MECHANICS AND ASTRONOMY. lix 



boring machine, 36 wood lathes, a large pattern-maker's lathe, and 36 pattern- 

 maker's benches and sets of tools. The foundry has a cupola furnace for iron, 

 two brass furnaces, and 32 molder's benches. The blacksmiths' shop has 32 

 forges, seven vises and the requisite outfit of hand tools. The machine shop 

 contains 22 engine lathes, 15 hand lathes, a machine drill, 2 planers, one 

 shaper, one universal milling machine, one grinding lathe, and 32 benches with 

 vises and hand tools for bench work. 



The work in the shop progresses by a regular and systematic course of 

 graded exercises devised with reference to the best and fullest instruction of 

 the student, and with no reference to the market value of products. 



The tuition fee for the course in mechanic arts is $150 per year; for the 

 course in industrial science it is 1200 per year. 



A reference to the published lists of the present employment of graduates of 

 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Worcester Free Institute and 

 the Stevens Institute of Technology shows that a very large proportion of them 

 are filling responsible and lucrative positions as engineers, draughtsmen, super- 

 intendents, and foremen in manufacturing and engineering establishments, or 

 as teachers in technical and scientific schools. 



In briefly summing up the results of my observations and inquiries, I would 

 say that on the question of the manner of conducting the work of the shops 

 in the industrial and technical schools, there are two sharply defined and quite 

 antagonistic opinions among those connected with or interested in these schools; 

 and in the discussion of these opinions — sometimes a little heated — two par- 

 ties have sprung up. The one party, headed by Worcester, and closely fol- 

 lowed by the Rose Polytechnic School of Terra Haute, Indiana, insists that the 

 school shops should be conducted like real business shops, and that the product 

 must be marketable. This party believes that few or no exercises should be 

 given merely for the sake of practice, but that every article made from the 

 beginning of the student's work, must have a marketable value. These men 

 insist that the student will work better if the article uponwhich he works is to- 

 have, when finished, a use and value over and above its value as a practical 

 exercise. 



The other party, led, perhaps, by the Massachusetts Institute and followed 

 by the United States Naval Academy, the Manual Training School of St. Louis, 

 the Stevens Institute at Hoboken, and most of the other schools, noticeably 

 those connected with the colleges, insists that instriidion rather than construc- 

 tion must furnish the key note of the work. These men claim that in the effort 

 to compete with real shops in the production of merchantable articles, pupils 

 are inevitably kept so long at single kinds of work in order to become skillful, 

 that the range of the student's practice is narrowed and his instruction is made 

 to suffer for the sake of profit to the shop. They claim that it is as impossible, 

 without detriment to the pupil's instruction, to make the product of students' 

 work in the shop salable, as it would be to make the instruction of a class in 

 grammar or rhetoric self-supporting by selling the pupils' compositions and 

 exercises to the magazines and newspapers. 



The argument for making these school shops entirely or partially self-sup- 

 portiug by the manufacture of salable articles, has certainly a pleasant sound to 

 the popular ear; and yet I believe that, like many other popular arguments, 

 there is in it a fallacy. There is a law of compensation holding everywhere that 

 holds here. We must learn before we can earn. The student cannot earn fees 

 during his first readings of Blackstone, cannot practice medicine while taking 

 his first lessons in anatomy and pathology. 



