KINDERGARTENS AND MANUAL TRAINING. 383 



by modern times should make work suck as shall connect artistic 

 dexterity with the cultivation of intelligence its basis. A writer 

 in the Philadelphia Times, commenting on the public-school " edu- 

 cation " as conducted mostly hitherto, says : " Nine tenths of the 

 young criminals sent to the penitentiaries have enjoyed school ' 

 advantages, but three fourths of them have never learned to do an 

 honest stroke of ivorlc. Our children have their poor little heads 

 crammed full of all kinds of impossible knowledge of names, of 

 dates, and numbers of unintelligible rules, until there is no room 

 left to hold any of the simple truths of honor and duty and mo- 

 rality." The military trainers declare that they obtain in the very 

 infantile stages (five years) a better drill than they do or can get 

 afterward, and Chad wick says : " The drill conduces to qualities 

 of a high moral order and value, denoted by the terms discipline, 

 patience, order, self-restraint, prompt and exact obedience. Chil- 

 dren so trained learn to move quickly together and to pull to- 

 gether, and exert force with fewer hands." 



It would thus seem that three of the most valuable years of 

 a large majority of our children have hitherto been allowed to 

 run to waste, and, as the educational policy of a country should 

 be directed toward developing all its intellectual wealth, a move- 

 ment which seems to be " in the air," that will eventually graft 

 the kindergarten on to the common-school system of the whole 

 country, should be hailed with joy by the patriot and philanthro- 

 pist. 



There are already thirty-nine in St. Louis in connection with 

 the public school, thirty-eight in Philadelphia, twenty-two in 

 Boston, twenty-two in Milwaukee, and from five to twelve in 

 other cities. If a good many thousands of the unoccupied young- 

 women of the land would learn to be first-class kindergartners, and 

 each, gathering a dozen or more of the neglected children now 

 crowded out of the schools about themselves, and bestow some of 

 their unused capacity for " mothering " upon them, what a prophy- 

 lactic it would be against the corrupting " reformatory " in later 

 years, and perhaps the penitentiary ! 



Now that really wise and discriminating educators affirm that, 

 in the time beyond the kindergarten years, the use of the hand is 

 not antagonistic to intellectual achievement, but rather promotive 

 of it, we are beginning to hear the phrase manual training on 

 every hand, the more because that, for successful pu&r iculture as a 

 factor in national life, we must, as Chad wick says, " add to the sci- 

 ence of the physiologist and the psychologist that of the political 

 economist, by whom man is regarded as an intelligent productive 

 force " ; and in another stage to which we are advancing that of 

 the general use of machinery Jules Simon defines man as " an in- 

 telligent director of productive force, valuable to the extent and 



