THE PHILOSOPHY OF MANUAL TRAINING. 493 



ing is rapidly being extended to the girls too. In the West they are 

 much ahead of us in this respect. In Denver, for example, they have 

 a fine manual training high school, with a very liberal course of 

 study, and open, as it should be, to both girls and boys. In Kansas 

 City, the new Manual Training High School has just opened with 

 an initial enrollment of seven hundred and thirty-six children — three 

 hundred and forty-nine boys and three hundred and eighty-seven 

 girls. In San Francisco, the Polytechnic High School is open to 

 boys and girls alike. And this represents the general spirit through- 

 out the West. I am very glad to see it, and I am the more sorry that 

 our older and representative manual training schools in Baltimore, 

 Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago, Brooklyn, and Boston do not un- 

 lock their doors to girls in the same open-minded fashion. 



The material that comes to a manual training school has always 

 interested me. It does not come from any one class in society. On 

 the contrary, it is a very composite group. Xews of the movement 

 naturally reached the most advanced people of the community first. 

 In the early days in Philadelphia — that is, something over a decade 

 ago — it seemed to me that nearly all the boys in the training school 

 were unusual. Their parents for the most part were come-outers of 

 some sort, liberals, people interested in social and religious reform, 

 very wide-awake people. As time went on, the groups became less 

 marked. The industrial side of manual training got noised abroad, 

 and for a time many boys were sent to the school merely because they 

 were not fond of study, and the school was mistaken as a place for 

 busy hands and sluggish brains. Boss mechanics, with no great faith 

 in education, but with a strong desire to have their sons get on in 

 the world, compromised the matter and sent them to the training 

 school. From the very start, too, there was a large influx of Jewish 

 children, whose parents were actuated, I think, not so much by that 

 text in the Talmud which bids every man have a trade, as by the 

 broader feeling that the children of Israel as a jDCople were suffering 

 from their too long and too exclusive devotion to commerce. The 

 Jewish charitable organizations have since established a number of 

 free manual training schools in the different cities, and are especially 

 working among the poorer Russian Jews. There were also a number 

 of colored boys, but these seldom remained to graduate. 



Now that the schools are better known, and have taken their 

 place alongside of the regular high schools, the choice has largely 

 passed from the parents to the boys themselves. They come to the 

 training schools, sometimes for good and sufficient reasons, because 

 they have a taste along mechanical and scientific lines rather than 

 linguistic lines, but often the reason is quite capricious. They come 

 because some chum of theirs happens to come, or they don't come 



