THE PHILOSOPHY OF MANUAL TRAINING. 505 



Back of them stand the begrimed and impoverished workmen. 

 Tubal-Cain was doubtless a strong man, but he does not greatly 

 touch the imagination. You may think it a fancy, but I can not help 

 believing that the hard and glittering surfaces of the metal exercises 

 have a less humanizing effect than the other manual work. These 

 influences of sound, color, texture, odor, and touch are very subtle, 

 but they are not to be neglected, and particularly in the case of 

 young children. I should therefore like to see the metal work 

 somewhat reduced in amount, and thrown toward the end of the 

 course. Its place could well be taken by work in wood and clay. I 

 am glad to see that this is now being done in the majority of manual 

 training schools, and that no metal work is introduced in the first 

 year. In the early days, the poor little first-year boys used to have 

 three solid terms of vise work, and it was somewhat dreary. Where 

 the elementary metal work is still distributed over the first and second 

 years, care is now taken to make it less monotonous. There may be 

 one or two terms of vise work, one of sheet-metal work, one of mold- 

 ing and casting, one or two of smithing, and one of ornamental iron 

 work. This is still the sequence in Philadelphia, but elsewhere the 

 tendency is to throw the joinery and carving and part of the turn- 

 ing in the first year; the pattern making, molding, and smithing in 

 the second ; and to leave the vise work until the last year. 



The most interesting and important of the metal work is un- 

 doubtedly that of the third year, the machine-tool practice and the 

 construction of finished articles in the way of apparatus and ma- 

 chines. In the hands of a scientific man this department can be 

 made to yield very rich results. The instruction may include so 

 much to arouse and awaken a boy and bring reality into life and 

 thought. Here he can learn to interpret mechanical drawmgs — a 

 large training for the imagination; he can learn the niceties of 

 mechanical construction, and by means of vise work, lathe, drill, 

 planer, and shaper can turn his designs into solid facts in three dimen- 

 sions; here he can embody scientific principles in suitable forms; can 

 test new plans by carefully constructed models ; he can do a hundred 

 things that are useful and helpful, and will bring him into possession 

 of himself. The work does not always take this broad turn, for it 

 requires a very broad man to give it such a turn, but in estimating 

 it, it is proper, I think, to value it for what it may become as well as 

 for what it is. 



Meanwhile, the girls have not been idle. They have been deep 

 in the mysteries of cookery and domestic economy — mysteries so deep 

 that I had better leave them to your imagination, for they would 

 require of themselves a long chapter. But it is to be remarked that 

 the occupations of the girls have nearly all of them a distinct prac- 



