378 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tigations and measures some surprising revelations and practical 

 results, which eventually affected the whole of the prevalent prac- 

 tice of infantile and juvenile training and education. The graded 

 school and the trained teacher were partially the incidental out- 

 come of a work primarily undertaken to rescue mentally and physi- 

 cally the young factory slaves. There were a few enlightened 

 and humane employers, permeated with the progressive spirit 

 of the time, who established schools in connection with their 

 works, and there were some good schools kept by trained teachers 

 in the large manufacturing towns, as at Manchester and Oldham, 

 where the half-timers could be sent. Mr. Chadwick made a careful 

 study of the best conditions for mental work among twelve thou- 

 ands pupils, during a period of twelve years, and has left on record 

 some very surprising but accurately thought-out conclusions. He 

 thinks that alert voluntary attention is the only profitable atten- 

 tion, and he is sure that " three hours is as much time as can be 

 occupied profitably with any subject-matters of instruction, with 

 very young children," but it was found that the half-timers got a 

 superior habit of mental activity, so that employers came to 

 prefer short-timers to long-timers, and the military drill that had 

 been introduced in the schools resulted in such superior bodily 

 aptitudes that the stunted pauper boys of town got the prefer- 

 ence over strong, robust rustics from the coast ; but the most sur- 

 prising result remains to be stated, for it soon began to appear 

 that in mental attainments the half-time factory boy was in advance 

 of the pupils of the board schools of the same age, the factory 

 boy attaining the fourth standard by his tenth year, while the 

 " long-time " board scholar reached it in his twelfth or thirteenth 

 year. 



In 1882, after half a century of observation and experiment, 

 Mr. Chadwick summed up some of the defects of the current 

 systems in words too apt to be improved upon. He says : " Un- 

 fortunately, the primary principle of education, the capacity of 

 the recipient, the mind, is not understood or regarded. . . . The 

 receptivity of the minds of the great mass of children, for direct 

 simultaneous class-teaching the only effective teaching is less 

 than three hours, and where these limits are undistinguished 

 and disregarded, the consequences are displayed in wearisome ef- 

 forts, as it were, to get quarts into mental capacities of pints and 

 gallons into quarts, with prolonged sedentary detentions for this 

 foolish purpose, and with grievous bodily as well as mental injury." 

 Meantime, educators have now settled these points : 

 1. The inadequacy of the old-fashioned college education 

 to enable the average man to take and hold a place among the 

 world's needed workers those six hundred applicants in Chicago 

 prove this. 



