388 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



face of the board was required. This the chihh'en tested for them- 

 selves. Often during the first work with saws a child would ask, 

 " Will that do ? " " Test it/' was the reply. Relactantlx the child 

 applied the test, and renewed his courage as Lest he could. After 

 a time the desire to use a new tool and to get on as some other 

 child did gave way to desire for perfection. This brings me to 

 the chief end of the work — not skill in handicraft or any finished 

 products, but to put before the children concrete examples of the 

 true and the false, in such a manner that the child himself should 

 judge his own work by some unvarying standard. As an instance 

 of the moral effects : One of the older boys was the first to finish 

 the shelves and both sides of his case, all but one groove. The 

 excitement of this eminence dizzied him, and that groove was a 

 failure — being too wide, it left an ugly crack above the shelf. No 

 one was more sensitive to that ugliness than he ; but the struggle 

 between his desire for perfection and the fancied humiliation of 

 making another side and letting some other child be the first to 

 complete a case went on for some time. Finally, with a manly 

 effort to keep his eyes from overflowing, he laid the faulty side 

 among the failures and began again. To give up the work of 

 many days, and the prospect of coming out ahead, was to win a 

 great battle not for himself alone but for his comrades. For use, 

 the rejected side was almost as good as perfection itself ; to ideas 

 of truth and beauty the boy's mind yielded obedience. Such 

 yielding of lower motives to higher ones, such discipline of pa- 

 tience and judgment as these lessons gave, were not reached in 

 any other line of work. 



Most public schools for primary children have two sessions a 

 day for ten months ; in the exj^eriment there was but one session 

 a day for eight months. In the former, five hours or more a week 

 are spent in reading alone ; in the latter, less than five hours a 

 a week were given to the science lessons and to the reading drawn 

 from them. The saving of time in other studies was almost 

 equally great; and besides the large body of superior knowledge 

 opened to the children, the ordinary proficiency in all subjects 

 commonly taught in primary schools was generally reached. This 

 demonstrates the fallacy of the current opinion that children can 

 not be taught science, history, and literature, and at the same time 

 master the usual three r's allotted to them. 



But the experiment aimed to introduce the child to the world of 

 real learning, with the idea that such introduction would produce 

 certain effects on his mind ; and it is by that aim and those effects 

 that it should be judged. As to the former, the reader has but to 

 examine the body of knowledge outlined, and judge whether it is 

 worthy to be called real learning and the foundation of knowledge. 



