496 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ficiencj has been gaiued at the expense of their youth. You remem- 

 ber that when Harvey demonstrated the circulation of the blood, 

 not a single physician in England, older than forty, accepted the 

 new view. Darwin's theory of the origin of species fell for the most 

 part on deaf ears except among the younger naturalists. It is un- 

 psychological to expect men of a certain turn of mind and a certain 

 way of life, and withal no longer young, to suddenly emerge out of 

 their old selves. 



The best work of the world is done without pay, the sacred work 

 that asks no pay — the work of the mother, the work of the enlightened 

 ones — but where the work is paid for, the rate of pay is a pretty sure 

 ^auge of the estimate that is placed upon the work. IN^ow, in some 

 of the manual training schools, the salaries in the manual depart- 

 ments are notably less, I should say about twenty per cent less, than 

 the salaries in the academic departments. This seems to me a grave 

 mistake. If manual training is to be put forward as a serious educa- 

 tional scheme, the teachers of manual training should be men and 

 women quite as carefully educated, quite as acceptable in their lan- 

 guage, quite as broad in their sympathies, quite as elevated in their 

 morals — in a word, in every way quite as cultivated as the teachers 

 of language and science and mathematics. And the first practical 

 step in bringing about this equality of requirement would be to 

 inaugurate an equality of pay. The manual teachers should get 

 precisely what the academic teachers get. 



In describing the manual training school, I am assuming that it is 

 •one in which this unity of purpose prevails, just as, in developing the 

 philosophy of manual training, I assumed the educational view. 

 And if, at times, it should seem that I am describing an ideal rather 

 than an actual school, bear in mind, please, that the picture has at 

 least been suggested by a reality. Let us glance, then, at the several 

 departments in succession. 



The humanistic group is weak, especially in English, and this 

 constitutes the gravest weakness of the manual training school as 

 now organized. Adequate results can not be obtained in the time 

 allotted to the studies. In the first year, only five periods a week are 

 commonly given to the entire group, three to English literature and 

 Thetoric, and two to a foreign language, and this, when you consider 

 the importance of the studies, is a mere drop in the bucket. The chil- 

 dren are not even well grounded in the bare structure of English. 

 They come up from the so-called grammar schools, where it has 

 seemed to me they learn the rules of grammar all morning, and break 

 them all afternoon. We need really an excess of English, for the poor 

 English heard in the manual departments, and bound, I fear, to be 

 heard for some time to come, ought to be effectively offset, or these 



