, and attendance at 

 the workshop is considered a privilege, and a reward of merit in ordinary school 

 subjects. It is therefore a simulus and incentive to industry and thoroughness 

 of work. This plan has been so effective that a boy once chosen values the 

 teaching and practice so much that he continues to be chosen each week, and 

 the instruction is therefore continuous, for the class has been virtually the same 

 since it started. 



Boys who have been trained in a good school, and have acquired soundly the 

 rudiments of education, too often when they leave school think that their proper 

 career is a city counting-house, and that to wear black clothes and appear as a 

 gentleman is a fair summit of their ambition. I certainly think that this work- 

 shop for upper standard boys will help to dissipate this idea, as it will show 

 boys that, after we have given them the best education which the school offers, 

 we then lead them into the workshop, and so practically show them that the end 

 and aim of our training is to enable them to learn some useful trade, and so 

 become good workmen. 



The workshop, I believe, is a valuable training to enable the eye and hand to 

 work in harmony. It is intended to make the school-drawing, especially the 

 scale-drawing and geometry, apply as much as possible to the work done in the 

 workshop. It is certainly a pleasant relief to ordinary school-work. Should a 

 boy not follow a trade when he leaves school, he will at least be able to make 

 his home-work comfortable by using the skill and facility which he has acquired 

 in this workshop. 



At the expense of the Rev. S. Barnett and a few of his friends, a 

 workshop has recently been fitted in the school attached to St. Jude's 

 Church, Whitechapel. Arrangements have been made for giving in- 

 struction in carpentry and turnery to boys, and in modeling and wood- 

 carving to girls of the upper standards, and the results of the lessons 

 have fully justified the most sanguine expectations of the advocates 

 of this kind of instruction. Those who have visited these schools have 

 been struck with the cheerful interest shown by the children in their 

 work, and by the effect of the teaching in quickening their perceptive 

 faculties and in stimulating their intelligence. The contrast between 

 the listless and often inattentive attitude of children, occupied with 

 some ordinary class lesson, and the eager eyes and nimble fingers of 

 the same children at the carpenter's or modeling bench is most in- 

 structive ; and no one who has seen it can have any doubt of the edu- 

 cational value of this kind of training. These results, it must be 

 remembered, have been attained by teachers most of whom have them- 

 selves been trying experiments, and have been working by the light 

 of Nature without any well-considered methods. Under properly- 

 trained instructors, the results would doubtless have been far more 

 satisfactory. 



There is good reason to believe that the stimulating effect of work- 

 shop instruction on the intelligence of children will be such that, not- 

 withstanding the loss of the time spent in the shop, their progress in 

 their ordinary studies will be in no way retarded. 



Mr. Swire Smith, a member of the late Commission on Technical 



